Rotterdam report part two

Ben Walters reports on a slew of excellent documentaries and some striking features from China.

Feb  9 2006

As Geoff Andrew reported last week, Rotterdam is a fine festival for discovering intelligent, eclectic work from across the globe, and its second week this year wasn't short on gems.

There were some particularly treasurable off-beat documentary titles to be found: in keeping with its subject, Philip Gröning's 'Into Great Silence' – a portrait of the silent order of Carthusian monks – offered an accretion of quiet illustrations of the passing year rather than interviews or commentary, providing audiences themselves with a taster of the contemplative life.

There was a glimpse of an altogether different alternative lifestyle in Mary Jordan's superb (though still unfinished) 'Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis', a fascinating portrait of the little-remembered pre-Warhol renaissance man of '60s art, and a glorious visual achievement which its subject, a saint of Technicolor baroque, would surely have appreciated.

Elsewhere 'Toro Negro' offered an enlightening if dispiriting document of a self-destructive young bullfighter in poverty-stricken Mexico, while 'Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre, 1961' was a gripping reconstruction of the Parisian police's brutal retaliation to the Algerian immigrant uprising. Made for French TV, it also serves as an excellent companion piece to Michael Haneke's 'Hidden'.

Jim Finn's 'Interkosmos', meanwhile, isn't quite the documentary it seems: using archive footage to help chart an invented '70s Soviet interplanetary programme, its witty blend of cosmic wonder and campy bathos bears comparison with Herzog's 'Wild Blue Yonder'.

In terms of features, there was striking new work from China, where dramas about adolescent identity trauma seem to be the order of the day. Political parallels with a superpower finding its feet are hard to ignore, but the films offered more than simplistic analogy: 'Dam Street' is a highly accomplished tragedy about an unwanted pregnancy while Han Jie's 'Walking on the Wild Side' (which took one of the three Tiger Awards) offers a stark view of alienated youth in the semi-industrial west. 'Taking Father Home', about a peasant boy's search for his dad in the city, was notably less sophisticated but equally interesting as it was more or less homemade by its lead and his family.

Other highlights included 'Un Jour d'Été', about the repercussions of a cocky teen's accidental death in small-town France, and the deceptively light Cuban feature 'Habana Blues': a music-packed drama about a young musician's attempts to do justice to his family and his talent, it cleverly negotiates its subject matter – commercial pressure for genre conformism versus the expression of genuine experience – in its own formal approach.

There were also a couple of strong US pictures, both set in the north-west: Steve Buscemi's horrible, hilarious 'Lonesome Jim', which casts Casey Affleck as a twentysomething loser, and Kelly Reichardt's 'Old Joy' (another Tiger-winner), a lyrically meandering account of ageing friendship starring Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy).

There were some disappointing British premieres in the shape of 'The Living and the Dead' – about the moribund remains of an aristocratic family – and 'Land of the Blind', an ambitious but hollow pastiche of revolutionary tropes starring Ralph Fiennes as a prison guard in an unspecified totalitarian regime and Donald Sutherland as a playwright-cum-political prisoner-cum-insurgent.

The last film I saw was part of the Festival's White Light strand on drugs and film (well, it is the Netherlands). Truth be told you'd need something much stronger than a spliff for 'Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical' to make any kind of cinematic sense: a filmed version of the tongue-in-cheek stage adaptation of the 1936 exploitation movie, it's bafflingly inept as filmmaking, but offered enough entertaining moments – deliberate or accidental – to send me home on a high.

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