Rotterdam Film Festival ends

The Rotterdam International Film Festival is approaching its finale. Anticipating the decisions of the jury, potential winners from two festival competitions were selected Andrey Plakhov.

Tiger Awards are awarded to debutant directors. Among the fourteen films included in this competition, I would have rejected almost half. Some are guilty of ostentatious radicalism, others amuse with a parade of technological effects, but neither one nor the other works when the author has nothing to say except banality.

The low point was the British “House Floating”. Director Justin Anderson managed to destroy the literary basis of Deborah Levy’s novel by introducing many cinematic and, even worse, political clichés. The characters are a frustrated poet from Bosnia and his American wife, a morally damaged war journalist. The couple goes to the Greek coast, their fifteen-year-old daughter is waiting for them in a luxurious villa. But not only that: in the pool on the surface of the water lies an unfamiliar naked lady who will join this progressive family and share its shelter. An attempt to maneuver between Scylla and Charybdis (more specifically, between “The Theorem” by Pier Paolo Pasolini and “The Pool” by Jacques Deray) does not lead to anything worthwhile and finally fails under the pressure of the erotic visions overwhelming the female military officer. You can still understand when she imagines naked, athletic Greeks from the neighborhood, but it’s more difficult when she repeatedly replays in her memory the film of a stupid sex show with acrobats in swimming trunks and bikinis.

And the highest point of the competition for me was the Indian “Van of Kisses” by Midhun Murali. An absolutely phantasmagoric spectacle, weaving into a tight knot fairy-tale mythology, archaic aesthetics of shadow theater and the latest computer animation techniques. Thunderstorms rumble, birds fly ominously, elements collide, crowds of fanatics wait for the sound of a divine symphony: a real cosmogony, but presented without stupid pathos and with dry, alienating humor. The plot twists, swirls and branches, but its plot is only roughly presented. Aisla, an orphan girl, used by anonymous “they” for genetic experiments, she escaped from an orphanage, almost became a sex toy for a pedophile and was saved by turning into the boy Aisak. But then she returned to her natural appearance and created a courier service through which women can send kisses to their fighting husbands (there is a permanent civil war in the country). On the screen we see how the kiss is loaded into the computer: 30, 50, 89 percent – and finally all 100: hurray, the package has been delivered to the recipient. In the same way, a “miracle” designed to shake the world is loaded through a computer: its arrival is announced by the inscription “access granted” – “access granted.”

At the same time, it is also a movie about movies. A film about a film that was made and lost. Each of the heroes, each of the heroines feels like the protagonists of their own film, and “they” standing in their way are always antagonists. Every now and then the cinema turns out to be black and white, because colors disappear from the life of the planet. But then they come back with bright “advertising” flashes. One of the characters in “The Kissing Van,” the director of the lost film, makes a joke on this topic: “The mainstream is independent cinema in the future.” Like Justin Anderson and Yves Netzhammer, the author of the Swiss animated dystopian film Shadow Voyage, Midhun Murali came from the advertising industry. But, unlike many, he managed to rise to the level of an author’s statement.

In addition to it, the Ukrainian film “Gray Bees” (directed by Dmitro Moiseev) may be eligible for the award in the “tiger” competition. And in the second competition, called Big Screen, where not only debutants, but also experienced directors participate, is the Kazakh “Steppenwolf” by Adilkhan Erzhanov. Read more about the paintings born in the post-Soviet space in the following report from Rotterdam.

I would add a few more films to the favorites of the second competition. This is “Portrait of the Real East” by Marcelo Gomes, done in retro black and white, about how the religious war in Lebanon continues in the Brazilian emigration on the field of love melodrama. The same venerable genre in the Danish “Eternal” (directed by Olaa Salim) is projected onto environmental fears: the hero devotes his life to eliminating an underwater crack that threatens humanity. And the heroine of the German-Swiss parable “Baby Teeth” by Sophie Boesch struggles with her position as an outcast in an inert village community.

One of the strongest in the program is Ville Suhonen’s documentary “Children of War and Peace.” It is entirely built on the patterns of draconian “patriotic propaganda” on which an entire generation of Finns was raised after the shocks of the First World War and the threat of the arrival of the communists. Archival film footage, photographs, fragments of radio broadcasts, magazine pages, and diary entries of children and adolescents paint a one-dimensional picture of the world, dominated by discipline, paramilitary sports, national exclusivity and hatred of a potential enemy. And the context of the era evokes parallels not only with time-synchronous phenomena, such as Soviet or German propaganda.