Rotterdam Film Festival opens

On January 25, the International Film Festival opened in Rotterdam, which, as usual, focuses on young, experimental and auteur cinema. Comments on the show program Andrey Plakhov.

Emerging as an alternative to traditional competitive festivals, Rotterdam first positioned itself as an almost homely or friendly get-together in cinemas and nearby cafes where you could eat “Kieślowski salad” and “Kronenberg steak”. Honored guests regularly appeared at them (such as Otar Ioseliani, as well as Tarkovsky and Parajanov at one time), but ordinary guys, aspiring filmmakers, predominated, and everyone felt caressed by informal attention. To the point that large photographs of all participants in the Rotterdam gathering, regardless of their degree of fame, decorated panels in the central city square.

Now the festival in Rotterdam is a large-scale European event, including an industrial one; Cinemart occupies a large place in it – the market for projects, and there are many other forms of interaction between proliferating young authors and producers, TV channels and funding funds; one of these foundations is named after Hubert Bals, the founding father of the Rotterdam Festival. Although there is still no official competition like Cannes or Berlin held here, in fact there is still a competition, and not just one, but at least two. Tiger Competition winners are rewarded with Tiger Awards; the film that wins the Big Screen Competition is released in the Netherlands.

The “tiger” section contains works by debutants, which often do not fit into any usual framework. Suffice it to say that two of the fourteen films are mysteriously named after the sound of oriental hieroglyphs. The Japanese “Rei” (directed by Tanaka Toshihiko) traces the landscapes of Hokkaido through the eyes of characters on a spiritual journey and discovering the polysemy of the language of human communication. The German “sr” (directed by Lea Hartlaub) owes its strange name to an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that means “giraffe.” This painting is another meditative journey, this time through the vastness of Africa and the hidden pages of human history.

Apparently, the Indian “The Kiss Van” (directed by Midhun Murali) is a kind of hieroglyph, which combines animation in the spirit of shadow theater and a political plot encrypted like a fairy tale. Even if other films look more or less traditional, they are still difficult to classify as narrative cinema. Post-Soviet countries are represented in the main program by the Ukrainian film “Gray Bees” (directed by Dmitro Moiseev), based on the novel by Andrei Kurkov, the action of which takes place in the Donbass in January 2022.

The second competition was also not complete without a walk through the post-Soviet space. Kazakh director Adilkhan Erzhanov called his film, without reference to Hermann Hesse, “Steppenwolf.” Its themes can be called both sensational and hackneyed: civil war, the prison system as the basis of society, the trade in children’s organs. Equally famously, Yerzhanov mixes genres – Western, road movie and black comedy; This is, perhaps, his signature style, developed in previous films.

The Rotterdam program includes many exotic flowers. In addition to fiction, it presents documentary works – for example, the Finnish “Children of War and Peace” by Ville Suhonen, showing how easily the idea of ​​​​national independence turns into authoritarian propaganda. There was also room for a Russian film in the Bright Future section. It was “Ashes and Dolomite” by Toma Selivanova. The heroine of the film, working on a film about Stalin’s repressions, goes on a journey through the Gulag to learn new things not only about the past, but also about herself.

The world in the minds of the young directors participating in the Rotterdam Festival appears mysterious and begs to be deciphered. Like a hieroglyph of an unknown language.