The Rotterdam Film Festival has ended

The Rotterdam Film Festival ended with the awarding of the best films: they were works by directors from Japan, India and Iran. In the Tiger competition, the top prize was awarded to the film “Rei” by Tanaka Toshihiko. Reflects on the festival’s Asian accent Andrey Plakhov.

This accent did not appear today. At the very beginning of the 21st century, Rotterdam curators came up with a crazy project: to compose the entire festival program almost exclusively from Japanese films. There was even a special interactive area created in the Corso, an old Rotterdam cinema from the 1950s, upholstered in red velvet. The audience was immersed in the atmosphere of urban pop culture typical of Tokyo. They were provided with cinema halls, video projections, CD-ROMs, computer games, as well as musical performances. The youth sang and danced, imitating the movements of the DJs. Touch devices built into the walls allowed anyone who wanted to control a kind of electronic shadow theater. In this installed environment, the European public discovered modern Japanese cinema – gangster sagas and bloody ballets, Yakuza films and pink porn.

This year’s winning film “Rei” by debutant director Tanaka Toshihiko represents this national school at a new stage. Blooming plum or sakura is a characteristic attribute of classical Japanese aesthetics. Contemporary Japanese filmmakers mix brutality and irony, radically rethink the canons of old genres, and blur the line between fine arts and the subculture of the modern metropolis. This can be called “non-blooming sakura”. The more beautiful the shots from the film “Rei”, dedicated to the heroes’ journey to the snowy peaks of the island of Hokkaido, the more painful are the “Dostoevsky” passions, fueled by childhood traumas, adultery and loneliness.

The traditional idea of ​​Indian cinema is also changing. This is evidenced by the huge success of the film “The Kiss Van” by Midhun Murali, which was awarded the Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize. This is an intoxicating cocktail of fairy-tale mythology, shadow theater aesthetics and the latest computer animation techniques. In addition, there is also a reflection on the nature of cinema and society, performed with a high degree of freedom, without regard to traditions and taboos. And although The Kiss Van is not at all similar to the entertainment production of Bollywood, the audience at the screening in Rotterdam roared with delight.

Even Iranian cinema, which has its own strictly censored canon, appeared from an unexpected side. The winner of the Rotterdam Big Screen competition, the film “The Old Bachelor,” directed by Oktay Baraheni, impressed with the frankness with which it showed the dark sides of Iranian life, in particular drug addiction and prostitution. The painful relationship between a cruel father, his mistress and two adult sons is presented with Shakespearean intensity and with an unusually high degree of violence for Iranian cinema, known for its humanism.

“Steppenwolf” by Kazakh director Adilkhan Erzhanov, partly based on the novel of the same name by Hermann Hesse, is also filled with violent violence. The film did not receive any awards, but remained one of the most powerful impressions of the entire festival. The action of this neo-western takes place in the atmosphere of a raging civil war on the territory of the wild steppe – the metaphorical post-Soviet space. The first shots are of bloody police shields lying on the ground. Soon the police department will be destroyed, only the former prisoner and the informant will remain alive: he is the “steppe wolf.” Fate brings him together with a distraught young woman who has lost her little son. Together they embark on an odyssey of revenge, because the head of the mafia, who practices murder and organ trafficking in the area, is to blame for the misfortunes of both.

The films of Adilkhan Erzhanov paint a grotesque image of the growing chaos of the universe, turned towards total kitsch. But the blackness of some of the director’s previous works was softened by humor, albeit also black, but here darkness dominates, and if there is anything that opposes it, it is heroic pathos. Two heroes, a man and a woman, who outwardly seem pitiful and weak, resist the unjust world. Having survived humiliation, sexual violence and the loss of loved ones, they are transformed into a different quality – they find themselves invulnerable to villains and, in a sense, immortal: after all, superheroes do not die.