Four former IFFR directors were in town this weekend for the premiere of Frank Scheffer’s documentary Tiger Eyes, celebrating IFFR’s 40th anniversary. They talk to Geoffrey Macnab about their time at the helm of the festival.  When did you first visit the Festival?Emile Fallaux (1992-1996): In the 70s, during the period of Hubert Bals (the IFFR’s founding director). It was in a small venue that has disappeared, the old Lantaren Venster. People were like sardines in a can. It was a bit of an in-crowd, but very joyful and adven-turous. People had the advantage that they belonged to the happy few watching foreign films no other Dutch person would see. Now, of course, that has completely changed. When I took over, attendance was something like 125,000. When I left, it was about 325,000. Sandra Den Hamer (2000-2007): At the beginning of the 80s. I was still a student. I came as a visitor. I think it was the very last year the festival took place in Lantaren Venster. It was very crowded. People couldn’t move. There were queues waiting to get into that small cinema while people still had to get out.  And how did you start working at the festival?SDH: I was an intern manager for Holland Film, organ-izing the Dutch presence in Berlin and Cannes. When I was in Cannes representing Dutch films, [film critic] Peter Van Bueren said to him [Bals], ‘You should talk to that girl. Perhaps she can work with you.’ For the first and possibly last time in his life – Bals was known for not liking Dutch films – he entered the Dutch stand. He said ‘I need to get to know you.’ Marco Müller (1990-1991): Hubert had died a few months before. There had been a transition edition. Anne [Head] had put together a programme [in 1989] more or less according to Huub’s guidelines. The Board was looking for people who could continue in the very same direction, but with their own personality.

Simon Field (1996-2004): There was a team from the festival who came to the ICA [where Field was Direc-tor of Cinema] to discuss whether I would like to con-sider applying for the post of festival director. Felix Rottenberg was then Chairman of the IFFR Board. He was a very energetic and persuasive figure. I couldn’t make up my mind. Then someone said to me, ‘I hear you turned down the Rotterdam job.’ That made think about it and eventually I took the job.  How do you remember Huub Bals?MM: If I could use a stupid line from an old Nokia ad, I would say he was the perfect person to connect people – to connect film people and art people and to make sure that by this connection, things would happen.SF: I never met Hubert Bals. One of the things I had to come to terms with when I came here – and that was perhaps more disconcerting than I expected – was that the shadow of Huub Bals was still felt enormously over the festival. You were inevitably compared with Huub. How were CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund founded?SDH: The year before Bals died, we had the idea for what is now the Hubert Bals Fund. He became a little depressed in the last years of his life, because he lost a distribution arm. In the early days, the Festival was both a festival and a distribution company. He bought films. But his eyes were bigger than his money allowed. The distribution arm went bankrupt, and then it was split up. There was a foundation for the festival and the distribution went over to the Filmmuseum. He was just running the festival and he was never happy with that, because when he was buying films, he could give mon-ey to filmmakers. That’s why he started the idea of sup-porting filmmakers in the early stages of production. MM: I invented what is now called CineMart. I invent-ed the idea that you should have a gigantic workshop where filmmakers would find the right kind of poten-tial partners. That was the embryo of what then be-came CineMart. Huub Bals would invite the filmmaker

who still had his dream project locked in a drawer. He would ask him to unlock that drawer, take the project out and give a presentation. My slogan for my two years in Rotterdam was: ‘forward in a 360-degree direction.’ There was no fence erected between high and low, art cinema and very peculiar commercial cinema.  What do you think was your biggest achievement in your time at Rotterdam?EF: The way we opened up the festival to a larger au-dience without compromising quality and adventure. The fact that the main pillars of the festival are still here. They seem to have been good choices, like The Tiger Awards. It was a big break from Rotterdam’s non-competitive 70s tradition. We accommodated the wishes mostly of Asian filmmakers, who could not get the help of their national film authorities to bring their films to a festival that didn’t have a competition. An-other reason was that we found small films didn’t get Dutch publicity. The Dutch press focused on the films that had been in Cannes. We started the Tiger competi-tion to try to shift this attention. SF: There are certain elements of the programme that I look back on with great satisfaction – the introduc-tion or the continuing in a different format of the Film-makers in Focus … obviously Catherine Breillat is one example, and Fukasaku Kinji – people you could put a spotlight on. And I suppose what was most distinc-tive in my regime was the way we built the Exploding Cinema and immediately began to have collaborations with museums and galleries. MM: I was so excited, you could test new ways of not just running a festival but also disrupting a big film event. I was keen to follow in Huub’s footsteps and not only create what is now the CineMart but also create the Hubert Bals Fund. I had to insist that we would now have an important number of world premieres. I felt that you needed to attract media attention. We needed to have enough material to ensure critics and journal-ists would be here for at least a week, if not more.

SDH: My speciality has always been to be very involved in CineMart and the Hubert Bals Fund – to make the festival more than a showcase for cinema, but also to be involved in stimulating the production and distri-bution of film. CineMart was the very first coproduc-tion market in the world. What does it feel like coming back to the festival?EF: There is always a nostalgia for when I was here, working 24 hours a day. After 15 years, you feel a little bit of an outsider, but that’s a personal thing. This year, I’ve tremendously enjoyed the way Rutger has expand-ed the ‘cinema without walls’ idea that we started in the early 90s, breaking out of the cinemas to have this cin-ematic experience linked up with other art disciplines in other locations – galleries, shops even.SDH: When I was working in Rotterdam, I always longed for the days I could come just as a visitor. My secret wish was to be a jury member – just to sit in the cinema and look at films. This year, that dream has come true.  Marco, why did you only spend two years at the Festival?MM: It takes a lot of energy for somebody who belongs to a southern European culture to come to terms with a northern European culture. I felt it was difficult to defend my own version of creative energy – my Latin version of creative fantasy. I was very surprised when I finally landed in Rotterdam today, because it was a sunny day. I think that over those two years, I had 10 days of sun! For somebody who was born and grew up in Italy, that was certainly a problem.

Is there anything the festival could or should do to change?SDH: The festival has always been changing. It is still changing and anticipating … in the new days of crowd funding, the Festival is again the first to research the possibilities to finance films through the internet and online distribution. That’s very smart. The spirit of change and development is still there.

RoTTERdaM REunIon

NEDERLANDSEEDITIEZ.O.Z

DAILY TIGER40TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #5 MONDAY 31 JANUARY 2011

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Twenty years of Tiger tales: Sandra den Hamer, Simon Field, Marco Müller, Rutger Wolfson and Emile Fallaux photo: Ruud Jonkers

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CHallEnGE oF THE nEW

Jansen heads up the festival’s distribution arm, which overseas the DVD and VOD releases of fes-tival titles. The distribution arm exists both to support film-makers, especially non-Western filmmakers with-out access to secure and ongoing funding, and to increase audiences for each film beyond the festival circuit. Heeding the advice meted out by industry experts on numerous CineMart panels, the festival has itself invested in digital in order to make its dis-tribution strategy more streamlined and effective. An IFFR YouTube channel provides access to shorts and features from the Bright Futures section, while the VOD streaming link on the festival website transports cineastes to past festival hits. Using Fes-tivalscope, film professionals can download the past work of CineMart directors and – subject to produc-er approval – the most recent Tiger selection. On average, the festival releases 20 to 25 films a year on DVD (average price €14.95) and 10 to 15

on VOD (€3.95 for classic films, €4.95 for recent releases). Approximately 60 films from past IFFRs are available on DVD from the festival webshop, alongside 80 downloads. In terms of remunera-tion to the filmmaker, the festival cannot offer a minimum guarantee, so instead offers revenue spilt between eligible partners. However, follow-ing the adoption of a new policy plan, the number of DVDs released annually will be reduced to ten, in order that Jansen and her team can give each release the most effective promotional push. The 2011 release focus will therefore be on this year’s Hubert Bals Fund harvest, and the 2010 Tigers and festival favourites. “This year’s Tigers have to travel the whole festival circuit, so it’s a little too early to distribute them”, say Jansen. This morning, the Rotterdam Lab will host a ses-sion at Zaal De Unie, during which industry ex-perts Teun Hilte and David Hope will discuss all aspects of digital distribution.

Indian director Vipin Vijay is plotting a documentary on the subject of “human catastrophe”, he tells Geoffrey Macnab.

Vijay (whose The Image Threads is a European pre-miere in the Tiger Awards competition) revealed de-tails of the project here in Rotterdam this week. The aim of the documentary, the director explains, is not to chronicle natural disasters. It is a much more per-sonal, idiosyncratic and subjective exploration of the phenomenon of catastrophe. “I was just going through a safety manual, which says that the safest room in your house is not safe enough anymore”, Vijay says of the inspiration for the docu-mentary. He was also influenced by various real-life events, among them the suicides of two Indian foot-ball players – one a former captain of the national team. “The reasons were quite interesting … it was about a certain element of male pain that I wanted to share,” the director says. “That’s what triggered off the project.” He has shot around 35 hours of foot-age already, and is contemplating how to draw the project together. Vijay’s new feature film The Image Threads (which has been screening this week in Rotterdam) is a experi-mental drama financed in an unconventional way: early on, the film received Hubert Bals Fund support for script and development. Its producer, Altaf Mazid, is a documentary filmmaker. He came on board the project after seeing Vijay’s earlier work, including his Tiger short film winner Video Game. “We met accidentally at the Bombay Festival. He called me up. We live in different parts of the country, almost 4,000 kilometres apart,” Kerala-based Vijay re-calls of the initial overtures the producer made to him. When Mazid received funding for one of his own projects, he diverted it to Vijay. Even so, the budget was far from complete. “Whenever he (Mazid) could raise money, we would shoot the film. It took almost three years to make the film, although we shot for only 27 days,” Vijay sighs. In the end, Vijay received extra support for post pro-duction from the Gothenburg Festival and from the Global Film Initiative in the US. Then IFFR selected The Images Threads for the Tiger Awards competi-tion. Vijay isn’t optimistic about the distribution pros-pects for The Image Threads back home in India. “The film doesn’t have any messages of prosperity attached to it. It would be very difficult to distribute the film in the public distribution film existing in In-dia. To top it all, it’s not a Hindi film. It is made in a vernacular language – it is a Malayali film. It doesn’t have stars. The technicians are new, the producer is new, the director is new. But I look at it as a positive cinematographic battle!”

namibian filmmakers G.T. detering and nicole davidow are in town this week drumming up support for their feature Camelthorns, billed as the one of the first ever namibian dramatic features. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

Detering is former assistant to US director Doug Liman (Bourne Identity, Mr and Mrs Smith). Liman exec-produced a short version of Camelthorns, which Detering and Davidow are using as a teaser for their feature. (This short has also showed wide-ly on the festival circuit.) “He really liked it, calling it unique and promising”, writer-director-producer Detering recalls of Liman. Davidow is the lead ac-tress and producer. Camelthorns is a Thelma and Louise-style road

movie, but one foregrounding the Namibian landscape. The film is about two rebellious young best friends, Marie (Davidow) and Jessica (Klara Mudge) on a farm in the middle of nowhere, who end up running away from home. The farm owner, a cold-blooded racist by the name of Andre, first appears hospitable, but then reveals his true char-acter. Why the title? “A camel thorn is a very indigenous tree to Namibia. The reason we chose it is that the tree has thorns that come in pairs of two,” Deter-ing explains. “It has little flowers that when they bloom, also come in pairs of two. It represents these two girls who are edgy and dangerous and yet beautiful at the same time.”Detering and Davidow met at drama class as 14-year-olds. “As a teenager, you have all these big

dreams … we said then that one day we wanted to make a film together.” The duo stayed in touch over the years. Then, in 2009, Detering wrote a first draft of the screenplay.The filmmakers are working in collaboration with production company Media Logistics Namibia (who also partnered on the short film version). As they point out, few (if any) feature films have been made in recent years by local filmmakers in Namibia. For-eign productions (for example Flight of the Phoenix) do occasionally use the country as a location, but in-digenous filmmaking is yet to take off. Camelthorns has a projected budget of €2 million. Detering and Davidow are now looking for interna-tional coproduction partners. The Namibian Film Commission is also supporting the project. The goal is to shoot in 2012.

The Image Threads

THoRny ISSuE

NEW VISIONS cHIEFToday in Rotterdam, the Toronto Internation-al Film Festival announced Andréa Picard as the curatorial head of its Visions strand. Hav-ing worked for the festival since 1999, Picard is to expand her present portfolio (which in-cludes programming the TIFF Wavelengths strand) to oversee the curation of Visions, TIFF’s 10-year-old showcase for innovative feature work. Working with TIFF’s other pro-grammers, Picard expects to show around 20 titles each year, adding the number of films has been “a little amorphous” in past years. In Rotterdam before travelling to the Berlinale, Picard hopes to “discover new work” at the IFFR.

NEW ARRIVALS AWARD

ANNOUNcEDRob Brown’s Silent Things was awarded the New Arrivals Award at a ceremony in Lantar-en Venster yesterday. A joint project between IFFR and Dutch broadcaster NTR, New Ar-rivals has been screening short films online from 2006, selected from international sub-missions. Over the course of the year, a jury selects nine monthly winners, which are all screened at IFFR and compete for the New Arrivals Award, consisting of €1,000. In their statement, the jury (consisting of script editor Sandra Beerends, visual artist Dan Geesin and filmmaker Adina Pintilie) praised Silent Things for “its simple silent con-nection and resulting emotional impact”.

The prize-winning British short can be seen at www.kortefilmonline.nps.nl.

nicole davidow and G.T. detering photo: nadine Maas

IFFR’s Juliette Jansen spoke to nick Cunningham ahead of yesterday’s launch of the EyE Instant Cinema platform for the exhibition of experimental and art films.

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Prolific new-york based musician – co-founder of the band Sonic youth – visual artist and writer lee Ranaldo tells Mark Baker about being invited to Rotterdam to sit on the Tiger awards jury – and present two live, film-related performances.

Will he feel like the ‘odd man out’ among the four other jurors, all of whom arguably have more direct links to the film world? Not a bit of it, the legend-ary guitarist says, speaking by phone from New York before arriving in Rotterdam yesterday. “I am really interested by the variety on offer,” Ranaldo says of sitting on the Tiger jury. “There’s a lot of international stuff there, a lot of Asian stuff; the films look great and I’m also interested to meet my fellow jurors, who seem to be coming from a very wide spectrum of the larger film world. I think it’s gonna be very interesting and I’m definitely look-ing forward to it.” “I met Rutger in Cannes a couple of years ago, and he said it might be something I might be interested in,” Ranaldo remembers of the initial approach. “He was looking to get a real broad mix of people with a cinematic interest involved. This year it fi-nally worked out, also with doing the performanc-es. It just seemed like a good time for me to come over. It’s hard for me to take eight days out and come over and just watch films. In a way, we put the performances together to make it more enticing.”

InteractIonThe first of these performances, titled Sight Unseen, takes place tonight in Lantaren Venster and will see Ranaldo playing along to films by his wife and long-time artistic collaborator, Leah Singer. “This is the second time we’ll perform Sight Unseen”, Ranaldo says. “It was conceived as a large outdoor work, in Toronto, lasting all-night, from sun-down to sun-up. In Rotterdam it will be indoors and will follow a more set time, about an hour and a half. In this work, we’re using digital projection; the films are set by Leah. There are three different screens, two of them locked in sequence together and the third an auxiliary screen. I started by creating a quadra-

phonic soundtrack for the piece to play in the space, with speakers in each corner. That’s then tied to the film in a very specific way. My soundtrack is just shy of twice as long as Leah’s film track – every time they come around, they subtly shift against one another – the same passages of film come by, with slightly different passages of music each time. I’ve been doing this thing the last couple of years where I’m suspending my guitar from a cord from the ceiling and playing it with a bow, swinging it around and stuff. In Toronto, because it was over a very long duration, I’d be playing for 20 minutes and then leaving the stage. Sometimes during these intervals, the audience would come up on stage and start to fool around with the guitar, so it was like audience-interactive. I don’t know how much of this will come across on Monday, but we’ll see; we

have the potential to involve the audience in an in-teracting kind of way.”

GratIfyInGIs the audience for this kind of performance differ-ent from the audiences who go to Sonic Youth gigs? “There are usually a fair amount of Sonic Youth fans present, because that’s where my main notoriety lies. But we’ve been doing film-related events long enough now that there’s usually a load of film-related people … we’ve presented film and music performances in Holland before in various settings, from rock clubs to proper cinema festivals. For example, I was here performing at the IFFR in 2005 with the group Text of Light. We played along with Stan Brakhage mov-ies on a double screen, it was really cool. It’s really fun when you get these young kids from the rock

world coming to these events, who don’t know any-thing about this kind of cinema and they go off and research it further. That’s pretty gratifying in itself.”

Deja vu“By the way, I’m doing another performance at the awards ceremony,” Ranaldo adds. “A 20-minute small-scale performance, playing along with two shorts that are in the festival, by Japanese director Tomonari Ni-shikawa: Tokyo – Ebisu and Shibuya – Tokyo. They look really cool – I said I could play with something that might be appropriate from the festival. I like the idea that I’m going to do an improvisation on something some of the audience may have already seen.”

IFFR live Music: lee Ranaldo & leah Singer – Sight Unseen Mon 31 21:00 LV1

This year is the last time the Netherlands Film Fund will grant its ‘stimulation awards’: an award for the development of a new project granted to filmmakers if their films are selected by certain major festivals, or win an Oscar nomination. The last recipients of these awards are three features, a documentary, three experimental films and an animated film. The makers of Brownian Movement (Nanouk Leopold), Schemer (Hanro Smitsman), R U There (David Verbeek, who competed for a Tiger Award at Rotterdam in 2008 with Shanghai Trance), the documentary The Player and the animated film An Abstract Day all receive €25,000 for selection at prestigious international festivals, while ex-perimental films The Healers (Tim Leyendekker), Loutron (Barbara Meter) and Restauratiewagens (Ar-ianne Olthaar) are each to receive €8,500 in the last

round of the Film Fund’s stimulus funding. From 2011, funding will focus on stimulating the inter-national distribution of Dutch films and the devel-opment and pre-production of new film projects. In Rotterdam with his Return of the Tiger selection Club Zeus, Verbeek told the Daily Tiger: “Of course, it’s a sign of the times that this money is not going to be available any more. Money for culture and the arts is drying up. I feel very lucky to be one of the last people to receive it. It will come in very handy for my new project: I am currently developing a project call Full Contact. I’ve just written the first version of the script and I have the feeling it’s going to be a really good movie. And of course I can really use all the money I can get.” As for the subject mat-ter of the new film, Verbeek keeps his cards close to his chest. “The only thing I will say is that, for a change, it is not set in Asia!” Mark Baker

IFFR live Music: lee Ranaldo and leah Singer

REMEMbERING ROTTERDAM

As part of our commemorative coverage of the IFFR’s fortieth anniversary, Dutch producer, programmer and talkshow host Kees brienen shares his most vivid memories of the event.

The memory I will never forget was the pre-miere of a film called Out of the Present by Andrei Ujica [a Tiger Juror this year and direc-tor of The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, screening in Spectrum] in 1996. I was there with lots of friends, two of whom have since died, but that keeps the memory fresh because the feeling is something magical. It was the first film shot in space, and was about Ser-gei Krikalev, one of the cosmonauts sent up in May 1991. Yeltsin came to power in 1992, and there was no money to get Krikalev back – so he stayed in space. The film was about the time he was there and how he reflected on the changes taking place on Earth, and especially in the Soviet Union. The film started with very bad images of space, but suddenly the Mir spaceship appears, with this techno music. It was so clear and took about five minutes for the Soyuz to dock with the space station. It was the most amazing image. Ujica made it into a film about brotherhood, the friendship between two cosmonauts, and the way they related to each other in space. The whole crew was at the screening, including Sergei Krika-lev, and I just had to embrace him. I mean, how many people have been in space? He is the only cosmonaut I ever embraced.

KNIGHTS OF LAbOUR

IFFR regular Kevin Jerome Everson speaks to Nick cunninham about the three recently announced exhibitions of his work that will play across the US in early 2011.

Venues are the Wexler Centre in Columbus Ohio, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington DC. Everson was speaking before the world premiere of his f ilm Qual-ity Control, screening in Spectrum. “I have mostly been shown in Europe, which is great for audiences, and now I’m at being shown a lot in the US and Canada,” he comments. “People want to see f ilms about labour and work because they ref lect industry and socio-economic conditions today. We’re putting the shows together now. I don’t know how many f ilms will be in them. I’m shooting some new stuff next month, but each exhibition will have a feature f ilm, some shorts and me giving a talk.” Everson’s Quality Control, a treatise on repetitive labour within the dry cleaning industry, is a possible contender for inclu-sion. “I used to work in a factory when I was young and I wanted to show the teamwork in this type of framework,” he says. “You see one person, but you know that there is a team involved, so I wanted to expand the frame and show the nobility within all the hard labour.”

Club Zeus

Thai director Sivaroj Kongsakul talks to ben Walters about the personal memories behind his Tiger competitor, Eternity.

Sivaroj Kongsakul’s father died when he was a teen-ager. He grew up to be a filmmaker, directing sev-eral shorts, but, he says, “that memory came back every time I started a new project. The feeling of that death was always there.”For his first feature, Kongsakul decided to embrace the subject. A meditative piece mostly comprising long takes suffused in the sounds and landscapes of rural Thailand, Eternity is about the persistence of love across worldly boundaries. Wit (Wanlop Rungkamjad) is a recently deceased spirit try-ing to find his house – something that will allow him to maintain a bond with those he leaves be-hind. After a while, the story slides into the past, showing the period when Wit fell in love with Koi (Namfon Udomlertlak), a teacher won over by the strength of love. Later, we see Koi, with her chil-dren, after Wit’s death, expecting to be reunited with him in time. It’s an immersive experience, and one that Kong-sakul doesn’t mind audiences scratching their heads over. “I didn’t expect the audience would un-derstand the whole film, but everybody would have at least one shot that would trigger something for

them,” he says. “I didn’t want to trap people into specific feelings.” Moving into production with Hubert Bals Fund backing, Kongsakul used backdrops from his own youth and family history. “I tried to get the exact same location,” he says. “Luckily, it’s far from the city, so most things are unchanged. I walked back inside our old house and everything was the same. There was no need for pre-production research.” The three parts of the story are marked by formal changes. Kongsakul was especially attentive to sound, using surround sound to capture a natural ambience and shifting registers. “The first part is intended to be a bit ghost-like,” he says. “The sound there was more mysterious – I didn’t really under-stand it myself. We were trying to get the sound of the feeling of hurt, of separating from your body – not pain, exactly, but lots of confusing things to-gether.” The result is a kind of ambient drone. There were times, Kongsakul says, when the pro-duction felt self-sustaining. “I could not control the film. It had a life of its own. But this is the film I intended to make – luckily!”

Eternity – Sivaroj KongsakulMon 31 16:15 PA6Tue 01 22:30 PA4Thur 03 12:30 CI3 Press & IndustrySat 05 13:15 PA6

GHoSTS oF My lIFE

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eye: the new institute for film in the Netherlands is your connection to the Dutch film industry.

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The Strongest Man in Holland by Mark de Cloe, Club Zeus by David Verbeek and Brownian Movement by Nanouk Leopold.

EYE_10xadv_IFFR2011_272x193_defst.indd 31 24-01-11 09:47

Tiger competitor uchida nobuteru discusses his powerful relationship drama with Edward lawrenson.

“It’s about the blind devotion one partner can sometimes feel towards his or her lover. Because of that intense attachment, certain relationships can feel unequal.” So says Japanese director Uch-ida Nobuteru on the initial inspiration behind his second feature and Tiger competitor, Love Addic-tion. Acted with raw power by his young cast, it is a moving, sharply observed portrait of the com-plicated romantic entanglements of a group of four twentysomething urbanites. Shot with handheld immediacy in his charac-ters’ cramped flats and anonymous workplaces, Nobuteru’s film gives centre stage to the convinc-ing and emotionally nuanced performances of his actors (he has worked with actresses Katou Megu-mi and Maekawa Momoko before, as a cinematog-rapher on short films; he cast the two actors Sato Hiroyuki and Takaki Hiroyuki from auditions). Sharing script credit with his cast, Nobuteru de-veloped the drama through improvisation: “From the start, it was my intention to produce a work based on improvisation. The characters’ back-ground and the film’s plot were drawn up by me, but I didn’t write much dialogue or action before-hand – only things that really had to be said or done. Everything else grew out of improvisation.” Working with a tiny crew, Nobuteru was also the main camera operator, with producer Saito Aya also filming. “It was at times difficult work-ing both on the camera and the directing, but it could be fun. The improvisational approach ap-plied to the camera-work as well as the acting. We shot the same scene over and over again from start to finish, regardless of whether there were any changes in the acting, and we used different angles, so we had as much as possible to choose from when editing.” The style was well suited to capturing the heated passions of his characters’ messy love lives: pas-sions that threaten to take a violent turn as the film reaches its climax. Nobuteru recalls a fight

scene as an especially vivid moment from the shoot: “We wanted to avoid it seeming fake, but at the same time I was worried someone would get hurt”. In the end, the only damage done was to the apartment rented for the shoot. In fact, repair costs comprised a certain chunk of Nobuteru’s small budget, around €10,000. Show-ing the film outside of Japan for the first time at the IFFR tonight, the international premiere of Love Addiction also marks Nobuteru’s first visit to Europe: “I’m very happy,” he says. “To reach out to an international audience is really exciting.”

love addiction – Uchida NobuteruMon 31 19:15 PA6 Tue 01 16:00 DWBZ Press & IndustryWed 02 10:15 PA6Thur 03 13:00 PA3 Press & IndustryThur 03 22:15 PA6 Fri 04 19:15 PA6

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