This year sees the Rotterdam Lab welcome new partners and strengthen its programme. By Nick Cunningham.

The Rotterdam Lab 2011 programme, ostensibly part of CineMart but increasingly assuming its own identity among the professional participants at the IFFR, gets underway today with five new partner organisations on board. This means that this year, 22 national film boards, training organisations and international trade bodies will work with Lab staff to enable 57 emerging producers (each nominated by their local industry) to benefit from the full range of Lab activities. New partners in 2011 are the Royal Film Commission – Jordan; the Secretaria de Es-tado de Cultura do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); PROIMÁ-GENES COLOMBIA; Medienboard Berlin-Branden-burg (Germany) and the Durban FilmMart (South Africa). The Lab continues its MEDIA International partnership, which this year enables five Latin Amer-ican producers to attend Lab events.

WIDER“The Rotterdam Lab is going into its eleventh year and is now more a parallel programme to CineMart,” comments CineMart’s Marit van den Elshout. “The programme is much stronger and we have given it a greater profile by allocating bigger budgets to invite more speakers, panelists and consultants.” Van den Elshout reveals that a key shift in Lab strategy from 2011 will be to widen the terms of Lab participa-tion and collaborate more closely with established production companies, active in co-production, who will be asked to nominate talented apprentice producers for Lab treatment. “This will increase our

input into the producer selection and will be easier for us to open up to territories that we don’t have part-ners with, such as parts of Asia.” The stated aim of the Rotterdam Lab is to merge top emerging talent with the great and the good of the international production, finance, sales and distribu-tion sectors. Particular emphasis is placed on digital and multimedia developments across all disciplines, but what makes the experience invaluable for par-ticipants is the vibrant festival and market backdrop against which all Lab activities are played out. Par-ticipants attend panel discussions and coaching ses-sions and are encouraged to observe producers and financiers in action during CineMart. Participating producers are offered the golden opportunity to pro-mote themselves, their companies and their projects and, as significantly, they can build or augment their business network using a pre-selected group of high-ly talented and like-minded creative peers.

NETWORKING“Networking is at the core of the producer’s activ-ity”, comments Kristina Trapp, managing director of EAVE, the professional training and project develop-ment organization for audiovisual producers, and a Lab partner. “The Rotterdam Lab is a good introduc-tion for upcoming producers to the world of CineMart and international co-production. The feedback we get from our producers is very good and the networking effect with professionals from all around the world is great. This is a great opportunity for our graduates to meet colleagues from other parts of the world outside Europe and to benefit from the great possibilities that the Lab – but also CineMart – offers.” The themes of the 2011 Rotterdam Lab panels

will be the ‘development and the role of the crea-tive producer’, digital distribution and VOD and a session on post-production management. There will also be a key address on transmedia in which filmmaker Anita Ondine will take the participants through the possibilities of transmedia production.

WORKSHOPThe Rotterdam Lab Coaching Session on the ‘effective pitching of film projects’ will be given by Ido Abram of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, with smaller pitching sessions offered by representatives of the Binger Filmlab. “In my opinion, the Lab is a perfect opportunity for emerging international producers to start or to enlarge their international networks and to get a proper feeling for how the international mar-ket is working,” Abram comments. “It’s also a great talent resource for the festival, since many producers return in the (near) future with projects in CineMart or films in the festival. Presenting yourself and your projects in the most efficient way at a festival is cru-cial, and that’s where my workshop comes in. Besides that, it’s a lot of fun.”

CONTACTSTeresa Hoefert de Turégano, co-pro funding advisor for the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg articulates the film board’s reasons for signing up as a Lab part-ner this year. “The Rotterdam Film Festival is one of the best film festivals in Europe,” she comments. “They have been programming great independent films for many, many years. It is one of the reference festivals in Europe. We chose two fairly young produc-ers [for the Lab], who are beginning to be interesting internationally and have already a little bit of experi-

ence working on international co-productions that fit more into the world of Rotterdam. What they have to gain from the Rotterdam Lab is the invaluable con-tacts that they can make. Because of the programming and what the Rotterdam festival stands for, it means that the people who are nurturing that kind of cinema will be here. Everything has to do with meeting people – and things happen from those meetings.”Sharif Majali of the Jordanian Film Commission, another new Lab partner, attends both as a producer and Commission representative. “We are trying to build a new industry in Jordan,” he stresses. “What we do at the commission is to try to participate in every important laboratory or festival, because you’ll get to know people and they’ll get to know you. This is how work comes along.”

ROAD TRIPHoefert de Turégano tells a story about a bus trip that pre-dated the Medienboard’s decision to sign up as Lab partners. As European festival and fund heads, and other key professionals, journeyed from Istanbul to Berlin by road on a 3-day odyssey, cursing a cer-tain Icelandic volcano, relationships were forged and strategies formed. CineMart’s Jacobine van der Vloed was on the bus, as were the Medienboard’s Hoefert de Turégano and funding managing director Kirsten Niehuus. It may have been taking networking to ex-treme lengths, but de Turégano refuses to rule out the possibility that the experience had some bearing on her institution’s decision to sign up for the Lab. “Many things can be sourced back to that bus ride, and will be in the future. The one thing that we all agreed was that nobody talked about business … but maybe it was one of the side reasons.”

MOBILE LAB

NEDERLANDSEEDITIEZ.O.Z

Actors rehearse for visual artist Abner Preis’ short film The Adventures of the Great Abnerio in XL venue Your Space. Now showing his work at Showroom MAMA, Preis drew inspiration for the film from his current exhibition. The cast is made up of volunteers who met one another for the first time earlier this week, and the film will be shot in a single take of around 20 minutes. The results will premiere later next week, on 5 February. photo: Nichon Glerum

DAILY TIGER40TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #3 SATURDAY 29 JANUARY 2011

FILMFESTIVALROTTERDAM.COM

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ChECkING IN

IFFR RECALLS ITS PAST LIvES SLOvENIAN FILM FuNd REvAMPS

The Slovenian Film Fund will undergo the fi-nal phase of its make-over at the end of January 2011 when it changes name to the Slovenian Film Centre (SFC). With the new name comes a change of director – Samo Rugelj, formerly of public broadcaster RTV Slovenia, was appoint-ed acting director last week – and a shift in funding policy. In the future, grants will be no greater than 50% of the budget for most films, except for youth and low-budget films (under e700,000), for which support can be as much as 80% of the production budget. In the past, up to 100% of a film’s budget could be paid for out of the Fund’s coffers. In terms of future monies allocated towards co-production, SFC head of promotion and sales Nerina T. Kocjan-cic is confident that investment will continue. Last year, the Fund invested e800,000 in five international co-productions. Maximum in-vestment is e200,000 per film. “Production funding currently runs at e5 mil-lion, and should be increased to e7 million, but co-production investment depends on the policy of the new director,” Kocjancic said yes-terday. “But I think he will encourage co-pro-duction, because if you want domestic produc-ers to get money for their films from abroad for their projects, then you have to do the same.” At IFFR 2011, the Film Centre is representing Slovenian/Finnish/Irish/Swedish co-pro Si-lent Sonata by Janez Burger, screening in Spec-trum. The film’s budget was e2.17 million, with e700,000 from the Slovenian Film Fund. In this dialogue-free film, a family traumatised by war slowly rediscovers colour in their lives when a circus encamps by their house. “It has no dialogue, beautiful photography and a very interesting relationship between circus people and aerial actors,” Kocjancic comments. “It is quite rare to see something like this on film.”Also in Spectrum is Oca (Dad), budgeted at e300,000. “It is a very tender film about the relationship between a father and his son, made on a very low budget” she explains. “Sometimes the idea for a film is bigger than the budget.” Nick Cunningham

Actor-director Mathieu Amalric talks to Geoffrey Macnab about the excitement of playing with the rules.

Here’s the challenge: you’ve got 12 days to shoot your movie, a budget of only e300,000, you have to stick to text written in the seventeenth century in rhyming alexandrine couplets and you’re only allowed to use actors from the Comédie-Française. The best camera you can afford to use is an in-expensive Canon 1D. This was what confronted French actor-director (and former Bond Villain) Mathieu Amalric when he set to work on L’ illusion comique (an international premiere in IFFR’s Spec-trum).“They’re not my rules. It was a commission,” says Amalric (on a whistlestop visit to Rotterdam before beginning shooting on new Alain Resnais film Vous n’avez encore rien vu next week). “That’s the excite-ment of commissions – to play with the rules.” Amalric made L’ illusion comique immediately after he had shot his feature On Tour (which won him Best Director Award in Cannes last year), a project commissioned by TV station France 2. Every play performed at the Comédie-Française is recorded by French public TV – and then gener-ally left to fester on a shelf. However, French ac-tress Muriel Mayette, administrateur général of the Comédie-Française, had been looking for a way to persuade TV to do something more inventive. Amalric was the third director enlisted to direct an adaptation that would have a life of its own. “What was really interesting was to try to invent some-thing that could only be a movie, with material

that was only theatre,” he says. The play features a magician. Amalric’s trick was to turn this magician into a concierge in a contemporary hotel. On the one hand, a practical solution to a formal problem. On the other, a creative gesture. “With those prac-tical problems, you find inspiration. That’s what I love about movies. It is completely impure. I was

searching for what today could pass as a magician in a cave, who could read the past and manipu-late things.” At first, Amalric thought about mak-ing the magician a John Le Carre-type spymaster. Then, one day, he saw a concierge walking out of a hotel carrying a bunch of keys. “That made me think about how, in big hotels, they’re aware of eve-

rything. That’s their job: to be discreet and to know everything. I thought about the keys as if the con-cierge was the master of the world. Then, I thought about the cave and I thought: video surveillance!”Shooting took place in a real hotel yards from the Comédie-Française, which meant the actors could film during the day and then hurry across the street to the theatre to perform on stage at night. Despite his experience in films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Quantum of Solace, Amalric admits he was apprehensive about working with the actors from the Comédie-Française. “I know them well because I lived with [actress] Jeanne Bali-bar and she was at the Comédie-Française ... but I was ashamed that I hadn’t prepared enough before meeting them. I was a little afraid.” To set the ac-tors at ease, he showed them an early cut of On Tour. Even though that film is about bawdy burlesque dancers, the Comédie-Française actors were imme-diately able to recognize the passion and humour in the dancers’ performances. On both movies, the director deliberately shot at breakneck speed. “That way, you surprise yourself. It’s better some-times to be so afraid, because it means you have to find something.”

Mathieu Amalric will be interviewed about L’ illusion comique after the screening tonight.

L’illusion comique – Mathieu Amalric Fri 28 19:30 LUX Sat 29 12:45 PA5Mon 31 16:30 DWBZ Tue 01 17:15 LV2

Scheffer was, he admitted, initially hesitant to take the commission. “I was immediately honoured to be asked, but I don’t normally do that, because I’m

very strict in my work,” he explains. “I want to be distracted as little as possible.” But over the following months, he reconsidered. “Rotterdam was always good to me and I wanted to give something back. That’s one sentiment. The other sentiment is that I was between two big cycles in my work. I had just finished 25 documentaries about composers and I had just started a new film in Iran. In my previous films, I was always look-ing for the soul in music, and now I wanted to look into the soul of human beings, within a cultural dialogue.” The Rotterdam request began to seem increasingly well-timed. Scheffer’s problem was what to shoot, who to talk to, what story to tell. He contacted former IFFR directors Marco Müller, Emile Fallaux, Simon Field and Sandra den Hamer, all of whom had programmed his films in the past, cooked them a slap-up meal – “at least I could give them some food back” – and devised a strategy to make a film

about the directors that each of the festival heads considered the most important or influential dur-ing their period at the helm. The work of these di-rectors, Scheffer figured, would go far in defining the essence of IFFR and its 40-year history. Field plumped for Apichatpong Weersethakul, with whom he collaborated on the 2010 Palme d’Or win-ning Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives. Den Hamer chose Abderrahmane Sissako. Fallaux chose Michael Haneke and Müller decided on Ab-bas Kiorastami, whom Scheffer refers to as “a great example of the poetry of cinema”. Scheffer himself chose Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Raúl Ruiz to represent the period when the late Huub Bals led the festival. The finished film is 53 minutes but plays, Scheffer says, as a prelude to the feature-length version he had initially envisaged, and for which he would like to raise the finance in the future. The whole expe-rience was both thrilling and efficacious. “It was fantastic to have, between my two film cycles, a mo-ment of contemplation, of measuring my thoughts as a film director in a dialogue with colleagues who are very highly regarded and who continue to in-spire me. I am now completely refreshed.”

Renowned dutch documentarian Frank Scheffer, who was commissioned to make a work to commemorate 40 years of IFFR, tells Nick Cunningham about the resulting film, Tiger Eyes, produced by prolific Amsterdam-based production outfit Pieter van huystee Film & Tv.

IFFR IN vOGuEIn a groundbreaking new initiative, Vogue Italia is joining forces with the IFFR. The Italian magazine is to stream the short films from IFFR’s Out Of Fashion: Fashion Film Competition on its website, www.vogue.it, in its ‘Talents Section’ as part of Vogue Video Lab. “We really like to show and promote young talent,” says Manuela Martorelli, the jour-nalist who covers the Benelux territories for the Italian fashion magazine. On Sunday, at the same time as the films from the young designers are showing in Rotterdam, they will also be available on the Vogue website. Martorelli, who suggested the initiative to her editors back in Italy, says that they were “absolutely enthusiastic” at the idea of the joint venture with Rotterdam.“We are really interested in showing new tal-ent,” Martorelli said of the decision to con-centrate on work by newcomers. “It is much more interesting to see what the younger gen-eration is doing. That is why we concentrate our energies on the film competition.” The fashion journalist has already watched sev-eral of the films. “The quality is very high,” she declared. Martorelli envisages that the films will reach a big international audience. Out Of Fashion: Fashion Film Competition features work from young designers who were asked to depict the concepts of their col-lections on film. It is part of IFFR’s Signals: Out Of Fashion, curated by Inge de Leeuw. 15 shortlisted titles are expected to feature on the Vogue site. Geoffrey Macnab Frank Scheffer

Mathieu Amalric photo: Ruud Jonkers

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hAPPY RETuRN

AGAINST INTERPRETATION

“It’s a love letter,” Barney Platts-Mills tells Edward Lawrenson of his new film Zohra: A Moroccan Fairytale, which has its world premiere today. “My love letter to Morocco.”

Set in rural Morocco, this charming drama charts the relationship between 14-year-old villager Zohra (played by Touba Noro) and 17-year-old Ibrahim (Said Bekkeurrie), a young man planning to move to Spain to look for work. Combining admiring views of the landscape surrounding Zohra’s village (beautifully shot by Spanish DoP Fulgencio Mar-tínez) with a sympathetic portrait of teenage life in Morocco, the film glows with Platts-Mills’ affection for the country. “In a sense it’s orientalism,” says British director Platts-Mills of his position as an outsider making a Moroccan film, although the filmmaker has lived in the country for some years. “I went there in 2000,” he says in advance of his IFFR screening. “I used to make videos in London with youths who might otherwise misbehave. At the end of that, one of the Moroccans who’d been on board asked if I wanted to visit his family farm. I did, and I stayed for a year, because it was so wonderful.”The film marks Platts-Mills’ return to feature film-making after a 27-year absence. Having worked as an editor in the “mainstream British film industry” (an early job was assisting the editing on Stanley

Kubrick’s Spartacus), Platts-Mills won acclaim for his 1971 drama Bronco Bullfrog, a youth drama set in London’s East End which the director developed in collaboration with a cast of young non-professionals. The long break from filmmaking wasn’t planned. “I lost the inclination to make films,” says Platts-Mills, attributing this to a sense of frustration with the film sector in Britain at the time: “I was so insulted by the lack of independent production.”Written quickly after Platts-Mills was introduced to Touba Nora, the young woman who gives a be-guiling title performance, Zohra’s budget (around £300,000) was partly raised from private funders in the City of London. “A venture capitalist started the ball rolling,” says Platts-Mills. Working with a crew of around 35, the budget was tight, although produc-er Rajitah Shas point out: “We wanted to make sure everyone was paid well.” Looking forward to the screening at IFFR, Platts-Mills hopes this will be attended by members of Rot-terdam’s Moroccan community. “I showed the film to a few London-based Moroccans,” he adds, “and they said the film has that sense of yearning a lot of young Moroccans abroad feel for their homeland.”

Zohra: A Moroccan Fairytale – Barney Platts-MillsSat 29 15:45 PA5 Sun 30 22:15 CI5 Fri 04 22:15 CI2 Sat 05 22:15 LV3

Tiger competitor vipin vijay tells Edward Lawrenson about the importance of being marginal.

“One thought will evolve into a thousand thoughts,” Tiger competitor Vipin Vijay says about the creative process behind The Image Threads. But pinning down the meaning of the haunting dream-logic behind this elusive, teasing, visually sumptuous and hypnotically paced debut feature is not something that comes easily to this Kerala-based Malayali filmmaker. “A lot of people are looking at meaning; I’m against interpreta-tion and against meaning-making.” He continues: “The word ‘understanding’ is a complicated one for me,” he says, “because I don’t understand a lot of the things about the world around me.” It’s not from want of trying. Discussing this chal-lenging drama revolving around a middle-aged IT lecturer Hari (whose fascination with his black-mag-ic practicing grandfather prompts a provocative ex-ploration of the relationship between digital virtual worlds and ancient spiritual realms), Vijay ranges across subjects as diverse as Robert Bresson, cultural thinker Paul Virilio, media theorist Lev Manovich’s idea of ‘database cinema’, Renaissance notions of perspective and his own attempts to resist and craft an Indian alternative to the ‘European’ tradition of cinema he was immersed in at film school.

Bracingly experimental, The Image Threads’ dense, essayistic sensibility reveals Vijay’s eclec-tic cultural outlook, but it is as a mesmerizing visual experience that the f ilm impresses. Shot in Kerala, it combines sequences in a modern-day urban environment, in which Hari seems a doleful and isolated presence, with more surreal rural sojourns that evoke archetypes from local mythology. “I’m not a traditional f ilmmaker,” says Vijay, “I’m an extremely marginal f ilmmaker. I think there should be marginals. Why does everybody want to be popular? Can you think about a world without margins – it would be horrible.” To this end, Vijay, who won a Tiger for his 2007 short Video Game, is grateful for Hubert Bals Fund support for script and development. The fund allowed him to start working on his initial ideas: “I collected books, I stared writing notes”. He adds: “Without it, I think the f ilm wouldn’t have happened.”

The Image Threads –Vipin Vijay Sat 29 15:30 PA7Sun 30 10:15 PA6 Mon 31 11:45 DJZ Press & Industry Thur 03 09:30 DJZ Press & IndustryFri 04 22:15 PA6Sat 05 10:15 PA6

From the very first guest (Sam Fuller in 1986) to Terence Davies last year, these guests have all given lengthy, wide-ranging interviews to the festival di-rector, Peter von Bagh. Now, von Bagh has made Sodankylä Forever, a compilation of reminiscences and observations from the hundreds of hours of material that have been made with the filmmakers over the years. “It was pretty difficult,” von Bagh reflects with evident understatement, of the editing of a proj-ect that encompasses every part of film history. “Certainly, in the beginning, it seemed impossible. Then, suddenly, like in a dream, all the threads started to come together. It had the very strange effect of taking me back into my personal life, be-cause I am always there when people are speaking. I am one metre from them, although invisible … it is very much about my own memories.”The documentary begins with Maud Linder, the daughter of the French silent movie comedian Max Linder (sometimes referred to as the world’s very first movie star), reminiscing about her father. We hear another Sodankylä visitor, Victor Sherman (director of Mr Skeffington) talking about seeing DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation when it came out – way back in 1915. Meanwhile, Francis Ford Cop-pola, who was in Sodankylä in 2002, remembers being inspired to make movies after seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World (aka Oc-tober). Certain themes are constant. Von Bagh always asked the filmmakers about the first movie they ever saw – “the yearning for the first cinema experi-ence.” Many were invited to discuss war. Directors like Milos Forman and Jerzy Skolimowski share details about traumatic events in their childhoods. That great magician of British cinema, Michael

Powell, talks about Hans Christian Andersen and The Red Shoes. John Boorman, director of Hope and Glory, reflects that war may be “the natural condi-tion of man”. Sodankylä Forever is a world premiere in IFFR’s Sig-nals: Regained. Part of it was shown as a work in progress in Sodankylä last summer, but the direc-tor says that he himself is yet to see the full movie on the big screen. Not every filmmaker who made it to Finland is featured in the film. In certain cases, material was lost. “I know that they were filmed but nobody took care of the materials. It is quite a mir-acle that almost everything was found!” Sodankylä Forever – Peter von BaghSat 29 14:30 CI7

This is the dynamic that underlies Yoon’s debut film, which follows three high school friends – Ki-tae (Lee Je-hoon), Dong-yoon (Seo Jun-young) and Hee-june, or Becky (Park Jung-min) – and is struc-tured around Ki-tae’s death. Shot in naturalistic, muted HD, it has a complex chronology, flashing back and forward throughout the final weeks of Ki-tae’s life and those after he dies. Bleak Night falls into three chapters: Ki-tae’s father’s investigation of events, during which he naturally considers his son as a victim; then we get the per-spectives of Hee-june, whom we learn Ki-tae bul-lied severely, and Dong-yoon, who knew Ki-tae since early childhood but was also not immune to his violence. But does Ki-tae’s aggression stop him being a victim too?Yoon, who was born in Seoul in 1982, has long been troubled by South Korea’s suicide rate – among the highest in the world – and the limited attention given to such deaths in Korean culture. “In Korean newspapers, suicides are reported in one sentence: ‘he was bullied so he died’, or ‘he broke up with his girlfriend so he died’, or ‘he failed an exam so he

died’,” Yoon says. “But that’s just the superficial side – the scars of a personal situation are very deep. I thought, it’s not right. There’s something wrong be-tween people and I wanted to investigate it.”Inspired by filmmakers ranging from Orson Welles to Gus Van Sant, Yoon developed his story at the Korean Academy of Film Arts. It was one of four projects selected for feature development and had its world premiere in Pusan last year, where it shared the New Currents award with fellow Tiger contender The Journals of Musan. Above all, Yoon seeks to avoid the simplistic or su-perficial. “All the people in this story are very weak and very fragile, but they break each other. There’s no black-and-white view of good and bad.”

Bleak Night – Yoon Sung-hyun Sat 29 19:15 PA6Sun 30 13:30 PA4 Mon 31 22:30 PA5Tue 01 13:30 DWBZ Press & Industry Thur 03 15:00 PA3 Press & IndustrySat 05 21:45 PA4

It’s the festival where the sun never sets. Over the last quarter of a century, the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä in Finnish Lapland, two hours drive north from the official residence of Santa Claus, has attracted many of the world’s most renowned filmmakers. By Geoffrey Macnab.

“People in South korea don’t live for themselves,” Yoon Sung-hyun tells Ben Walters of his Tiger contender Bleak Night. “They live for other people’s expectations – parents, friends. They’re very fragile. And if you’re fragile, you’re violent towards other people, to protect yourself.”

Bleak Night

The Image Threads

MIdNIGhT’S ChILdREN

hISTORY OF vIOLENCE

Zohra: A Moroccan Fairytale Sodankylä Forever

The links between fashion and film are celebrated in a special IFFR strand this year. Geoffrey Macnab talks to its organizers and the featured filmmakers.

“Inge [de Leeuw] came to me with an A4 paper with the idea. Half way through reading it, I said ‘OK, we are going to do it’,” Festival Direc-tor Rutger Wolfson recalls of the immediacy with which he greenlit the festival’s Signals: Out Of Fashion sidebar. “Usually, the ideas are much longer and I take much more time to discuss it with the programmers, but half way through reading the sheet, I thought ‘this is perfect!’ And she is the perfect person to do it, because she is a total fashion addict herself ... and I am also a closet fashionista.”Wolfson praises the way De Leeuw has struc-tured the Out Of Fashion programme, pre-senting a ‘digital film magazine’. “There is so much going on in this world between film and fashion, but it’s hard to conceptualise how you’re going to make that into an interesting programme. Inge did that incredibly well. It’s a very smart programme.”“I think it’s very interesting, particularly be-cause it is well researched,” agrees filmmaker and fashion designer Anna-Nicole Ziesche (whose film Childhood Storage screens in the Conceptual Spaces programme). Ziesche notes that previous exhibitions exploring fashion and film have tended either to focus on older films, or to have been programmed by fashion spe-cialists. “Here, Out Of Fashion tries something different. It really tries to present films which represent ideas around contemporary fashion, but which are also made by filmmakers and integrate a narrative. That’s a niche that hasn’t been explored yet.”The inspiration for the sidebar came to cura-tor De Leeuw when she saw a selection of films by British/Turkish fashion designer Hussein Chalayan online. She thought Chalayan’s work,

like that of several other designers working with film and video, deserved to be considered seriously as cinema. As a creative work in its own right, not just an attempt to sell designer product. “I was doing some research and I dis-covered that a lot of independent filmmakers were working together with fashion brands,” De Leeuw recalls. Even before the festival began, Out Of Fashion had already generated plenty of hype and in-terest. Vogue Italy has now come on board to stream films from the Out of Fashion: Fashion Film Competition for young designers, through its website. Legendary designer Agnès b. is due in town to introduce the world premiere of Une sorte de journal vidéo, a compilation from her archive in which she talks about her inspira-tions and her life – a feature-length project she

created specially for Rotterdam. Also featuring prominently in the programme is work from Belgian outfit Maison Martin Margiela. One of the first films De Leeuw selected for the programme was Yang Fudong’s First Spring, made for Prada. “I know his work. It is an ad-vertisement, but it is also in the style of Yang Fudong. It is his film”, De Leeuw notes. Historically, there has always been a strong link between fashion and cinema. Audrey Hepburn wore Givenchy in several movies. Designers from Cerutti to Armani have provided cos-tumes for movies. However, De Leeuw argues that this relationship is changing: “Fashion photographers are also using films. Fashion magazines are changing, in line with the iPad generation. You can now make different maga-zines,” she  reflects on the increasing overlap between fashion and film. This prompted her to come up with the idea of “a digital fashion magazine in the cinema”.Earlier this week saw the opening of the Out of Fashion Exhibition. Running alongside the film programme, this includes special installations, along with the original sketches from Darren Aronofsky’s Oscar-nominated Black Swan (also screening in the festival). The costume design for the film was by fashion label Rodarte, run by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy. “I started writing to them in April … they didn’t answer until two weeks ago,” De Leeuw recalls of her lengthy (and ultimately successful) courtship of Rodarte. Among the many guests participating in Out Of Fashion is Japanese artist and designer Pyuupiru, who gave a special performance at the exhibition opening earlier this week, and is the subject of a documentary made by her friend Matsunaga Daishi. “I wanted stronger films, rather than good clothing!” De Leeuw says of her criteria for choosing titles. She adds that Out Of Fashion reflects the age of YouTube and the internet. “It’s a more a contemporary programme than a historical one.”

SMART PROGRAMMINGInge de Leeuw

photo: Corinne de korver

REMEMBERING ROTTERDAM

As part of our commemorative coverage of the IFFR’s fortieth anniversary, critic and programmer Tony Rayns shares his most vivid memories of the event.

I was at an Indonesian rijstafel dinner with the Kitano Takeshi gang one evening (a din-ner made more memorable by the fact that one of the Office Kitano juniors had visited a Rotterdam ‘coffee shop’ during the after-noon and was suddenly so overcome that he had to be carried back to the hotel), when Simon Field leaned across the table and reminded me that I was supposed to be in Zaal De Unie, introducing Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair at the premiere of their f ilm The Falconer. I dashed (actually ran, for the last time in my life) across town to the Zaal De Unie and arrived just as the f ilm was scheduled to begin. Everyone was waiting for me. Because the f ilm is only an hour long, we’d previously agreed to have a long-er-than-usual sit-down discussion when it ended. Petit was an old friend, but I’d never met Sinclair before, and I hadn’t seen the f ilm. I got through the introduction okay, although Sinclair visibly took offence at something I said, and the f ilm began. I sat down to watch it, and immediately went deeply to sleep. I woke to see the credits crawling down the screen ... and so had to chair a lengthy discussion when I was the only person in the room who hadn’t seen the f ilm. Some of the Dutch programmers who were in the audience told me that the result was very amusing, but it sure didn’t feel like that to me.