41ST INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #9 FRIDAY 3 FEBRUARY 2012

Bringing the revolution homeYesterday, IFFR’s Power Cut: Middle East strand gave a chance to fi lmmakers and others from the Arab world to air their views on the changes taking place in the region, Ben Walters reports

Many of the effects of the popular uprisings that have spread throughout the Arab world over the past year are striking and unmissable: from the fall of Mubarak to the deaths of dozens of Egyptian football fans this week. But other effects are less obvious. “After 40 years of blockade and confi nement, people have over-come this fear,” suggests Charlotte Bank, “and are discovering themselves, rediscovering their friends, developing new relationships. There is an awareness of public space as a space for discourse. That didn’t happen before.”Bank, co-curator of the Visual Arts Festival Damas-cus, was one of several contributors to a group interview with fi lmmakers and other fi gures from the Arab world participating in the IFFR’s Power Cut Middle East: Busy Making Revolution strand. Some of the participants spoke under condition of anonymity. A Syrian fi lmmaker spoke of the power of seeing an installation piece at Rotterdam which allowed them to hear for the fi rst time the voice of an activist they had previously seen only as a photograph on walls.

Public space“When you moved in public in Syria, you control-led yourself and tried not to be noticed,” Bank said. “Now, public space is being seen as a location for the articulation of ideas. It’s being done in an anony-mous way: masses of protestors operate in the streets and there are several collectives using interesting new creative – even artistic – forms of protest. There has always been a political element in much artistic production in Syria, because it’s a way to articulate ideas it was not possible to speak about in any other way (but that could be addressed) through multilay-ered expressions, through the use of metaphors. But this artistic production could only be found in very specifi c locations. Now, you fi nd creativity in the public space.“The fountains of Damascus have been coloured red to commemorate martyrs on several occasions; this is done by an anonymous group of creative activ-ists or artists. There are several instances of the use of a very well-known revolutionary song whose writer was killed in a very brutal way. This song is being played in different spaces around the city – in garbage bins or from buildings. There have been people driving around in cars distributing leafl ets with revolutionary poems; balloon protests; so many different ways. It’s no longer a location that

is controlled, supervised and under the very heavy control of the state. It is the people now who are retaking their city.”

Organized crimeThere were mixed feelings from Egyptian residents about the country’s position a year after protestors massed at Tahrir Square. To artist and fi lmmaker Khaled Hafez, the deaths of more than 70 people following a football match on Wednesday was “an organized crime. Every three or four months there is a public gathering of some sort and something like that happens. Certain forces are improving their techniques – it’s the fi rst time yesterday that 70 people are dead without a single bullet. To me, the Military Council is a name – the whole thing is much bigger than that.”

Ripple effectHafez, 48, said that “it’s only the younger generation, who instigated this revolution, who are very much politically engaged. I was not trained or programmed that change would happen in my lifetime, certainly not by public protesting.” But Philip Rizk, born in Germany but raised in Egypt, where he still lives, disa-greed. “You had people from across generations and across classes – there were men and women aged 40,

50, 60 on the streets.” For him, the past year has seen an expansion of political consciousness, illustrated by the focus of last month’s protests compared to those of a year earlier. “This time, protestors were very clearly targeting the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, whereas last year one of the weaknesses was that they were focused on one person (Mubarak). As far as the system goes, nothing has changed and things have gotten worse.”The generational issue is clearly of widespread inter-est. “Something beautiful that I’ve noticed during the toppling of these dictators is the change in my mum,” said one young fi lmmaker of Iraqi descent based in Europe. “She’s in London, away from all of this, 62 years old. From the start to now she’s followed every single moment and, although she’s so sad and she cries, and so many people are dying, she sees some-thing that she never imagined she would see … This idea that we now are free – we can go to the bread shop and talk about the government and say how bad they are – it’s a new idea [and] people might not really know in which direction it’s going.” The effects of actions on the streets of Cairo, Lebanon and Damas-cus create ripples that travel more widely than might fi rst be apparent, with consequences no one can yet understand. “There’s a revolution happening all over the world, in people’s houses.”

Fast, fun fi lmmaking: Since setting up shop on January 25, Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Fac-tory (part of Signal’s strand For Real; see page 7) has been churning out four miniature movies a day. Each of the couple of dozen titles produced so far – including It’s Cold and Not a Sensi-ble Thing in Sight, Bloody Screwdriver II and The Unknown Tiger – was made by an ad hoc col-lective of ten people, using ready-made sets and props, and took barely three hours from pitch to premiere. Among yesterday’s participants were Bridget, an artist with no experience in fi lm

(“it was two and a half hours of fun!”); Astrid (“I made a resolution that I would make a fi lm by February and, being a Buddhist, I chanted for it, so it’s no coincidence”); and Kiemlan, who directed a fi lm for last year’s IFFR and wanted to try operating the camera. “To actually enjoy making movies, that’s what was important for me,” she says: “Pure, unadulterated fun!” (BW)

photo: Corinne de Korver

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Design in Boijmans

Rotterdam designprijs 2011 t/m 12 februari 2012 Nieuwe energie in design en kunst t/m 26 februari 2012 Interventie #18

Sheila Hicks - Cent Minimes t/m 4 maart 2012

www.boijmans.nl

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is hét museum in Nederland waar nationaal en internationaal ontwerptalent een podium krijgt. Binnen het programma ‘Design in Boijmans’ worden tentoonstellingen georganiseerd waarin o.a. designvoorstellen voor een duurzame samenleving centraal staan. T/m 12 februari zijn de genomineerden voor de prestigieuze Rotterdam designprijs 2011 te zien, en een presentatie van het werk van kunstenaar Sheila Hicks. Later dit jaar presenteert het museum een nieuwe collectie opstelling vormgeving en actueel design.

3

Topkapi Films, the outfi t set up late last year by leading Dutch producers Frans van Gestel and Arnold Helsenfeld, has revealed further details of its initial slate.The Amsterdam-based company is developing new fi lms with many of the cream of Dutch fi lmmakers, among them Urszula Antoniak’s CineMart entry Nude Area (due to shoot in the summer); a new project from Jean van de Velde (currently at a very early stage) and The Family Way by Joram Lurzen, a follow up to Dutch box-offi ce hit All Is Love (which posted 1.4 million admissions in the Netherlands). This is due to shoot in the spring. One fi lm due to fi nish this week is My Life On Planet B, directed by Iván López Núñez.Meanwhile, the company is busy fi nancing histori-cal epic Public Works, an adaptation of the novel by Thomas Rosenboom about two brothers striving

for success in nineteenth-century Amsterdam. This will be directed by Theu Boermans from a screen-play by Frank Ketelaar.Alongside its Dutch movies, Topkapi has boarded various international projects as coproducer, among them Carlos Reygadas’s Tenebras Lux and Flemish director Felix Von Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown and Patrice Toye’s Black Spiders. Topkapi is also expected shortly to announce details of a new coproduction with Danish powerhouse Zentropa. “The balance in my new company is a bit more commercial than at Motel Films or IDTV,” Van Gestel comments of the difference between Topkapi and the two previous companies where he has worked. “We always will produce strong arthouse fi lms because I like to work with some directors and I like those fi lms, but the market is asking for fi lms that come a bit closer to the audience.”

Van Gestel predicted that budgets for Dutch fi lms will come down signifi cantly in 2013 as the econom-ic crisis and the public funding cuts continue to bite. “We need diversity. We do arthouse fi lms. We have a few very big commercial titles and we are looking now also for fi lms that are crossover arthouse,” the Topkapi boss says.From his IDTV days, Van Gestel has retained a strong bond with Dutch distributor A-Film and Wild Bunch Benelux. However, Van Gestel says Topkapi is not looking for exclusive relationships with particular distributors. “Because we do different types of fi lms, we need different types of distributors. I cannot imagine myself working with the same distributor all the time. I will see per fi lm what is the best one. There is a lot of competition in the Netherlands. I think there are too many distrib-utors – but in a way, I think that is good for us!”(GM)

Eye-openerTIME TO IMAGINEHuub Roelvink, managing director of new Dutch distribution outfi t Imagine Film Distribution Netherlands, speaks after the company’s launch on January 31. Imagine (Netherlands) is the sister operation of the Belgian concern Imagine Film Distribution, run for the past ten years by Christian Thomas. Roelvink confi rms that he and Thomas will together buy Benelux rights for 10-12 fi lms a year. First release for the Dutch entity is the Spectrum title Monsieur Lazhar.“One needs to be present in both Belgium and the Netherlands with the same company ,” he stress-es. “Christian has been closely co-operating with Wild Bunch Netherlands for the last few years, I believe, but that was a little like two companies with different DNA trying to work together. Before that, he worked quite closely with Contact Film but that was always on a fi lm-by-fi lm basis. It’s too diffi cult to have loose partnerships. In acquisition, you have to think about the two markets, which are of equal importance. The whole point of the new operation is to harmo-nise it as much as possible. There may be some exceptions – for example, if we pick up a Dutch fi lm that is not suitable for the Belgian market – but in general we will really focus on those 10-12 releases and really do them together.”Roelvink helped establish specialist doc distribu-tion house Cinema Delicatessen before running the LUX arthouse complex in Nijmegen. He recently returned to Amsterdam to programme for a range of cinemas in Amsterdam and Amstelveen, a practice he intends to continue as he runs the Dutch Imagine. “Together with Chris-tian, we will try to do good quality arthouse that will also reach an audience. The team in Belgium are very dedicated fi lm-lovers and so are we, so that’s a good starting point, he concludes.” (NC)

GOING IT ALONEKuala Lumpur-based production outfi t Apparat is planning an ambitious 40-screen release in Malaysia for Dain Iskandar Said’s action movie Bunohan (a European premiere in IFFR’s Spec-trum). Here in Rotterdam, producer Nandita Solomon confi rms that the fi lm will be released through local producer Megaserv in early March. “We are spearheading our whole marketing and promotion on our own,” Solomon says.The martial arts action-thriller, which premiered in Toronto, is sold internationally by Eastern-Light (the Asian arm of Gary Hamilton’s Arclight Films). Bunohan has already been acquired by Universal Pictures for DVD and VOD distribu-tion in Britain, France, Germany, New Zealand and Australia. Bunohan was largely funded through a loan from the National Film Devel-opment Corporation (FINAS). The Malaysian Government recently set up a $70 million fund to boost Malaysia’s creative industries. The fi lm’s international success is being hailed back home in Malaysia. “Right now, the bank is very proud of us. Originally, the Malaysian Government said that the fund was to try to get Malaysian fi lms out there.”Bunohan is the fi rst feature by Apparat, set up in 2009. During IFFR, Dain Iskandar Said has also revealed details of his next projects. One fi lm is Orchid, a futuristic neo-noir set in Southeast Asia. The fi lm will explore the plight of poor immigrants, living on the margins of big cities.Apparat’s next fi lm is likely to be a thriller about a European ethnographer travelling through Asia. The working title is Bangkok Interchange. The company will be working on both with co-producer, Tim Kwok, a Malaysian based in the US who runs LA-based outfi t Convergence Entertainment. (GM)

British fi lm Weekend by Andrew Haigh, screen-ing in IFFR’s Bright Future section, has won the IFFR’s MovieSquad Award, consisting of a chance to be programmed in one of the fi lm educational programmes of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, such as MovieZone. The young people’s jury announced the winning fi lm at the MovieSquad Award Ceremony yesterday in Pathé 4. Weekend will be released in the Nether-lands in May 2012 by ABC-Cinemien.

Making Alms for the Blind Horse has been a revealing process for fi rst-time director Gur-vinder Singh, he tells Nick Cunningham

Gurvinder Singh’s fi lm debut, Alms for the Blind Horse, with a budget south of 500,000 dollars and a cast made up of local Punjabi villagers, not only picked up selec-tions at a slew of major international events in 2011 (including Venice Orizzonti) but also the Special Jury Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. The fi lm, which tells of a repressed family in a Punjabi village who join a protest against the demolition of a house, is selected for IFFR Bright Future 2012.“When I was casting actors in the cities, and in the Punjab, none of them seemed believable in the role of a villager,” Singh explains. “Nor did they look convinc-ing. I wanted to make a very studied, balladic, gentle kind of fi lm. For me, the expressionist quality that an actor can bring was not required. I was interested in the image, the light and the sound – less dialogue, but more information coming through silences and through faces.”The fi lmmaker read Gurdial Singh’s novel of the same name ten years ago while at the Film and Television Institute of India. After graduating, he recorded life (and folk songs) in the Punjab in a series of documen-taries. “There is a huge underbelly of the sub-castes and there is still a lot of exploitation,” he points out. “This is the reality that neither the fi lms from the Punjab nor the general media talk of.” Three years ago, he wrote the script for Alms for the Blind Horse. When he came to shoot the fi lm in January/February 2011, his choices were informed less by audience taste, and more by an aesthetic developed while studying international cinema and its myriad possibilities. “You’re making the fi lm from your own understanding of cinema ... and sometimes you feel

you’re working for the medium and not for anybody else. You want to take the medium forward,” he expresses.The roller-coaster past year has been a real eye-opener, and has prepared him, he claims, for future forays into the international marketplace. “It has been a great experience making the fi rst fi lm and then going to all these festivals and seeing how other fi lms are promot-ed, the whole business of cinema,” Singh comments. “When I come to make my next fi lm, I’m aware of this whole rigmarole. You know where a fi lm can go, and what the possibilities are for it. And I also feel that, without compromising my aesthetics or sensibilities, or what I want to achieve, I can fi ne-tune my fi lmmaking

after this experience of seeing fi lms from other parts.”Singh’s next fi lm will again be located in the Punjab, this time set in the 1980s, during the time of severe social unrest that culminated in the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. “Normal life became very diffi cult. You couldn’t travel by bus. The Hindus were targeted by the Sikh militants. You couldn’t step out in the dark,” he comments. “It will talk of the problems of the common man, how he was caught between the mili-tants on the one hand and the military on the other.”

Alms for the Blind Horse – Gurvinder SinghFri 03 Feb 10:15 PA3Sat 04 Feb 09:30 CI5

Former Sundance winner Leonard Retel Helmrich is to make a new feature documen-tary set in the world of Dutch herring fi shing. Geoffrey Macnab reports

Hollandse Nieuwe, as the project is called, is being produced through In-Soo Productions. It explores the plight of the Dutch herring industry as it enters what seems to be its dying throes. Only two vessels – Wiron 5 and Wiron 6 – of the shipping company Jaczon from Scheveningen are currently fi shing for herring under the Dutch fl ag. Helmrich has already shot on board the fi shing boats for eight days.The fi lm is billed as “a story told from the inside point of view of the Dutch herring fi shers, in which the romance, comradeship and herring is celebrated and where slowly one of the last ‘Dutch Glories’ is fading away.”The project is currently in development as part of the Teledoc-project. This is a collaboration between the Dutch Public Broadcasters, CoBO Fund and the Dutch Film Fund. A Teledoc is a feature-length, non-fi ction fi lm with a contemporary Dutch subject aimed at a wide audience, programmed on prime-time Dutch television.It has just been confi rmed that the director’s sister, Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich, the boss of Scarabee Films, will co-direct the project.

Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich produced Helmrich’s Posi-tion Among the Stars, a prize winner at IDFA which went on to win the Sundance Special Grand Jury Award.The brother and sister team of Naaijkens-Retel Helm-rich and Helmrich are also due to work on feature doc The Colour Of Survival. Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich will direct the fi lm and Helmrich will be one of the

cinematographers. The Colour Of Survival, produced by Rotterdam-based Holland Harbour, aims to shine a light on a little known aspect of Indonesian history, namely the plight of Dutch Indonesians trying to survive during World War II, when they were victim-ized both by the Japanese occupiers and by Indonesian nationalists.

Angling for survival

Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich photo: Ruud Jonkers

Gurvinder Singh photo: Corinne de Korver

TOPKAPI SLATES UP

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5

Dangerous games

Educating Kaspar

First cut

On the roadThe Ultimate Pranx Case is a found-footage fi lm campaigning against bullying, producer Claude Grégoire tries to convince Mark Baker

Audience responses to The Ultimate Pranx Case, a world premiere in Bright Future by Montreal-based writers/producers Slyvain Guy and Claude Grégoire, have been mixed – not to say polarized – Grégoire says, after three screenings at the IFFR. “Someone wrote a response (on the IFFR website) advising people to burn their tickets – but we have achieved a reasonable score in the audience award poll so far, so some people must have really appreciated it.”The Ultimate Pranx Case is the story of a practical joke gone – very seriously – wrong, presented as a campaigning fi lm against bullying. The makers claim it is a true story, and that the footage in the fi lm was taken by the pranksters themselves (and much of it streamed by them live on the internet, in 2010). The victim of the prank (Dinah Murphy) ended up dead, and the pranksters in hospital – and then in court.How did the makers come across the case? Speak-ing ahead of the fi lm’s last screening tonight, Claude Grégoire explains: “The story could be that... We came into contact (with Dinah Murphy’s parents) through a mutual acquaintance. They got permission to use the footage, which was released by the police after the trial. They also got permission from the other parents involved to use the material, to make a fi lm that would address the issue of bullying.”Guy and Grégoire then went to work on the raw footage. “When we saw this material, we realised there is a lot more to it than meets the eye”, he continues. “It’s not just that we (the audience) are watching what’s going on. There’s someone else also watching what’s happening. There’s a movie inside the movie, which is very interesting. And then there’s the fact that every-one – except for the girl – is aware they are being shot. This is a very current cinematic device – I just went to see a movie here called Un nuage dans un verre d’eau (A Cloud in a Glass of Water), which does the same thing. It’s a device that was also used a lot in the Nouvelle

Vague – making people aware they are watching a movie.”“What fascinated us about the prank material was, it is like a scripted story. As the fi lm critic Hassouna Mansouri wrote (in de Filmkrant, see http://www.fi lmkrant.nl, MB), we have taken real material, and it’s almost like we are trying to make it fake. Which is the reverse of what normally happens – for example with The Blair Witch Project – which takes something made up and pretends it’s real.”Technically, was quite a challenge to mould the raw footage into something screenable, Grégoire says. “We had to recopy everything. They had recorded the sound separately; but out of sync with the images, so we had to re-sync it all. The post-production was really heavy. Fortunately, it was all recorded in full HD, except for the webcam, which we had to work on quite a bit.”“At one point, we did decide to shorten it”, he contin-ues. “During the meal, there was a period when nothing much was happening, so we cut it. Because of this, there is some discontinuity, for example with the glass of wine, which some people have picked up on. We had to fi ght for this – Dinah Murphy’s parents initially wanted everything to be left completely how it happened – but fi nally they realised it was necessary for the fi lm.”Did Mr and Mrs Murphy not want to attend the premiere of in Rotterdam? “No,” Grégoire says. “They are from Pennsylvania. To them, Europe is a danger-ous place.”In terms of new projects, Guy is currently writing a script on nineteenth-century Canadian ‘strongest man who ever lived’ Louis Cyr, and Grégoire is working on a new feature project, provisionally titled Les Mondes Étranges, dealing with the problems of money and how “money shouldn’t be a problem – it shouldn’t be part of our lives.” Asked whether this will be a fi ction fi lm, Grégoire replies enigmatically, “Yes, it is fi ction – but then again, what is fi ction?”

The Ultimate Pranx Case – Slyvain Guy and Claude GrégoireFri 03 Feb 22:30 PA4

Getting The Legend of Kaspar Hauser made was a struggle, director Davide Manuli tells The Celluloid Liberation Front

“It’s such a struggle to self-produce your own fi lm”, sighs Manuli. “If you don’t have support, it’s really hard. You’ve got no idea; cinema is a rigid and harsh structure that doesn’t allow intrusion into its ranks.”Far from being dispirited, the director of The Legend of Kaspar Hauser fi nds time to laugh at his own hard-ships, turning production austerity into a poetic asset. A re-imaging of the story of Kaspar Hauser – the youth who appeared in Nuremberg in the early 19th century, claiming to have spent his upbringing in an isolated cell – the fi lm defi es easy description. The IFFR calls it a “surreal post-Western shot in beauti-ful black-and-white”, which is true but doesn’t quite do justice to the dizzying invention of the piece which includes, among other things, 1950s-style space ships and a charismatic turn by Vincent Gallo.After three years struggling to get it made, Manuli fi nally managed to bring his Kaspar Hauser to Rotter-dam. “What interests me in the story of Kaspar Hauser is how and why he became a myth; an archetype, a Christ, an idiot, an enigma”, he enthuses. “This fi lm is a Western up to a point. We worked on the original script with Vincent Gallo,” he explains. “There are a lot of different elements that clash with the Western genre, for example the (electronic) music”.

Unlike the true-life Kaspar Hauser, who was intro-duced to ‘civilisation’ by concerned citizens, Manuli’s is more or less neglected by his post-futuristic society: it teaches him nothing, because it has nothing to teach. “Absolutely, in real life Kasper Hauser was subjected to a very coercive ‘education’; they taught him piano, they dressed him up, taught him how to read and write, ride a horse and all that,” Manuli points out. “While in my fi lm it’s quite the opposite; the sheriff welcomes Kasper but doesn’t teach him anything!”Speaking about his decision to cast the actress Silvia Calderoni as Kaspar, Manuli explains: “I would have liked to work with a Russian contortionist in the role of Kasper, but it didn’t work out. Then I remembered Silvia Calderoni, who I had seen acting years ago in a play called Paesaggio con Fratello Rotto. Her androgyny introduced the esoteric element I was looking for to my fi lm.”Despite its scorching surrealism, there is a serious point behind the fi lm, Manuli says: “In the West, there is no time to get to know each other; to communicate, to welcome, help, exchange. What did Kasper Hauser learn in the two or three years granted to him by the bourgeoisie of Nuremberg? Nothing! Are we sure that he is the idiot and we are the intelligent ones?”

The Legend of Kaspar Hauser – Davide ManuliFri 03 Feb 22:15 PA3

Director Felipe Guerrero found the rhythm for his debut fi lm, Corta, through shooting sugar-cane cutters on Super 8, he tells Ben Walters

Felipe Guerrero’s Corta, which gets its world premiere in this year’s Bright Future strand, records the process of sugar-cane cultivation in south-west Colombia, from harvest to haulage to razing. The simplicity of the subject is matched by the fi lm’s form: it comprises seven locked-off long shots of a fi eld, each of them taking up a full 11-minute roll of 16mm fi lm, the rhythms of the labourers offset by the cumulative rhythms of Iannis Xenakis’s marimba score.Guerrero made his Rotterdam bow in 2007 with the short Paraíso, another experiment in documentary form. For his feature debut, he turned to a subject close to home. “I was interested in doing a piece on the working world,” he says through a translator, “and I come from a region in Colombia where sugar-cane plantations are concentrated, so I started doing some research into how the cutters lived and worked. In a plantation, you can see an idea of the whole of Colom-bia: the diversity of characters and socio-economic backgrounds, displaced people, former guerillas, people who process coca leaves in coke labs.”

Much of Guerrero’s research was shot, like Paraíso, on Super 8. “When I changed the Super 8 cartridges during fi lming, I felt that was also a rhythmic work, like that of the cutters. I imagined action fi lming, like action painting, where the creative process is the work itself. From there, I started working on how to portray the way in which the cutters move in space. That’s where the idea of the fi xed frame comes from – to work with the way they advance in the depth of fi eld.”The strict simplicity of this visual approach left room to develop the sound design. “I developed the idea of the image being a music score over which I was able to work the sound. Since the fi lm is edited in the camera, the sound editing was ultimately the fi lm’s greatest creative work.”Guerrero has also been at CineMart as part of Rotter-dam Lab with a new project dealing with internal displacement in Colombia. “Obviously, it won’t have a traditional construction,” he says. “It’ll be built like a kaleidoscope, with stories of three characters that fall apart and come together and mix up during a journey from the forest to the city.”

Corta – Felipe GuerreroFri 03 Feb 22:15 LV3

Matt McCormick’s fi lm The Great North-west is an affectionate record of a bygone America. By Edward Lawrenson

The inspiration behind The Great Northwest occurred when director Matt McCormick was spending some time browsing in a junk shop. Among the shop’s various bits of merchandise was the scrap book of a road trip through the North West of America made by four women friends in the late 1950s. Full of postcards, photos, menus, even a napkin alongside the multi-state itinerary the “ladies” – as McCor-mick affectionately calls them – the scrapbook was a collection of faded relics of the trip. Armed with the book and his camera, McCormick got in his car and retraced their journey.The result is a beguiling mix of travelogue, road-movie and documentary. Combing the material he shot during his own trip with the souvenirs the ladies

collected more than 50 years ago, the movie is in part a gently melancholic portrait of a culture that has long disappeared. “It is easy to fi nd a sense of nostalgia in these images,” he says of the ephemera that the ladies collected for their scrapbook, “but they do represent a time that seems to be quickly fading.” As he makes his journey, McCormick realises that some of the local attractions the ladies visited have long since gone: “The unique, individual road-side Americana of the 1950s is being replaced with corporate mass-produc-tion at an alarming rate.”There is a certain poignancy, too, in the scrapbook itself, a lovingly crafted, handmade artefact quite unlike the instant digital photos that now tend to record our holidays. “Everything is so disposable these days,” says McCormick. “The photos we take don’t even get printed out and only exist digitally on computer screens. Half of them are probably deleted before the vacation is even over.”The sheer ubiquity and ease of digital photography also means, says McCormick, “many tourists spend more time looking at the digital display of their cameras than they spend looking at the actual subject they are photographing.” The point is made with wit during his fi lm when McCormick trains his camera on a line of tourists expectantly waiting for the erup-tion of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park. When it fi nally happens, most of the audience expe-rience this impressive natural phenomenon through the tiny screen of their compact cameras or phones.Taking over a year to edit the fi lm – “the fi rst several months were dedicated to simply fi guring out the structure, while the second half was spent fi ne-tuning the edit, mixing the sound, and adjusting the colour” – McCormick says that the IFFR premiere of his fi lm was “absolutely fantastic”. And did he ever fi nd out anything more about the “ladies” than the artful scraps they left behind? “No, but I maintain hope that someday someone might see the fi lm and have some information about them.”

The Great Northwest – Matt McCormickFri 03 Feb 18:15 PA6

Matt McCormick photo: Rogier Maaskant

The Legend of Kaspar Hauser

Corta

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Stadsontwikkeling

L’Esprit du Temps

COLOFON DAILY TIGERNL: Anton Damen (hoofdredactie), Else de Jonge (eindredactie), Joost Broeren, Paul van de Graaf, Elsbeth Jongsma, Sietse Meijer, Kim van der Meulen, Maricke Nieuwdorp (redactie), Lotte Kroese, Niki van der Ende, Fabian Schellevis (web), Afke Duinkerken (marketing en communicatie)UK: Edward Lawrenson (editor-in-chief ), Nick Cunningham, Geoffrey MacNab, Mark Baker, Ben Walters (web)

Programma informatie: Chris Schouten, Melissa van der SchoorCoördinatie A-Z: Saskia Gravelijn, Lot Piscaer, Robert-Jan Schiphorst, Anne Lynn CleurenFotografi e: Felix Kalkman, Bram Belloni, Corinne de Korver, Ruud Jonkers, Lucia Guglielmetti, Rogier Maaskant, Nichon GlerumMet medewerking van: Anne Lynn Cleuren

Vormgeving: Sjoukje van Gool, Laurenz van Galen, Gerald Zevenboom, g7b.nlDrukker: Veenman+Acquisitie: Daily ProductionsOplage: 10.000 ex

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012 would like to thank:

7

The IFFR’s For Real programme explores fundamental questions prompted by techno-logical advances. By Edward Lawrenson

“Technologies are changing – digitization is doing a lot to our viewing habits – how do we as a festival respond to that?” The question is raised by IFFR programmer Edwin Carels, speaking in his offi ce on Wednesday – and it’s one that is at the heart of For Real, a major strand of events and installations playing in Signals.

Changing perceptionOne of the original ideas behind For Real came from fellow programmer Inge de Leeuw, who wanted create a strand that explored if and how new digital devices like tablet computers are changing the way we perceived reality. “The iPad was one of things that occasioned our thinking about this strand. More so than ever, people are in front of all kinds of screens in their daily lives, so we’re constantly mediating our experience and communicating via our machines. So what is cinematic about this; what is it from the tradition of cinema that is seeping into these new formats? Is it really altering our modes of handling audio-visual information and entertainment?”

Blurring of boundariesDigital technology certainly fi gures in For Real events. Our Broken Voice, an interactive experience created by artists’ collective Circumstance, provides individual participants with a set of instructions and prompts to be played through headphones on their MP3 players, and sends them out into a Rotterdam location. “It’s the opposite of a fl ash mob,” says Carrels. “It’s a subtle mob, where you are not supposed to be seen. You just immerse yourself in a big city environment: it’s very close to the experience of a short fi lm. I did it in Ghent and there were some beautiful occurrences – complete happenstance, but everything becomes poetic, that complete blurring of boundaries between your fi lmic experience and your real-life experience.”There is a similar blurring to be enacted in Wouter Huis’ Performance #1 presentation in a garage, in which a live big-screen relay of a street view is shown, where the view of the actual street would be. This substitution

of a high-defi nition digital representation for the real thing means, says Carrels, “you start to interpret the world outside as if it were a fi lm scene.”

Through the windowBut the strand’s preoccupations aren’t just about our relationship to new technologies. More widely, the project explores the degree to which our exposure to screen culture determines and shapes the way we look at things. “Can we ever leave the frame behind?” Carrels asks.One of the most prominent responses to this is provided by Eye Trap – described by Carrels as a “a big cinematic experience, but without fi lm.” “We have a big-scale performance by the Rotterdam Metropole orchestra,” he says. “They’re going to score a fi lm, like

they do with silent fi lms. But the ‘fi lm’ is now a window, looking out at the harbour, and we’ve invited Dutch artist Germain Kruip, who’s famous for really subtle installations working with ambient light and archi-tecture, to do something with that window – and the orchestra doesn’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know either. We’re all going to be watching through the window and we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. The whole thing – because of the setting and the score – will be a fi lmic experience.”

Stretching the territoryAlso including Michel Gondry’s Home Movie Factory (see front page), the strand develops some of the ideas Carrels put into place for 2011 XL project: “Last year, I programmed events at 40 locations to celebrate our

fortieth anniversary – it was a good test of stretching what is festival territory, what are the places where you want to experience fi lm. But these were still institu-tions – museums and galleries – that we collaborated with. Pushing that further, we ended up in reality itself: not in a formatted, institutional way, but leaving the cinemas behind and stepping into a reality where you’re not sure what kind of layer or script has been imposed.” “We take our programming out of the box and away from the screens,” he adds.

Eye Trap – Germaine KruipFri 3 17:00 Cruise Terminal

Performance #1 – Wouter HuisFri 3 16:00 & 20:00 Theater De Gouvernestraat

Out of the Box

Edwin Carels in the Reality Check on the Schouwburgplein photo: Bram Belloni