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Rotterdam Film Festival: Transcending Reality
Curatorial presentation by Diana Mereoiu
Taking further its fruitful long term collaboration with the Dutch film industry, the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF initiates this year a new inspiring partnership, with the innovative International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which offers the Romanian cinema lovers the rare opportunity to view some of the most intriguing 2014 Tiger Awards For Short Films Nominees, within a thought provoking theme program: TRANSCENDING REALITY.
The transcendence to which we invite you with this program is twofold. On the one hand, these films beckon us to explore cinematic language’s ability to interpret and transform what we perceive as reality and show us a stylized version of it. What we come to experience is a distillation of the cluster of facts, events and information, which introduces us to a completely new subjective perspective. On the other hand, some other shorts from the program make it their goal to expose the multiple layers of convention and often unseen mechanisms of fabrication which are ingrained into reality. Both types of films are a call to play, a challenge to leave behind our way of perceiving and welcome a novel point of view.
Choosing cinema itself as a target for demystification, HACKED CIRCUIT, this single-shot choreographic portrait of a Foley studio, reveals the multiple layers of fabrication inherent to filmmaking. Creating a sense of paranoia and uncertainty, Deborah Stratman builds an unsettling parallel between the stagecraft of Foley and the pervasive climate of government surveillance that threatens our right to privacy.
If the previous short aimed to broaden our understanding of reality, GIANT (Tiger Award For Short Film winner at Rotterdam 2014), signed by Finish visual artist Salla Tykkä, opts to create an alternative space-time, ripe for contemplation and reflection. The seemingly distant observation of the very young gymnasts from a Romanian training centre becomes a sensorial experience which makes us viscerally experience the tension between human fascination with grace and beauty and the dehumanizing process of attaining them. Screening possible courtesy of AV-Arkki - The Distribution Centre for Finish Media Art.
Deconstructing the fictionalization of reality for propaganda purposes, MODEL VILLAGE reflects on the fake projections and empty promises of politics. Denied access to the North Korean village built for agitprop, the filmmaker Hayoung Kwon resorts to a solution truer than reality: she makes a miniature replica out of plastic and Styrofoam and brings it to life through the soundtrack mixed from phone conversations, natural sounds and dialogue excerpts from propaganda films. An imitation of a phantasm, Model Village is a chilling piece that exposes the lengths to which life can be fabricated.
Also dealing with fictionalizing reality, this time of a personal nature, Laure Prouvost, winner of the prestigious Turner Prize awarded by Tate Museum London, uses her grandmother’s supposed wishes and repressed desires to paint the portrait of the artist’s fictional missing grandfather. A careful play of distance and intimacy, GRANDMA’S DREAM, presented with the support of LUX Artists' Moving Image, draws the viewer into a whirlwind of silent frustrations and made-up biographies.
Reality is traded in for a world of imagination in WALK WITH ME, as the protagonist, a little Ugandan girl’s first encounters and tries to make sense of death. The universe created by her is an ante-chamber of maturity where the demise of one of the girl’s animals is envisioned as a surrealistic struggle between disembodied doll heads and makeshift toy creatures. Far from being just a film for children, Walk with Me, signed by Peter Muhumuza Tukei & Johan Oettinger looks upon death with wide, innocent eyes and discovers that reality is at times both cruel and beautiful. The film is made within the DOX:LAB project of CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival - a true laboratory of innovation which produces every year impressive works that daringly explore the thin line between reality and fiction, works signed by young filmmakers from all over the world and screened in prestigious festivals like Berlinale, Venice, Locarno, Toronto etc.
A film like an epitaph, TWO POINTS OF FAILURE by Michael Moshe Dahan dissolves in negative emulsion a photograph of Jean-Luc Godard, thus conceptualizing the slow disappearance of analogic techniques of filmmaking and, with it, the death of an entire tradition in cinema. The image melts into abstract patterns of movement and colour, the process then being reversed, ironically, by digital means. Screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, this short-film inspired by the failure of a camera prototype commissioned by Godard, deconstructs and reassembles itself, being both a testament of a disappearance, and a question about the future of cinema.
The transcendence to which we invite you with this program is twofold. On the one hand, these films beckon us to explore cinematic language’s ability to interpret and transform what we perceive as reality and show us a stylized version of it. What we come to experience is a distillation of the cluster of facts, events and information, which introduces us to a completely new subjective perspective. On the other hand, some other shorts from the program make it their goal to expose the multiple layers of convention and often unseen mechanisms of fabrication which are ingrained into reality. Both types of films are a call to play, a challenge to leave behind our way of perceiving and welcome a novel point of view.
Choosing cinema itself as a target for demystification, HACKED CIRCUIT, this single-shot choreographic portrait of a Foley studio, reveals the multiple layers of fabrication inherent to filmmaking. Creating a sense of paranoia and uncertainty, Deborah Stratman builds an unsettling parallel between the stagecraft of Foley and the pervasive climate of government surveillance that threatens our right to privacy.
If the previous short aimed to broaden our understanding of reality, GIANT (Tiger Award For Short Film winner at Rotterdam 2014), signed by Finish visual artist Salla Tykkä, opts to create an alternative space-time, ripe for contemplation and reflection. The seemingly distant observation of the very young gymnasts from a Romanian training centre becomes a sensorial experience which makes us viscerally experience the tension between human fascination with grace and beauty and the dehumanizing process of attaining them. Screening possible courtesy of AV-Arkki - The Distribution Centre for Finish Media Art.
Deconstructing the fictionalization of reality for propaganda purposes, MODEL VILLAGE reflects on the fake projections and empty promises of politics. Denied access to the North Korean village built for agitprop, the filmmaker Hayoung Kwon resorts to a solution truer than reality: she makes a miniature replica out of plastic and Styrofoam and brings it to life through the soundtrack mixed from phone conversations, natural sounds and dialogue excerpts from propaganda films. An imitation of a phantasm, Model Village is a chilling piece that exposes the lengths to which life can be fabricated.
Also dealing with fictionalizing reality, this time of a personal nature, Laure Prouvost, winner of the prestigious Turner Prize awarded by Tate Museum London, uses her grandmother’s supposed wishes and repressed desires to paint the portrait of the artist’s fictional missing grandfather. A careful play of distance and intimacy, GRANDMA’S DREAM, presented with the support of LUX Artists' Moving Image, draws the viewer into a whirlwind of silent frustrations and made-up biographies.
Reality is traded in for a world of imagination in WALK WITH ME, as the protagonist, a little Ugandan girl’s first encounters and tries to make sense of death. The universe created by her is an ante-chamber of maturity where the demise of one of the girl’s animals is envisioned as a surrealistic struggle between disembodied doll heads and makeshift toy creatures. Far from being just a film for children, Walk with Me, signed by Peter Muhumuza Tukei & Johan Oettinger looks upon death with wide, innocent eyes and discovers that reality is at times both cruel and beautiful. The film is made within the DOX:LAB project of CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival - a true laboratory of innovation which produces every year impressive works that daringly explore the thin line between reality and fiction, works signed by young filmmakers from all over the world and screened in prestigious festivals like Berlinale, Venice, Locarno, Toronto etc.
A film like an epitaph, TWO POINTS OF FAILURE by Michael Moshe Dahan dissolves in negative emulsion a photograph of Jean-Luc Godard, thus conceptualizing the slow disappearance of analogic techniques of filmmaking and, with it, the death of an entire tradition in cinema. The image melts into abstract patterns of movement and colour, the process then being reversed, ironically, by digital means. Screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, this short-film inspired by the failure of a camera prototype commissioned by Godard, deconstructs and reassembles itself, being both a testament of a disappearance, and a question about the future of cinema.
International Film Festival Rotterdam - partner festival
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) offers a high quality line-up of carefully selected fiction and documentary feature films, short films and media art. IFFR is one of the largest audience and industry-driven film festivals in the world. Famously, only seventeen people attended the opening night of the first Film International Rotterdam on 28 June 1972. Nowadays, during twelve festival days, hundreds of filmmakers and other artists present their work to a large audience (2014: 287.000 admissions) and over 2.000 film professionals. The festival's official selection includes some 220 feature films and 320 short films out of 60 countries. The 44th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam takes place from Wednesday 21 January till Sunday 1 February 2015.
The Shorts section of International Film Festival Rotterdam has no fixed agenda, boundaries or statement, but is aiming to show films that are experimental, innovative and contemporary, with a maximum length of 60 minutes. It contains, besides the regular competition and spectrum programs, special thematic and solo programs, and also holds a series of MindTheGap nights with live audio-visual events. The selection committee of the IFFR Shorts doesn't thoroughly reflect in advance on what experimental or innovative means. We're interested in work that challenges generic designations (including the traditional avant-garde, underground or video art ones). Work may also draw on documentary, narrative, animation or any other tradition – or no tradition at all. So, what is experimental, what is contemporary in the eyes of IFFR Shorts? I'm hoping this program (partly) gives the answer.
The Shorts section of International Film Festival Rotterdam has no fixed agenda, boundaries or statement, but is aiming to show films that are experimental, innovative and contemporary, with a maximum length of 60 minutes. It contains, besides the regular competition and spectrum programs, special thematic and solo programs, and also holds a series of MindTheGap nights with live audio-visual events. The selection committee of the IFFR Shorts doesn't thoroughly reflect in advance on what experimental or innovative means. We're interested in work that challenges generic designations (including the traditional avant-garde, underground or video art ones). Work may also draw on documentary, narrative, animation or any other tradition – or no tradition at all. So, what is experimental, what is contemporary in the eyes of IFFR Shorts? I'm hoping this program (partly) gives the answer.
Representative - Theus Zwakhals
Theus Zwakhals – Short film programmer at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has studied Cultural History at the University of Utrecht. He works for the distribution and collection department of LIMA (previously known as the Netherlands Media Arts Institute NIMk) in Amsterdam since 2002. Previously, Zwakhals was also the producer of the Impakt Festival in Utrecht from 1994 until 2000. Currently, he is also a curator for Rumor Festival for adventurous music in Utrecht, and programmer for the Shorts-section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam since 2009.
