#VALUE! =SUM –(programming + audience development) + (partnerships + AI) Maths at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam

This year, IFFR partnered with Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam to draw a link between the festival’s focus on artists’ moving image work and the Filmmuseum’s gallery dedicated to showcasing filmmakers’ work as art. The collaboration is canny, not least because it’s far more difficult to find journalists willing and able to publish writing on artists’ moving images when there’s a bunch of mainstream flicks that will win idle clicks, and the festival has a responsibility to the artists it commissions – press coverage is part of the deal. There’s also a level of clout that the Eye has, with its international reputation and stunning setting in which to showcase moving image, that, even simply by association, stands to nudge IFFR’s Art Directions program into the art world proper. Galleries and festivals each have their own, distinct demographics, even if there is some coalescence in the Venn diagram. Institutions have something that not all festivals have: they are inherently valuable, respected, and virtuous. They “inspire confidence” and “benefit society”, because they “preserve cultural traditions”.¹ The festival, on the other hand, may do those things but it is primarily about growth and content: an economic imperative that relies on the uncertain commerce of art. Its unique positionality is therefore crucial for its survival, and for IFFR, this harks back to the 1970s, when the festival’s first director and creator Hubert Bals set out his intention for the fest, which began with the films, and then involved trying to find an audience for each individual film. A true curatorial approach, with audience development as an afterthought. But times have changed, and curation is not without community. As academic Marijke de Valck wrote in 2016, “In the context of today’s festival world, this position appears outdated and rather dogmatic.”² Another nine years later and this approach is positively pointless: though post-Covid recovery has been positive overall in the Netherlands with the city’s boutique arthouse venue KINO Rotterdam having achieved an astonishing 72% growth over the past two years,³ the festival has had its knocks, not least in the form of letting close to its entire programming team go and replacing them with a pool of freelancers, something that can, at its kindest, be described as risky in an audience-development age. Perhaps, then, this collaboration with Eye is the festival’s way of aligning itself with a more ambitious arthouse sensibility, and at a more elite audience: after all, institutions rely on public and private funds to thrive. For a festival that always thrummed along a sort-of DIY plane – cheap beers and late night projections at WORM, for example, I can’t help but wonder if IFFR’s attempt to survive the information 

age is in staking its claim on a future of intellectual discourse over a glass of chardonnay. Either way, and whether fruitful or not, the collaboration shone a light on the excellent exhibition at Eye. 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Inner Landscapes ∏ Hans Wilschut, photo courtesy of EYE Filmmuseum

Nuri Bilge Ceylan exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum

The room is dark but lit by images. There are screens – some on the walls, though most appear in the midst of the space, sort of hanging from the ceiling, sort of resting on the floor. There are photographs, like but not quite setting a perimeter, around the room. 

One of the first images I see is of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, on a TV screen mounted to the wall; excerpts from interviews reveal pearls of wisdom: tiny, shiny insights into his process and perspective. Cinema has the potential, he suggests, “to exceed the intellect”. He talks about his process as if the product were almost irrelevant – the thing that simply is after the thing that actually happens. Filmmaking is not an end result, it’s a journey that is filled with sumptuous learning. How lucky we are, I think, to be invited to watch the thing that came from such deep, rich experience. 

The exhibition is curated by Jaap Guldemond; he has curated the moving image exhibitions at Eye since the museum building had its makeover in 2011 (re-opening in 2012). He has worked with an impressive cinema legacy of materials from numerous big name filmmakers and experimental artists including Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Chantal Akerman, Hito Steyerl and Ben Rivers. As the Eye already has four cinema auditoriums, the exhibition space isn’t for screening feature films in full (though I am thrilled that Ceylan’s short film Koza (Cocoon, 1985), which I haven’t seen, is screening on a loop in a small room just off to the side of the dominant exhibition space). Instead, Guldemond edits the works to offer more easily digestible fragments of the whole. It’s not about reducing the work for consumption so much as it is about finding a way to curate what is relevant to a gallery context – bite-sized, even if that might serve the casual gallery-goer’s somewhat disinterested needs. 

Three Monkeys, still courtesy of Eye Filmmuseum

The gallery experience doesn’t ask its experiencer to analyse which elements work and why they have been included – or even to consider what has been excluded. Instead, the space speaks differently, somehow in conversation with itself, or like a chorus, each element amplifying another. 

For example, in the gallery context, due to the way that the screens were positioned, inter-film relationships sparked. Where I stood, Aydín (Haluk Bilginer) from Winter’s Sleep (2014) looked at Hacer (Hatice Aslan) from Three Monkeys instead of his wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen), who is seen lying on a sofa, speaking from her soul – but instead of her pouring her heart out to Aydín, she is speaking to İsmail (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar) from Three Monkeys. This intertextual interjection alters the course and detail of both timelines in that moment only: in the gallery, Nihal is sharing and amplifying her isolation, but she is also acknowledging İsmail in a more tonally respectful way than Hacer ever could. This new dialogue doesn’t disrupt the meaning or intention of either work. Instead, what it does is offer some of the characters with whom we, as audiences, most deeply empathise, an opportunity to be heard in a different way – through a new perspective, somewhere other than intellect. 

Stories and telling

While some interjections can allow and even enable new modes of interaction and empathy, others offer little more than marketing copy, that which seeks to sell rather than engage. Such were this year’s online program synopses, most of which left me uninspired but, worse yet, some of which were positively misleading. For We Are Aliens by Ugana Kenichi, the online catalogue copy reads: “With its combination of humanist philosophy, cuddly puppets and lo-fi aesthetics, We Are Aliens recalls Kore-eda Hirokazu meets Sesame Street…”⁴ Not so. Ugana’s film has trite commentary parading as philosophy; morose, mostly static, colour-coded rather than character-driven puppetry; and a lack of aesthetic vision altogether. As such, the copy, which rather annoyingly led me to view the film, was not only unhelpful, but actually served as an insult to Kore-eda, Jim Henson, and me as a viewer.

We Are Aliens

Another disappointment was the one ‘Big Talk’ I attended – a strange pairing of Peter Strickland and Alex Ross Perry. While the session was well-planned and hosted by one of the festival’s “Selection Committee Members”⁵ Michelle Carey, the two men looked an intermittent mixture of bored and annoyed to be speaking about their films and artistic process. Not exactly renowned for being cheerful or charismatic public speakers, I nevertheless expected Strickland and Perry to seem pleased to be there and couldn’t help but feel that they would probably rather be almost anywhere else. Perhaps it was the low attendance that soured moods – I estimate somewhere around a mere 100 people present. But it was pleasant enough, like watching mumblecore in real time, and the chat eventually revealed a sort of low-key bemoaning of the state of the industry, as well as the challenges inherent in balancing work-for-hire writing with creative projects: even celebrated filmmakers have bills to pay and admin to attend to. 

Videoheaven

I remain uncertain as to why exactly Peter Strickland was half the focus of a Big Talk this year, given that he was not premiering a new film at the festival. But Alex Ross Perry had two so the maths still mathed. As is often the way, I hear Pavements is excellent, but I didn’t see it at the fest. I did, however, catch Videoheaven, which is honestly an absolute delight of a film essay, narrated by Maya Hawke and all about the role of video stores in film and TV. Nostalgia and personal memory certainly play a part in my enjoyment of the film, not least because I grew up in the Australian suburbs renting movies every weekend in my formative years, but also because, as an adult, I went on to work in a rental store. But, and it’s no small feat, it’s an incredibly well-researched and thorough film that really examines how video stores are depicted as liminal spaces where shared emotions and social anxieties can safely play out. There’s also an incredible wealth of intertextual analysis that is both impressive and fascinating: who knew just how much love there is in Hollywoodland for Troma movies?

Mediocre movies and cracking crowd-pleasers

This year’s programming read to me as having some soft themes, alongside the usual competition strands, shorts, experimental and analogue stuff. But I never saw anything concrete, as in past years, where I could really grasp what the festival wanted to say.  My conclusion, dipping in and out of screenings with no particular agenda other than to see some films, is that the festival doesn’t really have anything on its mind this year other than filling cinemas and other venues across the city with moving images. As a casual cinema-goer this year, my pick’n’mix approach was actually fairly successful in terms of hit rate, though the high quality films I saw had all premiered elsewhere, mostly Cannes. The ‘best’ film I saw was Quentin Dupieux’s Le deuxième acte (The Second Act) and my personal highlight was The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan) – not only for Nic Cage’s stellar performance, but also for its superb depiction of white male Australian territorialism. I miss home more than I could ever explain and, living in the UK, almost zero Aussie films make theatrical waves each year, leaving me audio-visually homesick to a point of full on Freudian melancholy. And thus, any opportunity to see the deeply toxic and yet satisfyingly brutal and honest interactions I know all too well – from spending my summers down at Rye and Sorrento where I (a ‘city chick’ from Melbs) was always labelled a snob – is beyond cathartic: it’s like coming full circle and mourning myself into an acceptance of the deep pain ingrained in my soul – which is, narratively, what Cage’s character has to do, too. 

Hard Truths

I debated whether or not to go see Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths – it’s not a premiere and I’m super late to the party, but, seeing Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s incredible performance in IMAX? Unparallelled. As a perpetually angry person, I really felt Pansy’s pain. If you’re in the peri or post menopause of your life, and you have given your time, energy and let’s face it, embodied being, to male others who can’t even muster base level care for themselves let alone you, why wouldn’t you be absolutely raging? As a recent inductee to perimenopause with its incessant headaches, exhaustion, extreme mood fuckery (especially anger), et al, I can honestly say that I felt every single word she spat out with the same internal venom. And that’s before we even consider dealing with the inferred trauma the character is carrying. It’s unusual to see women on screen playing such honest anger, and it’s Leigh’s process of working with actors to improvise their character development that enabled such a gift to reach the big screen. Ultimately, his process gives control to the actors, who are, really, the only ones who truly know what depths they can plumb. In Pansy, Jean-Baptiste has proven yet again – just as in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996) – that she is a formidable talent. Who cares if it’s a premiere, there’s never going to be a time when that performance isn’t worth mentioning. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed Steffen Haars’s Get Away, which went straight to Sky in the UK – a crying shame for how fantastically entertaining it is, and for how absolutely brilliant it would have been for our indie Box Office, which needs quality genre fodder. Get Away, which stars Aisling Bea and Nick Frost, is a horror comedy that tickled me in a way that I haven’t really been tickled since Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). Aside from it being a punchy 96 minutes (a pitch-perfect gore-fest run-time), the film also plays every tired old trope in the biz before its stick twist, where it turns everything rather pleasingly on its head. It’s a lot like being tickled under the arms and then, just when you think you can’t laugh anymore, being jabbed in the side, under rib, pushing you to almost pee-your-pants territory. A riotous good time. 

Get Away

In a post-Covid environment, where on-demand culture and the attention economy have driven cinema-going into a more marginal leisure activity, direct to on-demand platforms still constitute a valid release strategy. Festival play aids these films somewhat through press and word-of-mouth, though they rely on it far less than theatrically released films. Which brings us to the other paradox that festivals play in the year-round challenge for cinema-going: too many films. 

There are already too many films flooding the market: between 400 and 900 first-run films are released each year in European countries.⁶ But production is even higher, with more than 2,000 films being produced across the continent every year, and at a rate that is now growing in excess of pre-pandemic levels.⁷ Festivals pick up some of the slack by showing many of these titles but, with the proliferation of festivals, who are at the mercy of exclusivity (international premieres are where it’s at), the sheer number of films means a bunch will sit somewhere on the mediocre-to-utter crap spectrum. 

For my part, I sat through mediocre, and I walked out of utter crap. I’ll begin with the latter because even in writing I’d like to move on as quickly as possible. Alexander Kluge’s Primitive Diversity sounds intriguing on paper, as a “caustic and sober while still ironic and mirthful journey through the history and future of image technology, politics and human flaws.”⁸ In reality, it’s a bunch of images that are so utterly dull I can’t even recall a single one to describe here. In fact, I was relieved when I realised, about half way through the drudgery, that I’d missed a call from my son’s school, which prompted me to leave the screening and return to the far more eventful and dimensional real world just outside. After making some calls, I went for a lovely long walk in the sunshine.  

Ick

Nothing else I saw was quite so terrible but there were plenty of middling items from Takashi Miike’s Blazing Fists – great title, but not enough punch to follow it up – to Joseph Kahn’s aptly titled Ick. The late night slot, I gather, is where these films hide out. I think the Grammy Award-winner is better known for his music videos than his movies, as Kahn has directed some absolute belters, from Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga to Snoop Dogg and Eminem. In Ick, he directs Mena Suvari (although there’s sadly not enough of her in the narrative which, once it gets going, centres on the dude and literally leaves all but one of the female characters behind) and Brandon Routh (one of those very familiar looking American actors that you spend half the movie trying to place only to conclude that he’s in “something I’ve seen”). The film is filled with CGI – from the titular ick that breaks through the ground and eventually possesses most of the town to the anti-aging technology used for flashback scenes of Suvari’s and Routh’s characters as high school sweethearts. The problem is not even that the ick is gross – that would require some nuance in its depiction and, most likely, some more tactile effects than the empty aesthetic that the CGI conjures – but that the story is so squarely milquetoast and the characters so desperately underdeveloped. 

Art Directions and absent politics

Still, not all CGI is bad. Much of it has its place, but blown up on the big screen at the Pathé is definitely not it. The CGI I enjoyed at this year’s fest was as far away as possible from the big screen – metaphorically, but also literally in geographical distance. My favourite CGI experience was a VR piece titled Otherworlds by Ukrainian artist Sophia Bulgakova. According to the catalogue copy it’s “A reflection on Ukrainian traditions and pre-Christian pagan rituals” that is supposed to invite you “on a sensory and transformative journey that rekindles your connection with nature’s cycles and the passage of time.”⁹ 

Otherworlds

I didn’t experience any of that, but I did enjoy that the style of the VR was such that you could “see” both inside the world of the experience and also, simultaneously, a lurid green version of the reality around you. Tethered by the headset to a central pole, I was also in close proximity to some pals which made the experience all the more enjoyable – that thing that VR typically can’t do, it finally did: collective experience (hallelujah! Praise be! It’s finally getting closer to a cinema experience!). I jest, of course, but what was actually enjoyable about it is that it wasn’t anything like cinema or cinematic VR at all. It was actually far more like a silent disco, and I found myself simply enjoying bopping about to the music and making big puffy pink splotches in the space around me, inside the experience, with my hands, which I interpreted as clouds of cotton candy. Again, my experience didn’t exactly match up with the marketing copy but, as I’m increasingly sensing with IFFR, that’s kind of par for the course. 

Otherworlds, along with a slew of other works that felt very gallery and not very cinema, were relegated to a very hipster venue on the other side of the city that I took a water taxi to get to. The water taxi – and I don’t mean this as an insult to the work but as a genuine compliment to the ride – was my favourite experience of the festival, seeing the city skyline from a new perspective and finally, after more than a decade of attending the fest, getting a sense of the physical size of the place. The Katoenhuis was once exactly what it sounds like, a cotton house, for bales coming from South America and Egypt in the 1950s. The venue website sort of skims that history, and today it serves as a “hub” for Immersive Experiences (IX).¹⁰ I’m unsurprised to read that it has also served as giant fruit refrigerator as it’s also probably the coldest place I’ve ever been in Rotterdam, outdoors included. 

But when all’s said and done, what I found truly chilling was that nowhere, not even in the late night slots at the Pathé or in the far-flung freezer of the Katoenhuis was there any sign of Palestine. Hubert Bals kicked things off with curation, but IFFR doesn’t even have curators or film programmers anymore; instead, the fest relies on “Selection Committee Members”. Their strategy for 2022-2025 doesn’t seem to include audience development at all, stating: “most important is our hope to stir audience engagement by confronting them with thrilling films that underline relevant and pressing issues.”¹¹ Audience development is supposed to be an actual strategy, not just some vague hope, and, judging by what I witnessed this year, the films selected were neither thrilling, relevant, nor pressing. IFFR is at risk of losing its curatorial identity and its audience. 

Partnering with Eye, perhaps like the characters from Winter’s Sleep and Three Monkeys, IFFR is hoping to adopt a new perspective on things. But the thing about the gallery is that it doesn’t ask us to sit, to stay. It says: it’s okay to walk away. Perhaps that’s why the festival now begins/ends with a free film on a big screen in a small shelter at Rotterdam Centraal train station – which is incidentally decidedly not intended to double as an actual shelter. As I left the festival in the early hours of the morning, I saw it cordoned off, the rough sleepers a mere metre or two from its wind-breaking walls, huddled for warmth on a freezing night, as its flashing images light up on a loop what might otherwise be a quiet, dark space to spend their night. 

With a disposable loop of CGI images, this year’s welcome/farewell piece is Lee Jinjoon’s Happy New Year. It uses a game engine to construct “a digital utopia – an inviting yet deceptive landscape inspired by AI-generated worlds”.¹² It plays out like a Ferris wheel: slow moving, and yet it makes you feel trapped. In what might be the only fitting description I read in the festival’s online catalogue/marketing copy: “This serene facade underscores how technology can obscure pressing global issues, cultivating collective apathy amidst unfolding tragedies.” As I take my train back to Schipol to hypocritically fly home, a bunch of soulless trends bombard my social media timeline, and I can’t help but think that AI is little more than a planet-wrecking prison for creativity. Seeing it mixed in with images of dead babies and buried medics is the algorithm’s agenda for apathising us all. I don’t care if it’s institutional or DIY, contributing to bums on seats statistics or hung on walls to be stared at or walked past; art has to exceed the intellectual, or humanity is lost. Give the rough sleepers a shelter. Turn the planet burning projection loop off. Free Palestine.

Endnotes