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IFFR 2025: Bright Futures (and Others)
The Shipwrecked Triptych Famously and by historical design, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is over-programmed. This is both exciting—look at the number of people exploring cinema’s possibilities against all financial odds!—and counter-productive: many of these movies will surely be mediocre or worse and, even for the most well-informed viewer, largely unknown quantities, so what to prioritize? Flying directly from Salt Lake City to the Netherlands, I couldn’t shake Sundance’s ghost; much of what I watched in IFFR’s first half came from known-to-me American pockets. But I wanted to attend the fest’s entire duration to also do some more far-fetched guesswork viewing while waiting for reports from colleagues as to what might be good and adjust accordingly. That’s every festival to some extent, but a process Rotterdam requires more than most, so it’s nice that the waiting game paid off with unexpected greatness at my 20th and final screening, Deniz Eroglu’s The Shipwrecked Triptych.
A gallery artist who seems to have re-used at least part of his installation of the same name for this, Eroglu’s three comic calling card shorts are unmissably differentiated in their source formats, chronological setting and storytelling conceits. In 16mm Kodachrome opener “Mutiny,” it’s New Year’s Eve 1983 at an elder care facility in Western Germany; that it’s West rather than East isn’t intuitive—the setting is heavy on decrepit, late GDR-vibes—but inferrable from one of the nurses having recently returned from a trip abroad. In the morning, seniors assemble breakfast configurations of pallid rolls, cheese and jam, the least appetizing iteration of the middle European spread repackaged for American hotels as the “Continental breakfast.” It’s not clear if these queasy closeups were meant to make these particular foodstuffs look gross but I suspect so, given the main dish staffers get later at their holiday party: eel in aspic, something so unappealing it doesn’t actually exist in the otherwise extensive history of Soviet jellies. You can just feel the GDR’s collapse in the worst-case holiday meal, a national political slow-burn collapse taking place against AIDS’s rapid global rise; radio broadcasts are heard about HIV spreading in NYC, so the returning staffer’s bathhouse tour there carries a sinister charge. There are unsubtle tensions between the mostly German-born staff and two foreign-born staffers, one Turkish, who bear the brunt of their racist snaps; because of the Querelle-sailors-on-leave appearance of the German staff and increasingly prominent/cartoonish hostility, I felt a little Fassbinder in there but wondered if I were projecting that based merely on the time, national context and queerness. But no: on Instagram Eroglu notes that the Turkish housecleaner Mustafa’s top is an homage to one worn by Brigitte Mira in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, so that associative charge is layered in.
Barely sublimated racial tensions rocket to the fore in part two, “Boarding,” which begins with close-ups of a white man who could be described as looking “extremely German” (pejorative, in this case) sitting in a car on a country road; his face is as orange as the auto’s interior, both the same ruddy shade as the furrowed rows of dirt behind him. Identifying himself to a randomly targeted Black immigrant family as “Herr Fromm” (Jürgen Ottmüller) of the municipal child services department, he talks his way in without identification to look over their house in not-even-putatively-justifiable fashion. The segment initially presents as hazy VHS, but a smooth dolly from Fromm’s POV moved at the speed of a weighty 35mm camera rather than a ’90s camcorder. A thought entered my head—was this 35mm transferred to VHS? Surely not, I reasoned, but my eyes were not deceiving me: this is indeed the case, an extremely perverse thing to do, and a decision that sets into what-am-I-seeing relief a segment that might be called If You Give a Racist German a Cookie. The dynamics are clear—the family errs on the side of caution with any white man who claims authority—but plays out as dark comedy; that an immigrant Turkish filmmaker based in Denmark is analogously sympathizing with another relocated/targeted group in German society reverses the charge of a potentially edgelord-y premise.
The closer, “Drifting,” is a 16mm black-and-white “silent film,” but while this medieval-era goofathon has terrifically graded shades of grey and performers giving pre-sound performances, Matthew Daughterty’s ambient-y score is firmly of the present, and the bizarre CG-rendered tree tubes writhing around landscapes in increasingly prominent positions bear no resemblance to either the medieval or silent periods. They could, though, be deliberately primitive CG analogues to the imaginative effects of cinema’s earliest shorts, powered with Twin Peaks: The Return levels of confidence in their conceptual boldness and disdain for photorealism as a guiding principle. I wasn’t sure about this segment until those little phalli started waving around; that gesture tweaks the photochemically-captured forest, that most common setting of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his aspirational descendants, into a previously unimagined un-natural variant. Shipwrecked’s whole package is invigorating, oblique in its connective tissue save one line repeated twice across segments (“They think they know what suffering is”—sinister!). The impulse to wrongfoot throughout is resultingly unnerving, pleasantly bewildering and very funny.
As conceptually neat as its title is unwieldy, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued is writer-director-editor-star(ish) Julian Castronovo’s filmic iteration of a familiar type of work: the postmodern novel of infinitely self-perpetuating/-indicting fabulation, in which one story breeds another before the framing narrative ends in irresolution. Debut’s project is immediately set in metafictional relief as archival extrapolations from the largely laptop-sourced documentation of an ostensibly disappeared Castronovo, findings narrated by an initially neutral, then increasingly sympathetic narrator (Philippa James). I tend to like the kinds of books this riffs on, which often depend for their effect on the comic verve of the narrator-voice, whether first person or omniscient; Castronovo adroitly self-caricatures himself, worrying about being emotionally and intellectually lazy while forcing us to conclude the opposite about him as a filmmaker. Having established two levels of POV scaffolding to mediate his onscreen self’s alternating bouts of grandiosity and self-loathing, Castronovo sets about busily iterating newly invigorated familiar prompts in need of deciphering—a cryptic letter that arrives unprompted, three numbers scribbled on wallpaper—which inevitably lead to other rabbit holes: biographies of famed forgers unearth related secret histories to investigate, microfiche archives are consulted. ASMR Juul video jokes, fake MUBI business cards and all, the texture is very now, but the general arc feels analog in keeping some of the materials included.
Assembled for $900 as a CalArts thesis project, Debut opens with split-screen of a basic expanded cinema experiment a la Tacita Dean, as a subject ties a ribbon to her hair and walks away from the lens it’s anchored to. The ribbon hangs increasingly heavy and prominent in a cameraphone image that was then filmed off a CRT monitor, that monitor then presented in split-screen, one version of the video starting seconds after the other. A digitally generated image presented in analogue, then filmed digitally again is a neat metaphor for the film itself: Debut’s difference from its predecessors is partially in its formal components. After that video art throwback, there are more expected and contemporary direct-to-webcam confessions, but the film never enters the more familiar desktop documentary (or Screenlife) mode of windows within windows being opened; this is more of a slideshow whose presentational mechanisms are invisible. The general thematic point is to say, repeatedly and explicitly, that the search for meaning is a narrative trap, something the film demonstrates as fully as Barth or Pynchon (a brief reference to the possibility of subterranean communication systems enfolds The Crying of Lot 49).
If I have a complaint, it’s that the story grows less compelling as it drifts away from the female narrator’s austerely funny precis to less-focused primary videos of Castronovo himself, a digital Joe Gibbons rambling out his worries. Conceptually, I can justify this deflation: in the POV shift from a narrator whose levels of disinterest aren’t trustworthy to the subject itself, Debut undermines the currently fashionable grant-application question “Why are you the right person to tell this story?” to suggest that that directive leads to boredom; true interest lies in engaging with the unfamiliar, in life as in art. It’s also worth noting a line tossed off by a character who works at a production company about how it’s impossible to make a feature (i.e., raise the money for one) without first having made a feature, a seemingly irresolvable catch-22. This is clearly “the feature to make a feature,” not a proof-of-concept; as fun as it is, I suspect whatever Castronovo wants to make next would ideally be very different.
Like Michael Almereyda’s previous sneakily melancholic portraits of 20th century scientists—Experimenter (Stanley Milgram) and Tesla (self-explanatory)—his and Courtney Stephens‘s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office moves from narrative reconstruction to primary source nonfiction. It also unfolds in chronological and thematic adjacency to Stephens’s recent Locarno premiere, Invention, another story about a controversial scientist with wonky ideas; less loosely comic and more sorrowfully contemplative, Coincidence Control proceeds through Lilly’s life and work while making vigorous use of fair use law to supplement primary-subject interviews. His just-digitized home movies and TV appearances and other direct context are juxtaposed with wide-ranging clips on associative tracks (I never expected someone to reappropriate the underrated Joseph Sargent deep cut Colossus: The Forbin Project). Narrated by a mostly monotone Chloë Sevigny, the film begins with Lilly’s early days as a respected scientist and Middle American father and husband, a stolid suit-wearing talk show guest thought no less of for his predictions of imminent conversations with dolphins. Then came his freakier period of immersion tank research—first without LSD, then on it. Journeys into the self became less scientifically justifiable and more “a guy freaking out”; where Lilly’s wiki trails off during this disreputable era, the movie stays original-research detailed.
Besides the primary appeal of the scientist’s galactic brain ideas, Lilly’s secondary allure has to be the plethora of famous people he intersected with (super-producer Joseph Levine) or, even more fun, second-tier showbiz lifers (Flipper producer Ivan Tors). These biographical byways allow for the temporarily discombobulating introduction of what turn out to be contextual materials, as when a clip from The Creature from the Black Lagoon is presented first on its own defamiliarized terms sans title card. Only then is the disconcerting clip’s inclusion labeled and explained: the dolphins in that film were trained and shot at Tors’s Marine Studios, where Lilly began his tests on the animals. One of Coincidence Control’s clear takeaways is that universal reverence for dolphins and whales, and how their preservation became a stand-in for caring about the environment as a whole, is a direct and uncomplicatedly laudable part of Lilly’s legacy. I’d never really thought about where and when that affection came from; now I know, and it’s a little like discovering the previously unquestioned origins of oxygen.
The starting point for Rajee Samarasinghe’s Your Touch Makes Others Invisible are the thousands of “enforced disappearances” during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, but while it’s true that the trim 70-minute feature is unambiguously political, maybe something like five minutes of it constitute direct, unmediated talking head testimony from heartbroken northern villagers about the disappearances of sons and loved ones, fruitless petitions and pleas for assistance to international bodies, etc. The rest of the film proceeds along impressionistic and spectacular lines in a master shot mode. Obliqueness is in part a strategy of necessity, taking heat from the authorities off of the production, but also one of artistry: the filmmaker’s background is in experimental short film, his default preference for the indirect. The spectacular dimension is introduced in one of the first shots (a girl and a cow in a landscape, eventually another cow), one of many great-looking widescreen tableaus that fit right in with 20 years of above-average slow cinema, but Your Touch also makes strong contemporary use of drones. One of Samarasinghe’s go-to tableaus is a shop window full of TVs; like a tweaked Nam June Paik installation, all but one are turned off, tesselatedly reflecting the streetscape before them. That one active monitor is reserved for an interview with former prime minister and accused war criminal Mahinda Rajapaksa, blithely chuckling and denying everything with despotic minimum plausibility. As this truly depressing exchange with a British journalist continues, Samarasinghe sends a drone up and away from its starting street-level view for an overhead view of the larger automative landscape, a scalar shift literally reframing just how many white vans there are even as Rajapaksa disavows knowledge of his regime’s “white van abductions.”
With its vaguely self-righteous pallor rising from a consistently hushed tone in both characterization and dialogue, expertly drawn-out non-professional presences/performances and single location belonging to somebody close to production, Stefan Djordjevic’s Wind, Talk to Me is perilously close to “generic festival film.” But I did genuinely like Wind, which stars Djordevic and his family, including his in-actuality terminally ill mother, and begins as the filmmaker returns to the family house after her death to perform some renovations alongside his brother, which is about it plotwise. The film’s disruptions to its surface-level “isn’t life very disappointing” tonalities include a heightened self-reflexive consciousness about the camera, which leads to guessing games as to whether, in this scene, someone will actively register it as a physical presence or whether it’s retreated back into the fiction of invisibility, a charge that keeps unpredictably changing. Another unexpected frill comes via a plotline about a dog Djordjevic accidentally hits with his car, who he subsequently lures to a forest clearing and captures for the purpose of healing. That might be a metaphor for mourning and realizing the otherwise-impossible fantasy of nursing someone back to health, but the dog is amazing; I have no idea how such plausible whimpering and skittishness was enacted, but it’s possibly the most riveting on-screen canine performance since Le Quattro Volte‘s souped-up sheepdog. There is, lastly, the chronological back-and-forth between past and present, so sneaky and undemonstrative that I honestly didn’t clock it until the palindromic final sequences made it clear; there’s a good deal going on under the unprepossessing surface, whose calm starts to seem like sleight of hand.
Save John Lilly, all these titles were in the Bright Future section reserved for first-time feature filmmakers, which is nice—albeit also an indication of the weakness of the putatively flagship Tiger section, whose features and shorts largely didn’t seem to particularly get anyone going this year. While I didn’t see grand prize winner Fiume o morte!, I did catch one of two Tiger special jury award winners, Sammy Baloji’s The Tree of Authenticity*, which—I mean this in a nice way—has a really good first part, followed by a not-so-good second part and borderline-risible epilogue. (That structural fall-off, a friend remarked, is a bit of a Rotterdam special.) After a comically long scrolling text prologue that’s literally a Guardian article from which maybe two dozen paragraphs are highlighted in part or full for a long time (far more context than either needed or advisable), Tree immediately redeems itself with a fairly spectacular drone shot that starts high up, descending with increasing speed until it makes a landing amidst villagers who run towards it as it lowers, a very cheap version of a classic Hollywood cast-of-thousands crane-down using technology to actively precipitate said crowd. Such shots are very quickly going to become cliches, but they’re fun for now, and I got a kick out of this one.
The first third is built around the diaries of Paul Panda Farina, a Congolese native turned first Belgium’s first Black colonial officer. Beginning in 1907 and continuing through his mysterious death in 1929, Farina’s voiceover journey towards Black self-determination and anti-colonialism is often layered over shots of decrepit tools of colonial administration, left to molder in fields for decades like fussily self-framing Wes Anderson installation objects. As the narration kept intoning barometric and temperature readings from the records, I realized that the film was teaching French by repetition, but solely within the rhetorical framework of preparing me for colonial labor, a very neat trick. The film becomes less interesting in its second section, structured around the experiences of Abiron Beirnaert, a mirror-image inverse: a white Belgian interloper in the Congo speaking a different colonial tongue, a fellow agronomist who also died under mysterious circumstances. Beirnaert’s Flemish-language narration is more overbearing and the accompanying footage less absorbing, which could be conceptually justifiable (colonizer is more boring than colonized) but in practice is still enervating even if that’s the intent (which I doubt!). The epilogue is a dealbreaker, as the titular tree (given that designation by the Congolese government in 1954) finally speaks in voiceover—a move that’s always gonna be kind of goofy and guaranteed to remind me of the misbegotten Beach Boys spoken-word deep cut “A Day in the Life of a Tree.” It is, however, notable that the tree says is that it is, by its very nature, bearing witness without the possibility of intervening—helplessness and depressive powerlessness popped up repeatedly in IFFR’s shorts, and it’s safe to say we’re going to be seeing a lot more of that, both IRL and on screen.
Though it’s played at many major festivals since its premiere last September at San Sebastián, I’m closing my IFFR coverage this year with Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude, as I finally saw it there. For two hours, Serra and his excellent cinematographer Artur Tort Pujol train their absolute attention on matador Andrés Roca Rey—occasionally in his room getting dressed up, sometimes in a car before or after a bullfight with his Entourage crew of thicknecks, but most often in the ring. With zoom lenses trained on him from far away, every camera movement requires the operator to be as minutely focused and physically tensed as the subject himself. There are cheers from the crowd, but even more from Rey’s buddies, who cheer the bullfighter on when the audience turns on him; “That took balls!” they cheer with fuck-the-haters verve. It’s clear that this admiration on focus and macho achievement for its own sake serves as a validating metaphor for Serra’s own artistic process, in the same way as Dracula cackling at his shit turning into gold did in The Story of My Death. The subject is otherwise pure color—the bull’s literally blood-red-blood on yellow sand and so on—and while the repetitive (or devotional, depending on how you respond to it) iterations didn’t sustain me for two hours, I respect the impulse and forbiddingly winnowed focus. I keep a running list in my head of movies that directors are likely to enjoy more than general cinephiles, an easy example being 8 1/2—consistently in the top 10 of Sight & Sound’s all-time directors poll but lower down or never in the critics’ top bracket. Afternoons chooses its aesthetic target with microprecision and refuses to deviate, and I expect that it’s going to remain Festival Director Canon for a while.
* I don’t know if Hipster Runoff jokes translate outside the States (I’m guessing not) but I regret to say that my first thought upon hearing it was that this is the most Carles-pilled title I’ve ever encountered.↩
