International Film Festival Rotterdam

"Successful things tend to get bigger and bigger," said Simon Field, reflecting on the International Film Festival Rotterdam, long the premiere showcase of the Benelux region and a growing and increasingly essential stop on the international fest circuit. "But it's important to maintain the festival's atmosphere and intimacy."

As the new head of the festival, succeeding longtime director Emille Fallaux, Field had reason to be concerned. The 26th incarnation of the festival was set to unspool in a massive new Pathé multiplex. Equipped with 2,700 seats in seven theaters, the chain's flagship theater in the Netherlands is a sleek archictectural behemoth set on a large square opposite the equally imposing if less flashy Shouwberg, where the fest's daily "talk shows" and numerous cocktail parties and concerts took place.

"Beforehand I was slightly anxious," he admits, "whether it would be possible to maintain the Rotterdam spirit in the new premises. But when I visited the cinema, which was already bursting with festival attendants, it was like the old days walking about in the Lantaren/Venster," he said, referring to a nearby theater/café complex with a distinctly "alternative" feeling. The fest's intimacy is aided and abetted by the city itself: downtown Rotterdam is essentially a large pedestrian mall that offers few local distractions.

Sixty percent of the festival took place in the Pathé multiplex, offering state-of-the-art projection on screens so formidable that more than one director was heard to gasp before introducing their film. The Pathé lobby, with numerous cafés and ample space to mill around in, was also the hub of the festival, which attracted record-breaking crowds. The fest's secondary screening sites - the Lantaren/Venster, the stately Luxor and Corso cinemas, and the tiny Zaal de Unie - were a short walk from the Pathé.

While the Pathé was an unqualified success, and the nightly parties, accessible to all accredited guests, helped to solidify the friendly, accessible atmosphere, the heart of the festival remained its commitment to the work of emerging directors as manifest in three core programs: the Tiger Awards, the Hubert Bals Fund, and CineMart.

Unlike most major international film festivals, whose Competition sections celebrate the work of major-league film directors, Rotterdam's Tiger Awards focus predominantly on first features. Because few of the directors of these films are known entities, the competition is an excellent place to discover new talent.

Of the 15 films in the Tiger Awards competition, the standouts included Ira Sach's highly provocative The Delta, in which the chance encounter of a gay, Vietnamese immigrant and a middle class American closet case unfolds as a dual search for identity with tragic consequences, and Elia Suleiman's smart, funny and utterly disarming Chronicle of a Disappear-ance. Awarded Best First Feature at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered last fall, Chronicle builds a complex portrait of Palestinian identity through a series of deceptively simple vignettes that underscore the ways in which politics infuse the most banal everyday events. Another highlight was director Amir Karakulov's Last Holiday - a Khazakstan Kids - in which three boys, celebrating the last day of school, get high in a friend's apartment and then commit a petty robbery that results in the arrest, beating and ultimate death of one of them. Beginning and ending with a military march, the film is a harsh, poetic allegory of rebellion and conformity in this former Soviet republic.

The Tiger Awards' cause celebre, however, was Frozen by Wu Ming (a pseudonym, meaning "No Name," for a prominent Chinese director who had not received official permission to make the film), a work of austere beauty that depicts the life of a young, idealistic performance artist, willing to die for his art. The fact that Wu Ming was forced to take this same risk to produce Frozen independently only enhanced the film's understated urgency.

Also notable was Japanese director Kawase Naomi's Suzaku. Like Sharunas Bartas - the Lithuanian wunderkind hailed by many as a successor to Tarkovsky - whose mood pic, Few of Us, was screened in Rotterdam, Naomi's sensibility was too precious for my taste, but her evocation of rural isolation was at times poignant in its lamentation for a vanishing way of life.

The Tiger Award jury gave top honors and cash prizes of approximately $10,000 each to Korean director Hong Sang-Soo's The Day a Pig Fell in the Well, U.K. director Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Space, and Last Holiday.

In addition to championing the work of first-time directors, the International Film Festival Rotterdam each year features films completed with the assistance of the Hubert Bals Fund, which provides development and production funding to projects from developing countries. The Fund has helped seal Rotterdam's reputation as a Festival with a genuine commitment to Third World cinema, and to politically committed cinema in general.

Among the features at this year's Fest produced with the assistance of the HBF were two outstanding African films: Tunisian Mohamed Zran's first feature, Essaida, and Senegalese director Moussa Sene Absa's Tableau Ferraille.

Essaida portrays a successful, middle class artist's quest to capture life on canvas in an impoverished Tunisian town. Like the artist-protagonist of the film, Zran's camera captures numerous orientalist details from the culture, but the exploits of a young boy who models for the artist and who ultimately turns to crime to survive offer a telling counterpoint to the voyeur's surface-deep intervention. Since the film's premiere at the Carthage Film Festival, this uneven but fascinating film has become Tunisia's highest grossing release.

Moussa Sene Absa's Tableau Ferraille is an epic story of sexual politics, political corruption and colonialism played out through the upwardly mobile trajectory of a Senegalese village careerist. Although the film suffers from being too pretty - everyone in the village seem always to be wearing their best clothes - it is nevertheless a remarkable, highly stylized work that, at its best, evokes the work of Glauber Rocha.

One of the most interesting components of the Festival is the concurrent CineMart, now in its twelfth year. Organized by Wouter Barendrecht and Janette Kolkema, and sequestered from the festival proper at the Rotterdam Hilton hotel, CineMart brought together the producers of 42 film projects with potential funders from around the world.

Reporting brisk business for a number of productions, CineMart has grown into a highly effective resource for producers; 12 American projects were represented in CineMart thanks through the sponsorship of the Independent Feature Project, which provided travel support.

While there were certainly many gems to be found in Rotterdam, I was most taken with one. French director Sandrine Veysset's first feature Will it Snow for Christmas? is, quite simply, a masterpiece. With documentary intensity the film is constructed around the slow buildup of details from the backbreaking life of a family of farmworkers. Drudgery and tension mount as both the mother and her children are continually abused by her new husband, who considers the children bastards and her a whore. But the beleagured mother (Dominique Reymond, in an amazing performance) protects and nutures her children, who clearly adore her. Veysset is in complete control of her craft as she shepherds this heartbreaking film to its transcendent climax.

Sundance Film Festival by Noah Cowan
Berlin International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
International Film Festival Rotterdam by Stephen Gallagher