IFFR 2025
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IFFR 2025: Bright Futures (and Others)
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 14, 2025 -
“…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me
German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea like no other art form can – even without special effects or CGI. From frame to frame, sequence to sequence, a collection of purpose-built images and sounds floats through their own unique space-time continuum, evoking an awakening, a recognition, creating a genre-defying ode to staying […]
by Pamela Cohn on Feb 2, 2025 -
Clandestine Sexual Development in China: Making 1 Girl Infinite
One night in the summer of 2022, I received a text message from a producer to whom I had sent the script for 1 Girl Infinite, hoping she might help me make the film. Her message read: “I love the script. But I won’t be able to do it because it’s dangerous.” I was not surprised by her comment. In China, filmmakers must pass the bureau censorship to release their work. I was acutely aware of the fact that the details of my film had no chance of approval for a domestic theatrical release in China, despite it being a […]
by Lilly Hu on Jan 31, 2025
