What would vertical cinema be like? It is a question that must have percolated in the minds of many a cinema enthusiast. After all, there is no rule decreeing that a film can be made only in horizontal format. But, of course, theaters, distributors and historical viewing practices have made us think of cinema in no other way. However, there could have been an alternate universe where films resembled portraits, not landscapes. At the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), underway right now, delegates got a peek into that alternate universe through a special section called Vertical Cinema. A Sonic […]

Winner of the Best Feature Tiger Award at the 2012 Rotterdam Film Festival, Maja Milos’s Clip has stirred controversy on the festival circuit for its graphic and downbeat look at the sexual rebellion of a barely-teenage Serbian girl. The first feature of its young female director, and partially financed by the Serbian government, the film takes its title from its 14-year-old protagonist’s penchant for recording her drug-and-sex-fueled environments on her cell phone. Brandon Harris covered the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam for the Spring, 2012 edition of Filmmaker and below is his take on the movie. Clip is released on […]

With its famously catholic tastes and sprawling slate, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is a place to get lost. A week into its 10-day run, a fairly subdued 42nd edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam has unfurled a smattering of buzz-worthy world premieres and its usual mix of budding talents from unusually farflung spots on the globe, high-art provocations, exhaustive considerations of an emerging national cinema or two and obscure auteur retrospectives. However, I’ve found that it’s always the surprises here that grab you, little films you’d otherwise never see except in this context, that make the trip worthwhile. I […]

(Artificial Paradises world premiered at the 2011 International Film Festival Rotterdam before screening at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. It opens theatrically in New York City at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, March 30, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Yes, Yulene Olaizola’s Artificial Paradises is about drug addiction. But not only does Olaizola take her time in revealing this agenda, her patient filmmaking and reverence for the gorgeous natural environment in which she shoots keeps that agenda from elbowing its way into the foreground. It’s this gentle approach that distinguishes Artificial Paradises from the rest of […]

For almost two decades I’ve been traveling to the International Film Festival Rotterdam immediately following Sundance, struggling to keep my jet lag at bay while I attend a few Cinemart meetings, hit the informal but productive Cinemart cocktail hours, and delve into the fest’s always excellent and eclectic program. This year several fellower Sundancers made the trip as well, including sales agent Ryan Kampe, producer Adele Romanski, the IFP’s Amy Dotson, the Sundance Institute’s Anne Lai, and director Terrence Nance, whose An Oversimplification of Her Beauty was programmed here and was one of the Park City’s true discoveries. Above is […]

After the rush of sales in Park City this year, it seems the entire American cine-punditry is racing to declare this the beginning of a new golden age in American Independent Film. I sure hope they’re right. One wonders if March’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin will continue the trend and finally push that festival into true market status. Nearly 40 films were acquired in Park City and many more that premiered there will surely be acquired in the weeks and months to come. Yet for some of the most daring new American films, the sales rat race at Sundance […]

The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been an exciting oasis in the festival calendar, a place to see new directors, experimental programming, and to connect with new projects away from the din of more market-defined festivals and red-carpet affairs. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of Rotterdam’s CineMart.) This year’s festival was a good one — you can read Michael Tully’s wrap-up here — and now New Yorkers have the opportunity to discover the filmmakers of the Tiger Competition. The Tigers consist of films by new filmmakers, and the gamut runs from edgy dramas to intriguing doc-fiction hybrids to […]

Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar’s thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was […]

In Europe, the domestic theatrical business is as perilous as it is in the States. After spending time with a number of foreign distributors while at the Cinemart in Rotterdam, I was struck by the topics of conversation: declining audiences, fewer young people going to the movies, the threat to conventional theatrical from DVD day-and-date, and worries over the impact of new distribution platforms, like first-run downloading of feature films direct to cell phones. (Apparently, this was tried with The Interpreter in Italy and theatrical bookers revolted, booting the film off a number of Italian screens during its first run […]