Port City; 150 days of rain a year — I’ve never been to Rotterdam, but I can’t imagine it’s the most enjoyable place to be in the world right now. Belgium and the Netherlands might be blessed with some things, but the weather is not one of them.
But perhaps one wet January, I’ll brave the dark and the rain to attend the Rotterdam Film Festival in person, because this northern European event is slowly shaping up to be one of the key events in the yearly calendar. With plenty of premieres and a focus on cutting-edge and experimental cinema, it’s a place where the cinema goes to be born anew amidst the boredom-inducing, calendar-defying awards season and the theatrical new release deadzone of January.
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For me, this month, populated mostly by B-movie actioners and lazy comedies, is for staying at home. It feels like far more exciting things happening in the Australian Open (JANIK SINNER) and the Darts World Cup (LUKE THE NUKE ) than in the festival world.
But as Berlinale quickly looms into view, people are losing their heads at Sundance (I’ll catch it later), and Cannes is not actually that far away, Rotterdam excitedly kicks off the European cinematic scene. Don’t expect massive names, but a solid smattering of debut efforts, some Scandinavian movies (mileage varies!), and a few very weird, yet satisfying auteur visions. We managed to get our hands on a buncha movies. Here’s what we had to say:
Tiger Competition
Radical Archeology Challenges Past and Present in Praia Formosa
By Nick Kouhi:
In the title alone, Praia Formosa (Julia De Simone, 2024) foregrounds geography. The film’s wordless opening surveys industrial sites — devoid of people — within Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África neighbourhood as metallic groans and liquid burbling tease the soundscape.
These translucent urban images signal an effaced legacy of brutal subjugation. Julia De Simone’s palimpsestic accentuation of the obscured histories which inform these sites is consonant with her documentary work while simultaneously anticipating the fertile creative ground she treads in her first fiction feature.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire Rejects Conventionality in Favour of Archival Speculation
By Nick Kouhi:
Suzanne Roussi-Cesaire was a writer and radical intellect whose words and work were overshadowed by her comparatively better-known husband, Aimé Cesaire. With The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire (2024), Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich mounts a corrective to the occlusion of Suzanne’s contribution to the Surrealist Movement. In the spirit of its subject, the film rejects the conventional demands of a straightforward biopic, expanding on her moving-image piece Too Bright to See (Part 1) (2023) to ruminate on an intensely personal connection with an enigmatic figure.
During the Second World War, Suzanne wrote a series of essays for the magazine Tropiques from Martinique. She and her husband incurred the ire of Vichy-appointed stooges and garnered the respect of revered radicals like Andre Breton. Hunt-Ehrlich extensively drew upon interviews with the Cesaires’ children and existing historical records to visualise Suzanne’s words through actress Zita Hanrot. Simultaneously, the film incorporates Hanrot’s post-partum life as a corollary to Suzanne’s enduring legacy as a mother to six children and “an artist who didn’t want to be remembered.”
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Big Screen
Eternal in Name. Eternal in Nature.
By Redmond Bacon:
If you press a note on the piano repeatedly, it doesn’t matter how softly or loudly you hit it, the melody will always be the same.
Eternal (Ulaa Salim, 2024) plays like this very note, plonking continously (and rather annoyingly) in its fruitless search for science-fiction profundity; hampered by a lack of genre technicalities while the dramatic beats lack harmony, imagination and intrigue.
Playing in Big Screen competition like a strange marriage of The Core (Jon Amiel, 2003) and Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), it pales in comparison to the inherent strengths of both those bold sci-fi visions.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Bright Future
Sisterhood Prevails Amongst 78 Days of NATO Bombs
By Redmond Bacon:
In a highly suspect moment in the final season of The Crown, Peter Morgan tackles the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia with remarkable historical simplicity. Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) makes a speech to the Americans, seemingly convincing them singlehandedly that dropping bombs on former Yugoslavia is the right thing to do. This is then seen as a great success of Blair’s premiership, contrasted with the Iraq War, which is later seen as a terrific disaster.
In Operation Allied Force, NATO attacked Serbia to stop Milosevic’s murderous campaign in Kosovo, relentlessly bombing the country for two and a half months. This led to the death of anywhere between 500 (Human Rights Watch) and 2,500 (Serbian government) civilians. At a time when bombing civilians in the name of “rooting out evil” is all around us (Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen), NATO’s refusal to acknowledge its mistakes, and to condemn current atrocities, ensures that simplistic narratives, such as The Crown, loom large in the popular imagination.
In Emilija Gašić’s 78 Days (2024), playing in the Bright Future section, the talented debut director utilises documentary aesthetics to centre the very human, and very painful, cost of living in the shadow of conflict. Using a Hi8 camcorder to capture the over-exposure, dark contrasts and low-quality grain of 90s home video, this found-footage film reminds us that nothing is simple when bombs rain from the sky; when children live in fear; when the spectre of death looms large over every single childish decision.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust Won’t Be a Hit. It’s Too Unique For That.
By Redmond Bacon:
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust (Ishan Shukla, 2024) is a very strange movie.
The animation is strange, developed from a video game engine to give off an uncanny feel; the characters are strange, cryptically talking around the subjects at hand; and the design is strange, freely evoking everything from Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott) to 1984 to Brazil (Terry Gillian, 1985) to this heavily-shared short movie about using your phone too much. And its conclusions are even stranger, not so much raging against the machine but slowly succumbing to it, asking if freedom is truly better than the authoritarian alternative. I very much enjoyed its hallucinogenic and despairing aesthetic.
This Indo-French co-production, developed from Shukla’s own 2016 short, is shot entirely in Epic’s Unreal Engine, best known for being the driving force behind games as diverse as Fortnite, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Final Fantasy VII.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Harbour
The Light Provides a Fleet Danish History Lesson about the Lingering Complications of Nazi Occupation
By Nick Kouhi:
Following a spate of formally slippery films, The Light (Alexander Lind, 2023) is easily the most conventional film I’ve seen in Rotterdam this year. That’s not necessarily a slight against Alexander Lind’s economically paced documentary, which packages plenty of intriguing information into a fleet history lesson on a Danish art installation and its inadvertent revelation of staunchly fervent nationalism.
The piece in question was a laser show mounted by Elle-Mie Ejdrup to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Denmark’s liberation from Nazi Germany’s occupation. Charting a course from Sild to Skagen, the laser illumined a series of bunkers constructed by Danish labourers for the Nazis. The project drew vociferous condemnation from former members of the Danish resistance for the incendiary implication of collaborationism the bunkers effectively symbolise.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Small Hours of the Night Gives Testimony to Disembodied Dissidence
By Nick Kouhi:
“If you could tie your being to the time of the stars, what would it be like?”
This question arrives late in Small Hours of the Night (2024), retroactively framing Daniel Hui’s historical chamber piece in cosmic terms. Yet the question stems from a decidedly grounded concern for the victims, nameless or otherwise, of Singapore’s stringent crackdown on dissidence. Beginning in the mid-20th century, Hui continues his investigation of his country’s tumultuous political history post-independence.
The film remains largely fixed in a single location: an interrogation room hosting a man (Kasban Irfan) and his prisoner Vicki (Yanxuan Vicki Yang). Their conversation begins with inquiries about another detainee who may or may not be real before Vicki remarks that she has visions of people, perhaps from the future. While the opening epitaph situates us in the late 1960s, the ensuing dialogue makes plenty of references to future events, the most significant involving the case of Tan Chay Wa, a suspected communist who fled to Malaysia but was extradited in the 1970s after being discovered with a weapon and eventually executed in 1983.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Cinema Regained
Godsterminal Remains as Empty as a Reenactment
By Nick Kouhi:
Godsterminal (Georg Tiller, 2024) is primarily concerned with questions of authorship. Edward “Eddie” Weki, a Sudanese labourer living on Fårö Island, is rapidly losing authorship of his memories to Parkinson’s. For their third collaboration, director Georg Tiller dramatises Wecki’s final days as a pseudo-Bergmanesque elegy replete with references to the gloomy Swede’s corpus.
Weki’s memories cascade in monochrome flashes, puncturing the drab colour of his hospital dwellings. His nurse Alma (Manuela de Gouveia, ostensibly mirroring Bibi Andersson) tries triggering Wecki’s recall of people he can only describe by name. This task is made more urgent by the arrival of Death (Marita Kuunari), who plays Wecki not in a game of Chess but Abanga. The Proustian tactility of objects provides the film its strongest throughline, poignantly emblematising their cultural and personal anchors to the life Wecki must ultimately leave.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!
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