Experimental Films in the Program Lineup

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) enjoys a reputation as a destination for those curious about and interested in discovering new and unusual cinematic voices.

So it comes as no surprise that the 55th edition of the fest, running Jan. 29-Feb. 8, is again chock-full of envelope-pushing arthouse movies that sounds anywhere from offbeat to outright outlandish.

Vanja Kaludjercic, festival director at IFFR, has promised “an array of titles that speak to our mission of audience discovery and championing filmmakers forging new paths in cinema.”

Here is THR‘s look at a small selection of Rotterdam films that sound experimental, out there and different, to say the least.

58th
Director: Carl Joseph E. Papa
IFFR section: Harbour
Sales/world rights holder: GMA Network Films, Inc.

After the 2009 Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines, most of the corpses of journalists and the wife of a progressive political candidate were found. Not so the 58th victim, a photojournalist nicknamed Bebot. His daughter Nenen has since fought to get his killing — by forces directed by an influential family allied with the then-government — officially acknowledged.

Papa (The Missing) mixes animation, TV news footage and Skype interviews for an envelope-pushing documentary following her tireless efforts. After all, “even though justice was partly served by the courts in 2020, Bebot’s absence from the historical record continues to haunt his family,” a synopsis of the film highlights.

The unusual approach allows even unrecorded events to be dramatized. “Most touchingly, this creative approach opens the door to lyrical imagining of times past, present and future,” points out the IFFR website.

Dead Souls
Director: Alex Cox
IFFR section: Harbour
Sales/world rights holder: Exterminating Angel

Legendary indie director Alex Cox — the man behind the 1984 cult classic Repo Man — returns to the screen as both director and star in this frontier fable of American greed, which is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s 19th-century Russian novel of the same name. Cox plays a mysterious drifter called Strindler who scours the West for the names of dead Mexican laborers and pays top dollar for them.

Other cast members include Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Amariah Dionne and Edward Tudor-Pole, while spaghetti Western legend Gianni Garko has a co-writer credit with Cox on the project.

“Pistol duels and crooked officials abound,” IFFR promises. Don’t expect any by-the-numbers-type straight shooting. Instead, “Cox’s idiosyncrasy stands out as the film veers tonally through the picaresque, dark satire and genre curveballs you won’t expect.”

Unerasable!
Director: Socrates Saint-Wulfstan Drakos
IFFR section: Tiger Competition
Sales/world rights holder: Socrates Saint-Wulfstan Drakos

If you are thinking (like the writer of these lines), “What a cool name that director has!” – think again! Socrates Saint-Wulfstan Drakos is not the real name of the filmmaker behind this Rotterdam competition entry. “And when the film is over, everyone in the audience will understand why,” the IFFR website tells us. “The creator of such a politically outspoken work, one that confronts both the limits of civil liberties in an authoritarian Southeast Asian regime and the inner colonialism of a very neoliberal European country, would naturally prefer to take shelter behind an assumed name.”

The story the film tells is simple – and heavy. “An independent filmmaker, tortured for his participation in a pro-democracy movement, fled his home in 2018 and relocated to nearby Thailand, undocumented,” explains a synopsis. “After five years, he left the region for the West, hoping to build a new and finally dignified life for himself. Instead, he became caught in another struggle, this time with bureaucracy.”

IFFR festival director Vanja Kaludjercic has this to say about the film: “The story Drakos weaves from various kinds of images, some rough and nervous, others with a more professional sheen, and gradually develops a serene poetry that seems impossible to foresee in a work with such political urgency. It stands as a film shaped by pure heart and true dedication.”

The Passion According to G.H.B.
Directors: Gustavo Vinagre and Vinicius Couto
IFFR section: Harbour
Sales/world rights holder: Carneiro Verde Filmes

“A hookup becomes a threesome; the threesome becomes an orgy. In this magical realist gay bedroom odyssey, Matias reminisces about his past encounters and considers his future, while speaking to a fictional figure from Brazilian literature.” Alright, I’ll let you digest this for a moment…

Ready? This Brazilian movie features “Chemsex,” the use of psychoactive drugs to enhance sexual experiences. Vinicius Couto, Igor Mo and Christiane Tricerri star in the film, which IFFR calls “a conceptual deep-dive surfacing the risks and rewards of chasing perceptual and sexual expansion.” Adds the fest: “The film’s gay strangers attempt to dissolve the boundaries between each other and within themselves.”

But hold on — who or what is GHB?! We don’t know, but what we do know — after a bit of research — is that Matias speaks to the apparition of G.H., the fictional narrator in Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s 1964 mystical novel The Passion According to G.H. That should clear it up.

Wolfgang
Director: Filmsaaz
IFFR section: Bright Future
Sales/world rights holder: Saleh Kashefi

You decide whether the writer-director’s name, Filmsaaz (real name: Saleh Kashefi) — an audiovisual artist from Tehran — or this synopsis is more unusual: “In this acid trip opera, the life of 22-year-old Mozart is reimagined to tell the present-day story of an Iranian artist exiled in Paris” to escape censorship back home. In fact, in 1778, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was actually in exile in Paris. Reeling from his mother’s death, he spent his days writing music and engaging in hedonistic excess. Mozart’s experience thus becomes a parallel of sorts for Wolfgang, the Iranian artist living through similar extremes in Paris.

If you’re intrigued by this “audiovisual opera,” which is a debut film, here is more: Ghazal Shojaei, herself an exiled Iranian actress, plays the titular Wolfgang, with Kata and Saeed Mirzaei also part of the cast. “Navigating grief, destructive tendencies and creative expression, the artists’ lives swirl together in a time and gender-queering ode to self-transformation,” according to IFFR.

Rotterdam programmers promise a film “sliding between hallucinogenic, candy-colored fever dreams, and painterly black-and-white chiaroscuros,” with Filmsaaz’s “dub-laced reinterpretations of Mozart’s music reclaiming the perversity and latent queerness of one of the most revered composers in history.” Concludes the IFFR preview: “Gradually, every scene strips away another layer of artifice: revealing a moving journey towards self-discovery, and intricate reflections on making art in political exile.”

Art Is Dark and Full of Horrors
Director: Artemio Narro
IFFR section: Harbour
Sales/world rights holder: El Llanero Solitario

Star artist Chema rules the Mexico City art scene — but if he falls, every vulture of the art market will be ready to swoop in. This satire of the Mexican art world unfolds over the course of a week of preening, dealing and partying, full of posing and artspeak.

Director Artemio Narro, who has developed a reputation for his stylized and irreverent approach to filmmaking, has also brought his two previous features — ColOZio (2020) and Me quedo contigo (2015) — to IFFR. His latest movie uses “witty Brechtian distancing devices, including life-size cardboard cut-outs standing in for real people,” the fest programmers highlight. “And in this film about art, almost no art is ever actually glimpsed: the ‘white cube’ of the modern gallery has never looked emptier or more bereft of soul.”

Let Them Be Seen
Director: Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi
IFFR section: Bright Future
Sales/world rights holder: Brown Flamingo Productions

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