/ 25 February 2000

A flurry of fine films

Film festivals are like orgies: an over-abundance of choices, lots of options, exhaustion and a certain amount of measured satisfaction.

I was invited to the Rotterdam Film Festival two weeks ago and found a flurry of content, with more than 200 movies and 150 shorts, and over 2 000 guests attending, not to mention the barrage of the Dutch public.

The festival has been around for 30 years and is renowned for showing cutting-edge cinema. Director of the festival Simon Field says: “The first principle of the festival is to support the film-makers, not just their finished product … Our energy largely goes into trying to discover new talents and new directors. We constantly attempt to adjust to the way independent and director’s cinema is changing, contributing to the ongoing debate on the kind of films we defend, and catching up on new development.” As a result, Rotterdam is widely regarded as the funkiest film festival in the world and this session was no exception.

The main focus this year was on Japanese cinema, its industry’s maverick visionaries and new digital technology. There was a side-event called Tech.Pop.Japan which focused on the crossovers between animation, design, online stuff, art, video games and the moving image. The festival looked at how boundaries between high culture, mass culture and subculture have freely become blurred. When I visited the cinema I saw major manga installations, a computer virus exhibition and, most intriguing of all, a dance machine where a couple who pretend they’re dancing on a video console try to follow the dictated moves and can see their movements on screen. Quite bizarre.

Of the plethora of films on offer I only managed to catch a few. French wunderkind Leos Carax, who hasn’t made a film in eight years since the astounding and costly Les Amants de Pont Neuf, was there to show his latest movie, Pola X, based on Herman Melville’s novel The Ambiguities, and starring the usually luminescent Catherine Deneuve as the mother of an artist who is struggling with his girlfriend. I found it a complete wank from beginning to end, filled with interminable pregnant pauses and pretentious camerawork.

Then there was Même le Vent, a French/Senegalese short film by Laurence Attali that was completely astounding. It tells the poetic yet documentary-influenced tale of a Dakar taxi driver who has a white woman as a passenger. Inexplicably they fall in love on their journey.

Quite different were Pink Prison, produced by Danish maestro Lars von Trier, and a hardcore porn flick made by a woman, Lisbeth Lynghøft - the film even came with a manifesto claiming that it was one of the first porno movies made by a woman from a female perspective. The story involves a female journalist who breaks into a prison in order to interview the infamous warder – along the way, you guessed it, she is taken by almost every inmate. It was more sexist than usual, with a woman getting done by all these macho bulky prisoners – mind you, she did ask for it, but when she got it, it was no different from male-created porn, anyway.

A more interesting movie about sex was Rosa von Praunheim’s Der Einstein des Sex: Leben und Werk des Dr Magnus Hirschfield that, through recreated “documentary” footage, worked as a tribute to the founder of Europe’s first gay political movement. It’s a beautifully made portrait of emotional, political and sexual struggle, something to look forward to at next year’s local Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

As for locals, there was a strong South African presence at the Cinemart section of the festival, part of the programme designed to bring co-producers together in order to finance movies. Capetonian Bridget Thompson was there with Somalian director Abdulkadir Ahmed Said, with a Pan-African project called Errant Knights. Thompson said the Cinemart meetings were great: “It is very well organised, one doesn’t have the feeling of rampant craziness like at the Sithengi market in Cape Town where one has to pitch to a whole room of people. Here it’s much more focused.”

Of South African cinema Said was very critical: “Yours is a voyeuristic cinema based on violence which perpetuates the idea of a traumatised society. South African cinema will never be truly African unless it can get rid of the violence.”

Steven Markovitz of Big World Cinema was there with writer Jack Lewis and Canadian-based director John Grayson to find Dutch financial partners for their film Proteas, based on Cape Town’s sodomy trial of two Robben Island prisoners – one Khoi and one Dutch – in 1735. Markovitz says, “It’s a Canadian/South African co-production but there are obvious reasons to bring in a Dutch partner, and the Cinemart meetings have been one on one and very focused.”

Grayson chirps in, “It’s a great story, you know, about Catholics and sodomy. It’s an old story but a good one, trying to diffuse political tensions Monica Lewinsky-style.”

Also representing South Africa at the co-production market were Ramedan Suleman and Bhekizizwe Peterson with a project called Zulu Love Letter, a psychological, magical drama about the rift between a mother and her daughter with the language of beadwork forming an intrinsic formal part of the narrative. I asked Suleman if coming to Europe was just doing the “begging-bowl” routine, to which he replied: “If you consider yourself a beggar then they’ll treat you as such. You’ve got to know the terrain and come with some money, even if that’s your script, and your personal skills to the table.”

Then there was Teddy Mattera with his proposed film Max in the Crying Business, a contemporary satire about a professional mourner. Khubu Meth was present with her project What’s Going On? about a young black journalist who discovers her former lover murdered by her prominent husband, a one-time apartheid activist and double agent.

The head honchos were there as well, headed up by Jeremy Nathan, Gina Bonmarriage and John Stodel of Primedia Pictures. Nathan has been a regular at Rotterdam for nine years and serves on the Cinemart advisory board. He says, “Rotterdam is great, specifically the co-production market that allows people to meet informally and in a friendly atmosphere.”

Exhausted after such a hectic week, all 2 000 wannabe movie-makers, financiers and distributors returned home with togbags filled with promotional material. Some of this will convert from paper into celluloid, to be screened at next year’s presumably even bigger and more outrageous Rotterdam festival.