The International Film Festival Rotterdam opens on January 21 with Tom Hooper’s War Book and runs through February 1, when J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year wraps the 44th edition. In December, we saw the titles lined up for two programs, Limelight, highlighting “big art-house successes during the past year at other international film festivals,” and Signals, “broken down into four sections with the theme of ‘contemporary reality’ connecting all four.”
The other day, IFFR set 20 films for its Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films. And today, it’s the big one, “the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition 2015, with 13 projects by first and second time feature filmmakers from across the world.” All are world premieres except the two designated below as international premieres (IP). ith descriptions from the festival:
Ismail Basbeth‘s Another Trip to the Moon. “The magical surrealist journey of Asa, daughter of a shaman, who confronts her own mother, fighting for her own life and freedom.”
Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás‘s La Mujer de los perros. “The protagonist of Dog Lady is a woman (Llinás) who lives on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with a pack of dogs, in a house like so many other humble shacks in the urban sprawl of the city.”
Jakrawal Nilthamrong‘s Vanishing Point. “A drama depicting life in different paths. As two men delve deep down in search for what could heal their pains, through the path of imagination, they see themselves in each other.”
Juan Daniel Fernández Molero‘s Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes). “Internet cafés and slackers, not-so-innocent schoolgirls and amateur porn using Google Glass: things in Lima, the Peruvian capital, are pretty similar to contemporary reality, virtual or otherwise, in the rest of the world. Cinema meets digital psychedelia.”
Kyros Papavassiliou‘s Impressions of a Drowned Man. “A man who doesn’t know who he is meets his former love. She tells him he is a famous poet, Kostas Karyotakis, who killed himself in 1928. Every year he returns on the anniversary of his death.”
Carlos Quintela‘s La obra del siglo. “Three Cuban men, obliged by circumstance to live together under the same roof, pass their days in the ElectroNuclear City.”
Martin Radich‘s Norfolk, “a haunting thriller about a reclusive father and son whose close relationship is threatened when the father’s violent past catches up with them.”
Lukas Valenta Rinner‘s Parabellum. “In the company of housewives, professionals and a retired tennis instructor, Hernán is part of a middle-class community that is preparing for the eventual arrival of the end of the world at a holiday resort in the marshy Tigre delta.”
Jeppe Rønde‘s Bridgend. “Over a 5-year period in Bridgend in Wales, 79 people, many of them teenagers, committed suicide without leaving any clue as to why. This is the starting point for this mysterious social drama. Hannah Murray convinces as the ‘new girl in town’ in Danish Rønde’s feature debut.”
Nicolas Steiner‘s Above and Below, “a rough and rhythmic roller coaster ride seating five survivors in their daily hustle through an apocalyptic world. A mind-blowing, cinematic exploration of contemporary existence in the US.” (IP).
Lisa Takeba‘s Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory. “Haruko is a girl who prefers to cuddle up to her old-fashioned TV set. In this wondrous story, a television can transform into a man: and this is by no means the end of the strange cheerfulness.”
Remy van Heugten‘s Gluckauf. “Social drama about the oppressive relationship between a father and a son who, as modern outlaws, struggle to survive in the depleted Dutch province of Limburg.”
Britni West‘s Tired Moonlight. “Combustible dreams fail to ignite as lonely, middle-aged, Dawn is confronted by lost love in a glorified-pit-stop town.” (IP).
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