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Wednesday 17 July 2024
Object 817 (Olga Lucovnicova, 2024)
Tuesday 2 July 2024
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado, 2023)
Thursday 27 June 2024
Raindance 2024: Dog War
Tuesday 25 June 2024
Raindance 2024: Sting Like a Bee
Sunday 23 June 2024
Raindance 2024: The Heirloom
Friday 21 June 2024
Raindance 2024: Árni
Wednesday 19 June 2024
Raindance 2024: Eternal You
What if a person's death did not mean their end of life? What if their loved ones could still talk to them long after their body has been cremated or is lying lifeless in the ground? Eternal You—which screens tomorrow as part of this year's Raindance Film Festival—accompanies people who use AI to ‘connect with the dead’. Offering a powerful commentary on the commercialisation of grief, from the perspectives of ethicists and technologists to entrepreneurs, the film follows Joshua who chats day and night with the digital clone of his deceased first love and lets her take part in his everyday life; Christi, who just wants confirmation that her late best friend is doing well in heaven, but has a harrowing experience with his AI likeness; and Jang Ji-Sung, who meets the VR clone of her daughter.
The inventors of the services deny any responsibility for the profound psychological consequences of those experiences. Numerous competitors hope for a lucrative market, with major players such as Microsoft and Amazon entering the race for afterlife-related services. A new, secular narrative of salvation through ‘digital immortality’ is emerging, as religious and collective forms of mourning lose relevance. From the multi-award-winning directors of The Cleaners (2018), Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, Eternal You is an exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product—and in turn the possibility of the end of human finitude.
Source: Margaret London
Images: Max Preiss / Konrad Waldmann
Monday 10 June 2024
Queendom (Agniia Galdanova, 2023)
Monday 3 June 2024
Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023)
Thursday 16 May 2024
1st MIFF (30/5/24–2/6/24)
Wednesday 8 May 2024
IFFR: Hubert Bals Fund Announces HBF+Europe Titles
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Beyond the Raging Sea (Marco Orsini, 2019)
Tuesday 16 April 2024
IFFR: RTM Pitch Winner / Dates for 2025
With IFFR 2025 confirmed to take place from Thursday 30 January to Sunday 9 February 2025, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has announced the winner of its latest RTM Pitch. Bubbling, a cultural movement fusing dance, rhythm and electronic music born out of Rotterdam’s Afro-Caribbean community in the 1990s, is the focus of a documentary project awarded a grant of €20,000 by IFFR together with the municipality of Rotterdam. Filmmaker Sharine Rijsenburg will explore Bubbling culture as having both a deep imprint on the city’s identity whilst being simultaneously undervalued. As the winner of the RTM Pitch, the project will receive expert guidance and aims to premiere at IFFR 2025.
Sharine Rijsenburg: “For me, Bubbling Baby is a film about how we in Rotterdam, as a multicultural metropolis, celebrate, remember and appreciate our night culture. The Bubbling subculture shows a history that has helped shape Rotterdam’s identity, yet has remained invisible. With this film, I want to celebrate and make known the value of this cultural heritage.” The film will explore the impact of Bubbling, and more broadly Black culture, on Rotterdam’s identity. Using an Afrofuturistic aesthetic, Bubbling Baby will combine archive material from 1990s Rotterdam with scenes of Bubbling parties and the upcoming Summer Carnival.
Sharine Rijsenburg is a creative researcher and visual anthropologist based in Rotterdam, who combines explorations into socio-political issues with engaging storytelling. Her short films Paradijsvogels and Paradeis Perdí demonstrate her practice of delving into Dutch and Caribbean archives to investigate the relationship between (self)image, representation and colonial history. She has worked as assistant director on So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us (Lavinia Xausa, RTM Pitch winner 2021 & IFFR 2022) and as a researcher for, among others, VPRO Tegenlicht. At IFFR 2020 she was a Young Selector, a festival initiative giving creative and ambitious local young people the opportunity to curate their own IFFR programme.
Source/image: IFFR