Cannes Film Festival 2025: IFFR-Backed Selections

A spread of films and talent presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart and backed by the Hubert Bals Fund are once again a fixture of the Cannes lineup in 2025. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón brings her family trilogy to a close with Romería, a moving story of love, yearning and family anguish, this time through an adolescent lens as orphan Marina travels to meet her grandparents in Spain. Erige Sehiri's second feature Promised Sky focuses on a pastor whose home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student, before an orphan girl arrives and tests their solidarity.

Italian-American filmmaker duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis continue their investigation into the legends and myths of Italian folklore with the surrealist Italy-set Western Testa o croce? (Heads or Tails?). The name derives from a bet between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys (who visited Italy with their Wild West Show in 1890) and Italian cowboys over which team was better at taming wild horses. The film follows two young lovers on the run, played by rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island) and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), with John C. Reilly co-starring as Buffalo Bill.

Renowned Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada has made a number of highly acclaimed features across the last fifteen years dealing with “domestic disequilibrium”, including Harmonium (2016)—which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—A Girl Missing (2019), The Real Thing (2020) and Love Life (2022). Inspired by real cases in Japan, his latest, Love on Trial, follows Mai, a rising J-Pop idol whose big break is threatened when she falls in love, violating the “no love” clause in her contract. The project was presented at CineMart in 2022, where it picked up the IFFR Young Selectors Award.

March is mourning his wife Nat—who has recently passed away due to dust pollution—when he discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. So begins the premise of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s unique, playful, genre-mixing debut A Useful Ghost (pictured top). Boonbunchachoke’s short Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall won the Junior Jury award at Locarno in 2020. A Useful Ghost was supported by the HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme in 2023, where it received €60,000 of production financing.

Source: IFFR

Image: THE PR FACTORY

After the Long Rains (Damien Hauser, 2024)

Following 2021's Blind Love and 2022's Theo: vestlus aususega, After the Long Rains is Damien Hauser's third feature film—not bad going for someone in their early twenties.  The Zurich-based Hauser is an extremely hands-on filmmaker, and a brief glance at the end credits of the IFFR-selected After the Long Rains reveals the extent of his involvement; beyond Hauser's duties as writer-director, his responsibilities include editing, producing, composing, photographing, driving, and mixing the sound.  Hauser's multitasking appears to be a direct result of budgetary constraints—as opposed to a monomaniacal desire to control virtually every aspect of this handsome-looking production.     

After the Long Rains centres on Aisha (Eletricer Kache Hamisi), a lively ten-year-old who dreams of becoming an actress.  Once this plan is vetoed by her elders, Aisha focuses on becoming a fisherwoman, something she considers to be a more achievable ambition.  However, even that career choice is frowned upon by others, who think of fishing as an exclusively male activity.  This gender bias also goes in the other direction, as Aisha's older brother Omari (Ibrahim Joseph) is handy with a sewing machine and has a secret passion for making clothes, yet he's widely expected to follow in the footsteps of family patriarch Bakari (Emmanuel Baraka Gunga), who earns his living as a motorcycle chauffeur.    

Undeterred by such views, the headstrong Aisha pushes on with learning all she can about fishing, and she's helped in this endeavour by local angler Hassan (Bosco Baraka Karisa), who is happy to tell the child what he knows—including a handed-down tale of a mythical golden fish.  Hassan is generally an amiable sort, but his fondness for a few drinks leads to a heated exchange between the fisherman and Bakari that puts Aisha's training in jeopardy.  Towards its conclusion, After the Long Rains brilliantly veers off into a magical realism that provides a glimpse of the dazzling work it might have been (budget permitting).  As it stands, Damien Hauser's film is likeable and pleasant, but far from essential.      

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

IFFR 2025: Competition Lineups Announced

IFF Rotterdam today revealed the lineup of films selected across the Tiger, Big Screen and Tiger Short competitions at the festival’s upcoming 54th edition. At the heart of the festival, the Tiger Competition showcases emerging voices from across the globe, with 14 world premieres exploring personal stories and profound connections to history, identity, and place—spanning Montenegro to Malaysia and Congo to India. The 14 titles in the Big Screen Competition bridge the gap between arthouse and popular cinema through genre-blurring stories of rebellion, tradition and expression, covering territories from Lithuania to Japan and the Netherlands to Argentina. The 20 titles in the Tiger Short Competition represent the most exciting and refreshing film art of today, featuring a Slovenian climate sci-fi, a re-appropriation of Myanmarese government broadcasts, and a Georgian photomontage.

Additionally, the first names in IFFR’s 2025 Talks lineup are also confirmed. Leading the programme are Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin, who, following their recent collaboration on Rumours, will come together for an expansive dialogue about creative collaboration, the role of film festivals, and the enduring power of the short film form. IFFR will also welcome Lol Crawley to discuss his acclaimed cinematography, and Alex Ross Perry will talk about his documentary Videoheaven, part of a Focus programme celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture. As previously announced, the festival will open with Fabula, a compelling dark comedy from the award-winning Dutch director and screenwriter Michiel ten Horn, and close with the ambitious historical epic This City Is a Battlefield from Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya, which was also supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund.

Source: IFFR

Images: BFI

Small Hours of the Night (Daniel Hui, 2024)

Daniel Hui's fourth feature Small Hours of the Night—which screened at the most recent edition of the London Film Festival—received its world premiere at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it played in the Harbour strand alongside the likes of Michael Gitlin's The Night Visitors, NZ coming-of-age tale (and festival opener) Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's horror The Soul Eater, and Damien Hauser's After the Long Rains.  The last of these films joined the 16mm-shot Small Hours of the Night at this year's LFF, but while the IFFR saw these two titles as stablemates (in the admittedly wide-ranging Harbour), the LFF placed the films in separate strands, with After the Long Rains assigned to Journey and Small Hours of the Night occupying a berth in Experimenta.

Inspired by the tombstone trial of Tan Chay Wa, Hui's film is a 60s-set two-hander that pits Irfan Kasban's nameless interrogator against Vicki Yang's Vicki.  As per the title, much of Small Hours of the Night appears to take place over the course of one long, dark night as the official quizzes his prisoner on various incidents, some of which are actually from the future.  For Small Hours of the Night is a film in which time is slippery, à la the work of Alain Resnais, and in one sequence—as impressive as it is eerie—Vicki watches a clock face on which the minutes tick by as normal, yet the date changes every few seconds.  The interrogator seems not entirely unsympathetic towards Vicki—think O'Brien's relationship with Winston in Orwell's 1984 (a tale set just one year on from Tan's trial).  

Small Hours of the Night is perhaps one of the more accessible examples of experimental cinema, but it's still a demanding film, one that requires much patience and attention.  While both of the actors put in strong performances, plenty is asked of them; the story largely unfolds in a single location, and Hui's dialogue isn't always able to keep the odd lull at bay.  The film invites us to read around what it presents; for example, it's fairly clear that Yang is playing a composite character, but what isn't obvious is that several figures from the tombstone trial have been incorporated into this persona.  Despite its aura of disconnect and frequent temporal shifts, those who stay the course will be rewarded by this haunting film, whose cathartic conclusion proves that even the darkest night is followed by dawn.  

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

IFFR: Hubert Bals Fund Announces New Projects

International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has selected 12 feature films to each receive a Development Support grant of €10,000. Diverse yet united in their common effort to remain vocal, the filmmakers of this funding wave extend across a variety of unique and creative styles. Tamara Tatishvili, Head of the HBF said: "This wave of grant recipient filmmakers each come from a different context but share a common approach—they do not remain silent or give in to despair amid the challenges of our current times. Instead they stay active, speak up, and make their voices heard through their stories and artistry. The filmmakers selected for the grants are just a fraction of those who submitted for consideration, making this an incredibly challenging round".

Brazilian filmmaker Lillah Halla is one of a number of filmmakers with an IFFR history who are supported in this round of funding. Her new project Colhões de Ouro is a dark musical comedy centring on Krista Bomb, an 85-year-old radical who plans to infiltrate and destroy a hyper-masculine cult to save her son. Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku Wamai's epic neo-Western Enkop (The Soil) sets the story of 55-year-old Lorna Marwa on the dusty expanses of Kenya's volatile ranch land. Kiss Wagon (pictured above) director Midhun Murali's next project, MTV i.e. Mars to Venus, is a similarly inventive feature that combines four different genres. Muayad Alayan's Conversation with the Sea follows a Palestinian man from Jerusalem who is ordered by an Israeli court to pay a debt owed by his late son.

Christopher Murray's Piedras gigantes tells the story of the archaeologist Katherine Routledge arriving on Easter Island in 1914. In Una Gunjak's road movie How Melissa Blew a Fuse, Melissa steals €200k from her workplace in Germany, buys a car, puts on music and heads towards her home town in Bosnia. Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini is supported for Four Seasons in Java, about a woman's journey to find peace after being wrongly convicted of murdering a young man. The short Notes of a Crocodile by Cambodian filmmaker Daphne Xu is now the basis for a feature of the same name; the HBF backs this docufiction hybrid project, which weaves myth, queer desire and politics against the Chinese development of a canal project in Cambodia.

Belarus is the setting for a dark sci-fi comedy touching on the immigrant experience in Darya Zhuk's Exactly What It Seems. In Falso positivo, Theo Montoya approaches the 'false positives' murders in Colombia, where civilians were killed by the military and falsely passed off as enemy combatants, to sculpt a narrative on the falsification of reality. Georgian filmmaker Elene Mikaberidze's documentary Blueberry Dreams (pictured above) had its world premiere earlier this year, and she's supported for her debut fiction feature Le goût de la pêche, which focuses on a young woman caught in escalating geopolitical tensions. Kasım Ördek's feature debut Goodbye for Now follows Sevgi, who is drawn into a dangerous search after her mother's mysterious disappearance.

Source: IFFR

Images: Festival Scope

IFFR 2025: Focus Programmes Announced

Four Focus programmes at IFFR 2025 will celebrate the contributions of underappreciated filmmakers and revisit historical and cultural legacies, with the strands highlighting documentary filmmaker Katja Raganelli; Ukranian director Sergii Masloboishchykov; the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference; and VHS culture. The first titles in the programmes include world premieres of Alex Ross Perry's Videoheaven and Rotterdam filmmaker Gyz La Rivière’s Videotheek Marco.

Perry’s documentary Videoheaven (pictured above), which chronicles the history of video stores in Hollywood cinema, anchors Hold Video in Your Hands, a Focus programme celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture. This programme examines the interplay of private and public film cultures. Rotterdam filmmaker La Rivière returns to the festival with his ode to the video store Videotheek Marco (pictured below), an investigation into local video store history and connected audiovisual activities like community television.

As conversations evolve around streaming platforms and their impact on cinematic viewing practices, IFFR presents a timely exploration of VHS culture deeply rooted in community, creativity and unique viewing practices. This diverse programme includes film screenings ranging from the 2011 Indian documentary Videokaaran to David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds (pictured top), as well as interactive projects inviting Rotterdam citizens to share their personal home video stories, creating a communal cinematic experience.

Source/images: IFFR

HBF+Europe: Post-production Support Grants Announced

International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund has announced the four projects each awarded a grant of €60,000 through the HBF+Europe: Post-production Support scheme. The awards, sponsored by Creative Europe MEDIA, offer support for the final stages of European co-productions with filmmakers from regions where the Hubert Bals Fund targets its support. Filmmakers from Georgia, Nepal, Peru and South Africa are supported through co-producers in Luxembourg, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands respectively. The diverse projects range from a 16mm inquiry into coloniality to a revenge noir.

Georgian filmmaker Rati Oneli’s feature fiction debut Wild Dogs Don’t Bite follows his observational documentary on a derelict mining town City of the Sun, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2017. Dealing in the winners and losers of post-Soviet Georgia, the film is a noir-inspired revenge thriller. Nepalese filmmaker Sahara Sharma’s film My Share of the Sky is a search for the elusive dream of home in a patriarchal society, as a young woman grapples with uncertainty on the eve of her wedding. Sharma was the first female director to open the Kathmandu IMFF with her debut Chasing Rainbows.

The selection moves into the realm of experimental storytelling with Estados generales by Peruvian filmmaker Mauricio Freyre, whose current project is a 16mm film that reimagines the voyage of a parcel of seeds from Madrid back to the place where they were picked in Peru. Fresh from the premiere of their Afrikaans-language drama Carissa in Venice earlier this year, Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs are supported for Variations on a Theme. Like the former, the project is rooted in the rural experience, blending the magical world and the mundane on the margins between fiction and documentary.

Source/image: IFFR

IFF Rotterdam: New Head of IFFR Pro Appointed

IFF Rotterdam has appointed Marten Rabarts to the position of Head of IFFR Pro, effective immediately. Recently, Rabarts served as Festival Director at the New Zealand IFF. His extensive global career also has significant legacy in the Netherlands, both as Head of EYE International (now SeeNL)—where he was responsible for the promotion of Dutch film and film culture worldwide—and as Artistic Director of the ground-breaking development centre Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam. Rabarts will work closely with IFFR’s Festival Director, Vanja Kaludjercic, and Chief of Content, Melissa van der Schoor.

As Head of IFFR Pro, Rabarts will play a crucial role in building this sustainable programme, developing and implementing IFFR’s industry strategy, establishing new partnerships and delivering the festival’s industry programmes. IFFR will also feature an industry day dedicated to the Dutch film ecosystem. Another key focus for the upcoming edition is the Darkroom, IFFR Pro’s programme of work-in-progress screenings that takes place during CineMart. The projects presented are either supported by the Hubert Bals Fund or formerly presented at CineMart—bolstering support of projects across their lifecycle.

Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director at IFFR, said: "Marten has an incredible track record in both developing and implementing industry programmes and in elevating Dutch film culture on the global stage—making him the ideal person to spearhead and revitalise our industry offering. His strategic, entrepreneurial and curatorial vision is unparalleled and we are very proud to have him joining the team. IFFR has a history of trailblazing in artistic selection but also through creating vital spaces for the industry to meet and collaborate—and we look forward to building on that in our upcoming edition together".

The 54th edition of IFFR will take place from 30 January–9 February 2025, with the IFFR Pro Days running between 31 January–5 February 2025.

Source/image: IFFR

The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023)

Since the mid-1980s, experimental filmmaker Michael Gitlin has steadily worked away on an eclectic series of projects, including Duplicating the Copy from Memory, The Birdpeople, The Earth Is Young and That Which Is Possible.  Over the decades, Gitlin has seen his work selected for numerous international film festivals, including the London Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.  It is at the last of these where Gitlin's latest film, The Night Visitors, played as part of the 2024 edition's Harbour strand, in which it took its place alongside the likes of festival opener Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's eagerly awaited horror The Soul Eater, and Rotterdam favourite Amanda Kramer's new film, So Unreal.  Having received its Dutch premiere at the festival, The Night Visitors had its third and final IFFR outing in early February, when it screened at the city's KINO.

The Night Visitors is a documentary all about moths, and in less than 75 minutes Gitlin's film casts its net (ha!) far and wide as it examines these nocturnal lepidopterans.  Given that there are around 160,000 species of moth, the film can only look at a relatively small sample of these inscrutable creatures, but Gitlin sprinkles The Night Visitors with some striking examples: the tree-munching spongy (formerly gypsy) moth (Lymantria dispar); the giant, silk-making Polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus); and the gorgeous, brightly-coloured rosy maple moth (Dryocampa rubicunda).  While there are plenty of fully grown moths on show, the film is punctuated with fascinating footage of several instars as a caterpillar undergoes its transformation.  The Night Visitors is an experience that allows us to get up close and personal with its title characters, with the superb cinematography befitting of a top-class nature documentary.     

Indeed, there are times during The Night Visitors when you have to remind yourself you're watching the work of a video artist known for his avant-garde efforts, as the film almost plays as a straight, linear piece of nonfiction—albeit one that exhibits the odd experimental flourish.  A fair chunk of the running time is devoted to the curious story of Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, an astronomer and amateur entomologist who perhaps should have stuck exclusively to the former role, given that his botched efforts at silk harvesting led to the spread of the aforementioned spongy moth.  Trouvelot brought some of the now-invasive species' egg masses into the US from Europe and was raising the moths in controlled conditions when some of the larvae escaped; with the catastrophic damage done—the caterpillars now defoliate over a million acres of forest every year—Trouvelot lost interest in entomology and eventually returned to France, where he remained until his death.    

The Night Visitors also references Edgar Allan Poe's "The Sphinx", a New York-set tale in which the protagonist encounters the badass outsider that is the death's-head hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos)—even if the species wasn't, and isn't, to be found in the United States.  As Gitlin wryly observes, "never let geographical distribution get in the way of overwrought symbolism" (while there are several voiceovers on the soundtrack, this particular nugget—like much of the film's most interesting information—is relayed via concise onscreen text).  The Night Visitors' inclusion of "The Sphinx"—which is here given a brief, witty precis—provides a tangible link to Gitlin's 1996 film Berenice, a freewheeling adaptation of Poe's eponymous short story.  As experimenta goes, The Night Visitors is certainly one of the more accessible examples; it's a fluid, engaging and beguiling work, one which provides a very welcome insight into the opaque lives of these remarkable insects.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

You Promised Me the Sea (Nadir Moknèche, 2023)

Nadir Moknèche's debut feature Le harem de Mme Osmane was released nearly 25 years ago, and the director followed that film with the Belgian co-production Viva Laldjérie, which played at the 2005 edition of IFF Rotterdam; since then, he's directed several solid features (Lola Pater, Goodbye Morocco, Délice Paloma) en route to his latest effort, You Promised Me the Sea (French: L'air de la mer rend libre).  Moknèche's new film was one of the selections for this year's BFI Flare, where it screened alongside several other strong examples of francophone cinema including Chloé Robichaud's Days of Happiness, Edith Chapin's Sex is Comedy: The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators, Jérémy Piette's The Blue Shelter, and Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography.       

Moknèche's previous film, the aforementioned Lola Pater—which starred the legendary Fanny Ardant and featured a juicy role for the excellent Belgian actress Lucie Debay—hinged on a parent who'd long kept a secret from their adult son, and in You Promised Me the Sea this scenario is inverted as twentysomething butcher Saïd (Youssouf Abi-Ayad) goes to great lengths to hide his homosexuality from his mother and father.  Saïd's efforts to keep a lid on his clandestine life extend as far as acquiescing to an arranged marriage to Hadjira (Kenza Fortas), a rather reserved young woman who has recently completed a stint in prison.  Given their respective circumstances, there's a sense that the marriage may prove useful to both Hadjira and Saïd—that said, they still have to go through the experience of living together.

Hadjira and Saïd aren't particularly fond of each other to begin with, and the pair soon settle into an unhappy domesticity in which Hadjira becomes increasingly isolated as the distant Saïd spends his evenings arranging hookups via a dating app.  It's clear that Hadjira, who is unaware of her husband's real sexual identity, would like to make a go of the marriage and start a family, but Saïd is both physically and emotionally absent, and the couple make little progress.  As someone who was jailed largely on account of her ill-judged relationship with a drug dealer, Hadjira views the situation as a chance for a fresh start, but Saïd has no interest in becoming someone else and isn't looking to embrace a heterosexual relationship—although he does at least try to maintain the façade, lest his parents discover the truth.  

With You Promised Me the Sea, Nadir Moknèche has created a subtle, engaging tale, one in which the simplicity of the setup belies the effectiveness of the end product.  The film is underpinned by a wonderfully sympathetic turn from Kenza Fortas, an actress previously best known for both playing the title role in 2018's Shéhérazade and her substantial part in Cédric Jimenez's exemplary action thriller The Stronghold.  Youssouf Abi-Ayad is also very good, and he has a tougher task on his hands as he vies to make the slippery Saïd a likeable, relatable character.  The two leads are backed by a fine supporting cast, of which Zahia Dehar and the fine, stalwart Zinedine Soualem are the most memorable performers.  As with Lola Pater, Moknèche here presents the viewer with very little that is new, but there can be few complaints when a film is as well-crafted as this.

Darren Arnold

Images: Pyramide Films

Raindance 2024: The Heirloom

Having had its world premiere at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam—where it took its place alongside the likes of Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's horror The Soul Eater, Kaouther Ben Hania's documentary Four Daughters, and Sean Durkin's biopic The Iron Claw—Ben Petrie's The Heirloom plays at the Raindance Film Festival tomorrow, when it screens at London's Prince Charles Cinema.  In terms of the festival's prizes, The Heirloom has been nominated in the same categories as Dorka Vermes' Árni, with both films up for Best Debut Director, Best Performance in a Debut, and the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature.    

Prior to The Heirloom, Ben Petrie had made half a dozen shorts, the most recent of which is also the best known: Her Friend Adam (see trailer below).  Heavily reliant on a DIY aesthetic, Petrie's feature debut feels like a very natural progression from his short film work.  In The Heirloom, the director himself stars as Eric, a filmmaker labouring over a script he started some years earlier.  As in Her Friend Adam, the writer-director's real-life partner Grace Glowicki plays Petrie's character's companion, and as Eric toils over his screenplay, Glowicki's Allie is desperate to get a rescue dog.  Eric has some misgivings about such an endeavour but eventually agrees, and the wheels are set in motion.

With lockdown looming, the race is on to secure a dog before the pandemic makes such a transaction impossible, and Allie and Eric arrange to rehome Milly, a whippet from the Dominican Republic.  Given the restrictions that are in place on account of COVID, Allie and Eric need to collect Milly directly from the airport; cue a vaguely threatening nocturnal scene in which the couple meet their new pet on the wintry tarmac.  Once this tense sequence passes, Milly is taken to Eric and Allie's home and, as you might expect, it takes some time for her to get used to these new surroundings.  Milly is a sweet girl, but one lacking in confidence, and Allie and Eric work steadily to integrate the dog into their lives. 

As Milly becomes established in the couple's home, Eric—who now firmly states his desire to achieve a work-life balance—abandons his moribund screenplay in favour of making a film about the couple's relationship with their pet.  From this point on, The Heirloom turns into a most slippery metafiction, one in which we're never entirely sure if what we're watching is simply the film, or the film within that film.  There are a few clues here and there—a stray boom mic, multiple takes of Allie reacting to Milly urinating on the floor, the diegetic noise of a drone engine as it films an overhead shot—but it says much about Ben Petrie's filmmaking that The Heirloom works so fluidly.  The screening will be followed by a Q&A.

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR

Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023)

Earlier this year, acclaimed filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania's Four Daughters (Arabic: Banāt Olfa; French: Les Filles d'Olfa) fell slightly short in its bid to win the Oscar for best documentary feature.  Ben Hania is no stranger to the Academy Awards, as her 2020 narrative film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for best international feature; centring on a Syrian man who went to desperate lengths to reach Brussels, the film was based on a bizarre true story and starred Monica Bellucci and Belgian actor Koen de Bouw.  The Man Who Sold His Skin would eventually lose the Oscar race to Thomas Vinterberg's excellent Druk (AKA Another Round), and Four Daughters also faced some stiff competition in March when it came up against Maite Alberdi's The Eternal Memory, Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo's Bobi Wine: The People's President, Nisha Pahuja's To Kill a Tiger, and eventual winner 20 Days in Mariupol.

Four Daughters'  Dutch premiere took place in January, when it played in International Film Festival Rotterdam's Limelight strand, which also included such titles as Bertrand Bonello's The Beast, Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw and James Nunn's One More Shot.  This year, the Limelight section opened up its scope beyond Rotterdam, with audiences in Arnhem, Groningen, Maastricht and Den Bosch getting the chance to catch an advance screening of a film from the strand's eclectic selection.  Ben Hania's film focuses on a Tunisian family headed by single mum Olfa Hamrouni, who, as per the title, has four daughters.  In the wake of the First Arab Spring (which began in Tunisia, the only democracy to emerge from the uprisings), Olfa's two eldest girls—Rahma and Ghofrane—were radicalised and left home for a jihadist training camp in Syria.  Understandably, this left a huge hole in the lives of Olfa and her other two daughters, Eya and Tayssir.

In Four Daughters, actresses Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar respectively take the roles of Rahma and Ghofrane, while Eya and Tayssir play themselves as events from the four girls' past are restaged for the camera.  While this is all quite straightforward—in essence, the sisters are joined by proxies for their absent siblings—matters get much cloudier when it comes to the mother's part in the film: even though Olfa is still very much present in the family home, she too is played by an actress (Hend Sabry), but the real Olfa is always ready to interrupt a scene when she feels it isn't playing out as she remembers.  It's suggested early on that Sabry's function is to act in those episodes which are too painful for Olfa to relive, although Eya and Tayssir are afforded no such safety net.  Given its slippery mix of fact and fiction, some may have been slightly surprised to see Four Daughters nominated for the best doc Oscar—it is certainly more of a docudrama than a strict documentary—but on balance it is fair to say that the film always has reality at its core.

As formally interesting as it is sincere, Four Daughters is sadly lacking when it comes to providing genuine insight into why these two girls decided to join Daesh; in this regard, Benedetta Argentieri's The Matchmaker—which documented the story of student Tooba Gondal, who left London to link up with ISIS in Syria—offered a more compelling look at the radicalisation of young women.  With her novel setup established, Kaouther Ben Hania appears wary of doing anything that could upset the metafictional apple cart, and the upshot is that the form eclipses the content.  But the quasi-family dynamic presented here is both moving and undeniably impressive, and there is much to like about the ways in which the performers interact with Olfa and her two remaining daughters.  Surprisingly, given its grim subject matter, Four Daughters is not without humour, and several of the reënactments elicit genuine laughter from all involved.  Yet no amount of hilarity can obscure the keen sadness at the heart of this fitfully engaging film.

Darren Arnold

Images: Jour2Fête

IFFR: Hubert Bals Fund Announces HBF+Europe Titles

The Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has announced the ten co-productions awarded €60,000 each through its HBF+Europe support schemes, with eight supported for co-production and two for post-production. The selection comes with a strong commitment to emerging talent, supporting a majority of first or second time feature filmmakers and covering a wide geographical spread, with filmmakers from Singapore, Turkey, Lebanon, Chile, Tunisia, Mexico and Argentina. 

Tamara Tatishvili, Head of the HBF: “While demonstrating an impressive range of artistic approaches, all the projects in this selection call for the need to make our world a better place. Each production team follows a complex path to bring projects to fruition, and in cases like the two supported projects from Argentina, these funds will prove crucial to realising ambitious, artistically driven work. I am proud to make the HBF part of these strong collaborative efforts between international producers and selected filmmakers.”

The topic of migration is present throughout the selection, notably in Love Conquers All; Marie & Jolie similarly deals with movements of people. Bruno Santamaría presents a 90s-set story in Seis meses en el edificio rosa con azul; another period tale is Hijas únicas. The ghosts of the Paraguay War haunt the community in El mundo es nuestro. Olivia tackles the theme of disappearance; Agora is the second project supported for post-production. One of the eight projects selected for Co-production Support must remain anonymous.

Two of the projects selected are Netherlands co-productions, both debut features. As Shadows Fade by Turkish filmmaker Burcu Aykar is a poetic, multilayered narrative that deals with queer issues and women’s liberation in 1990s Turkey, and is co-produced by Amsterdam’s Isabella Films. Set in an all-girls school in Singapore, Amoeba by Siyou Tan is supported for the third time by the HBF, following development and NFF+HBF funding, and is co-produced with Rotterdam’s Volya Films. 

Source/images: IFFR

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

The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin, 2023)

In the years since his 2011 directorial feature debut, the impressive and decidedly Haneke-esque Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin has directed just one other feature film—2020's The Nest—prior to his latest effort, the biographical The Iron Claw.  In between his first and second movies, Durkin made the superb miniseries Southcliffe, a harrowing four-parter centring on a spree shooter played by a particularly terrifying Sean Harris.  The Tony Grisoni-penned Southcliffe may well be Durkin's finest achievement, and just last year he returned to the small screen to direct half of the episodes of another acclaimed miniseries: Dead Ringers, a remake/reboot of David Cronenberg's 1988 film of the same name.  Durkin has also produced other directors' films, notably those of Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer, Christine) and Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother, Piercing).   

The largely 80s-set The Iron Claw charts the travails of a Texan family of professional wrestlers ruled by a fist of, er, iron belonging to patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), who is at the tail end of a solid career in World Class Championship Wrestling (WCWW).  As Fritz's time in the ring draws to a close, he's keen for his offspring—he and his wife Doris (Maura Tierney) are parents to half a dozen boys—to tag in.  When the couple's firstborn, Jack (Romeo Miloro Newcomer), dies in a freak accident at the age of six, the protective Kevin (Zac Efron) becomes the eldest of five, and as teenagers he and his brothers are pushed towards wrestling careers, irrespective of the varying levels of enthusiasm among the siblings.  Under the domineering Fritz's harsh guidance, the boys achieve a great deal on the wrestling circuit, with middle son Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) becoming the most successful of the brothers.  Sadly, the numerous titles won by the Von Erichs are more than offset by a series of family tragedies.

If The Iron Claw wasn't based on a true story, most would dismiss its plot developments as implausible, but the horrifying truth is that 

at the age of just 35, Kevin was the last surviving son.

  By this stage, Kevin and his wife Pam (Lily James, excellent) had started a family of their own, and the new father was understandably so concerned about the Von Erich line being cursed that he opted to give his first child the real family surname of Adkisson (Von Erich was only ever a ring name).  The physically transformed Efron is outstanding as Kevin, a kind, polite and sensitive man outside of the sport, yet one who poses a formidable opponent to the parade of de facto villains he faces in the squared circle.  Refreshingly, Durkin has opted to film each of the wrestling matches in one long take, and the results are convincingly unconvincing; as is so often the case with the cartoon world of wrestling, the question of authenticity remains unresolved.

Given his CV, Durkin seems an unlikely candidate to helm a wrassling movie—but many of us thought much the same when Darren Aronofsky announced he would be making The Wrestler.  Like Aronofsky's wonderfully bleak tale, The Iron Claw is a wrestling film that packs an existential wallop; that this punishing picture is backed by so-hip-it-hurts indie studio A24 (Midsommar, Uncut Gems, Moonlight) tells you it is likely to be anything but a rote sports drama, and Sean Durkin proves a good fit for a story in which the next misfortune is never very far away.  That said, the writer-director does know when to exercise some restraint, as evidenced by the omission of youngest brother Chris Von Erich—who committed suicide in 1991—from the film; even as it stands, the litany of agony presented in the IFFR-selected The Iron Claw comes perilously close to having a numbing effect.  Yet the coda is suitably moving, and for the most part Durkin's engaging film possesses a warmth that was all but absent from his previous work.

Darren Arnold

Images: A24

One More Shot (James Nunn, 2024)

Having had its Dutch premiere at the Pathé de Kuip as part of International Film Festival Rotterdam on Sunday, James Nunn's One More Shot has its fifth and final IFFR outing tonight, when it screens at the city's Pathé Schouwburgplein.  One More Shot is playing as part of the festival's Limelight strand, where it takes its place alongside the likes of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, Kaouther Ben Hania's Four Daughters and Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw; while Nunn's film may pale in comparison with these acclaimed titles, it's a serviceable action movie which deserves better than its straight-to-video fate.  With this in mind, One More Shot's Rotterdam screenings afford a rare chance to see the film in a cinema, and it's safe to say that far worse films will be granted a theatrical release between now and the end of the year.  While the movie's absence from multiplexes will prove disappointing for its cast and crew, it's easy to imagine One More Shot enjoying a long life on the small screen.

One More Shot is a direct sequel to James Nunn's 2021 feature One Shot—in between these ventures, the filmmaker helmed creature feature Shark Bait—and both films are novel in that each appears to have been filmed in a single continuous shot.  As such, the films' titles are quite witty, although it should be pointed out that considerably more than one gunshot is fired in each film.  One More Shot joins its predecessor and the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman and Sam Mendes' 1917 in a select group of movies that have been edited to look as if they were filmed in one take, even if such efforts might have to defer to those films that are bona fide one-shot features—such as Russian Ark, Victoria and Medusa Deluxe.  One More Shot reunites Nunn with the first film's star, Scott Adkins, who came to the project fresh from his memorable turn in last year's epic John Wick: Chapter 4—a film that featured a jaw-dropping single-take fight sequence as it set about redefining the modern action flick.

Here, Adkins reprises his role as crack Navy SEAL Jake Harris, who in the first film was in the thick of it as his squad attempted to transport Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) from a CIA black site.  Mansur had been detained on account of his involvement in a plot to launch a terror strike on Washington DC, and One More Shot opens with the prisoner and Harris arriving in the US as the clock ticks down to the attack.  The American authorities have brought along Mansur's heavily pregnant wife Niesha (Meena Rayann) as leverage, but before the CIA can begin interrogating their man, an army of mercenaries led by Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White) storms the airport in an attempt to retrieve Mansur.  Harris, who has only just had his part in this fraught business ended by Tom Berenger's apoplectic CIA officer, soon realises what's going on and sets about dispatching countless henchmen via a variety of brutal methods—although, more often than not, a gun is involved.  

The one-shot film is something of a curio: it can be hard to reconcile the impressiveness of the achievement with the notion that it's not much more than a technical exercise.  Here, though, there's a real-time urgency to the film, and the kinetic presentation manages to maintain interest in what is essentially a glorified video game (as indeed was the aforementioned 1917).  Adkins—in the sort of role usually reserved for the likes of Jason Statham—is good value as Harris; disappointingly, White is given precious little to do up until his (admittedly impressive) big fight scene with Adkins—both actors have a background in martial arts, which lends a satisfying authenticity to the face-off.  The rest of the acting is pretty variable, with Berenger phoning it in and Gemma Arterton's less-famous sister Hannah struggling to make much of an impact as a brusque CIA agent.  But One More Shot is all about the spectacle, and Nunn, working with a relatively low budget, has crafted a likeable, competent and generally entertaining action thriller.

Darren Arnold

Images: Screen Media Films

53rd IFF Rotterdam (25/1/24–4/2/24)

Jonathan Ogilvie’s spirited Head South will open the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Thursday 25 January, with the festival running until Sunday 4 February. New Zealand filmmaker Ogilvie returns to IFFR with his semi-autobiographical film, a small-town coming-of-age comedy where a private schoolboy becomes desperately enamoured with all things post-punk in 1979 Christchurch. Ogilvie's last film Lone Wolf screened in the festival’s Big Screen Competition in 2021. Vanja Kaludjercic, IFFR Festival Director: "With Head South, Jonathan Ogilvie returns to the festival with an unpredictable coming-of-age story that delights in its shifting tone. Ogilvie is the kind of filmmaker we cherish at IFFR: those for whom the art is, above all, an adventure of discovery".

A star cast voices Ishan Shukla’s dystopian sci-fi animation Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, which has its world premiere at IFFR 2024 in the Bright Future programme of feature debuts. The paper bag-wearing citizens of the film’s ultra-regulated society attribute their voices to actors including Golshifteh Farahani and Asia Argento, as well as filmmakers Gaspar Noé and Lav Diaz. So Unreal is the latest film from genre-expanding filmmaker Amanda Kramer following a Focus programme at IFFR 2022, and screens in Harbour where it has its European premiere, as does Elegies, the latest by Hong Kong cinema legend Ann Hu. IFFR 2024 also welcomes Egypt’s 2024 Oscars submission Voy! Voy! Voy! by Omar Hilal, screening in the Limelight programme of festival favourites and international award-winners.

In the lead up to the festival, audiences across the Netherlands can get a taste of the programme with the IFFR Preview Tour. More than 35 cinemas have currently committed to hosting a screening of a film from the Limelight programme in the week before the festival, in cities including Arnhem, Groningen, Maastricht and 's-Hertogenbosch. The 41st edition of IFFR’s co-production market CineMart begins on Sunday 28 January, with Spotlight presentations by project teams returning this year on Monday 29 January. On Tuesday 30, the second edition of the Pro Darkroom presents a curated selection of work-in-progress screenings, and is followed by the IFFR Pro Awards in the evening. Talent programmes, including the Rotterdam Lab, also return to the festival.

Source/images: IFFR

IFFR: Hubert Bals Fund Announces New Projects

The Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has chosen ten feature film projects to each be awarded a grant of €10,000 under its Script and Project Development Support scheme. A committee of international industry experts selected the projects from more than 760 applications. Tamara Tatishvili, incoming Head of the Hubert Bals Fund: "In these complex times, when uncertainty seems to reign, the significance of impactful storytelling becomes even more pronounced. In the midst of a fiercely competitive round and guided by the diligent efforts of the HBF selection committees, I am delighted to extend a hand of companionship to the creative teams that’s about more than just financial backing". 

Vanja Kaludjercic, IFFR Festival Director: "The Hubert Bals Fund remains a steadfast ally for emerging talent and a vital tool in championing storytelling worldwide. It's truly encouraging to find both new faces and familiar filmmakers who've previously showcased their work at the festival among our selections. We take immense pride in supporting their creative journeys". Two projects from the African continent are supported: Afronauts, about the true but forgotten events of the Zambian space programme, is the first feature by Ghanaian filmmaker Nuotama Frances Bodomo; and Senegalese-French filmmaker Katy Léna Ndiaye turns from the past to the shocking present with her debut fiction feature Lënd, in which rising waters threaten the lives of the residents of a fishing neighbourhood.

The Sea Is Calm Tonight is self-taught Vietnamese filmmaker Le Bao's follow-up to the Berlinale Encounters jury prize-winning Taste (2021). Mimicking the flows between the more than seven thousand islands that make up the Philippines, Martika Ramirez Escobar follows Leonor Will Never Die (2022) with Daughters of the Sea. Ana Elena Tejera’s Corte Culebra addresses the ancestral trauma of the communities displaced on Gatun Lake, the artificial heart of the Panama Canal. Another of the filmmakers in the selection to have screened their work at IFFR is Shengze Zhu, whose Present.Perfect. competed in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2019. Her fiction debut A Distant House Smokes on the Horizon will explore the violence of the everyday with the recent phenomenon of juvenile murder cases in China.

Lipika Singh Darai’s short Night and Fear was in competition at IFFR 2023, and her feature debut Birdwoman will be produced in the language of the Ho indigenous community from Odisha in India. Egyptian filmmaker Nada Riyadh’s feature fiction debut Moonblind will be rooted in an arena of traditional Egyptian healing rituals. With I Recognized Him by His Hands, Omer Capoglu presents a humorous but heartfelt take on the Turkish culture around martyrdom. Fantasma Neon sees Brazilian filmmaker Leonardo Martinelli take on the gig economy in musical style, protesting against the anonymising and casualisation of labour by making the delivery drivers in his film the loudest they can be, singing and dancing in the streets. The film is the follow-up to the short of the same name.

Source/images: IFFR