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

International Film Festival Rotterdam: RTM Pitch Winner

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and the municipality of Rotterdam have awarded a grant of €20,000 to the Rotterdam-based Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker Diana Al-Halabi for a short experimental film on food insecurity and migration. The project will receive expert guidance and aims to premiere at IFFR 2024 as part of the festival’s Rotterdam-focused programme, RTM. Vanja Kaludjercic, festival director, said: "This is the fourth project to be successfully funded through RTM Pitch, which has been crucial for bolstering the development of Rotterdam's vibrant film scene. The sell-out RTM Day at IFFR 2023 was electrifying—we can’t wait for the next one and for the premiere of Al-Halabi’s daring project".

The Battle of Empty Stomachs will present an absurdist fashion walk through the iconic Maastunnel in Rotterdam—a musical and poetic journey exploring themes of migration, exodus and hunger. The tunnel connects the north and south of Rotterdam, two sides of the city considered marked by class and cultural divisions, here becoming a symbol for water crossings in migration and the asylum-seeking process. Diana Al-Halabi pursues an interdisciplinary practice, with a focus on moving image, text, performance and painting. Her previous short, The Disaster Cannot Be Contained (pictured above), premiered at IFFR 2023 in the RTM programme, and drew on the artist’s connections to both Rotterdam and Beirut, where she examined the devastating port explosion in 2020.

The jury consisted of Fleur Knopperts (Volya Films), Ibtisam Harrak (Rose Stories Academy) and IFFR programmer Koen de Rooij. They said: "The jury was impressed by the strikingly unconventional way the film deals with the geopolitical problem of food distribution, an urgent subject that is rarely addressed in cinema". The €20,000 grant is financed by the municipality of Rotterdam as part of its film and media policy to encourage local film talent development. Previous winners have taken a cinematic approach to local stories, including port workers and Feyenoord supporters. At IFFR 2023, Ravi Sandberg presented the 2022 RTM Pitch-winner, Fantoomwijk: a ghostly investigation into the Tweebosbuurt in Rotterdam.

Source/image: IFFR

Shabu (Shamira Raphaëla, 2021)

Shamira Raphaëla's Shabu feels very much like a companion piece to Mondig Zuid: both documentaries—which were selected for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, where they played in the RTM strand—examine the daily lives of teens from Rotterdam's south side.  Following post-IFFR outings at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) and the Berlinale, Shabu continues to make its way round the festival circuit with screenings at the London Film Festival, where it is showing today and tomorrow; a measure of anticipated interest in the film is indicated by the fact that today sees it playing on two screens, with 15 minutes separating the start times.  Mondig Zuid's three main subjects could quite seamlessly wander into Shabu, while the title character of Raphaëla's film would not look out of place alongside the teenagers of Mondig Zuid.    

Much of Shabu takes place in and around De Peperklip, one of a number of striking residential complexes designed by Dutch-Curaçaoan architect Carel Weeber; now 40 years old, the controversial apartment block stands as the largest social housing project in Rotterdam-Zuid, and in Shabu this vast, sprawling building serves as a character in its own right.  The Shabu of the title is a 14-year-old boy of Surinamese extraction, and shortly into the film he's seen being admonished by his grandmother for wrecking her car, which he borrowed without permission.  With a long hot summer in the doghouse stretching out ahead of him, Shabu is tasked with scratching together the money needed to pay the substantial repair bill.  Naturally, the teen is none too pleased with the penalty he's been handed, but he reluctantly agrees to do what he can to raise the required four-figure sum. 

When several days of hawking ice lollies fails to bring in much revenue, Shabu—who appears to know virtually everyone in the vicinity of De Peperklip—turns his attentions to staging a block party, which will carry an admission fee of 2€.  Shabu proceeds to go on a charm offensive, calling various friends and acquaintances in hope of finding a DJ for the event, and he ropes a number of friends into learning a dance routine that's planned as a backdrop to Shabu's showcasing of his talents—or otherwise—as a rapper.  It must be said that Shabu shows no lack of initiative as he sets about organising the party, and his resourcefulness is quite impressive.  While it is clear that Shabu—who often passes for someone five years his senior—knows how to schmooze those who can help him out, there are also moments when he demonstrates a lack of tact, with both his girlfriend and loyal best friend falling victim to Shabu's thoughtlessness.

Yet it is Shamira Raphaëla's willingness to document the various sides of Shabu that makes her film so compelling; Shabu may be flawed and immature, but he's also capable of real warmth and generosity, and in a holistic sense his personality is one in which the good clearly outweighs the bad.  Which again brings us back to Shabu's near neighbours from Mondig Zuid who, like the boy from De Peperklip and countless other teens, are simply trying to figure out what is a very confusing period in their lives, and in doing so they don't always make the correct decisions.  While Shabu's immediate situation may be rather more pressing as he scrabbles to earn the money to pay back his grandmother, he's treading what is recognisably the same path as Mondig Zuid's Selena, Darlin and Tamia, each of whom could easily have anchored a film all on their own.  Over time, I suspect I will conflate the engaging, uplifting Shabu with Mondig Zuid, but both films are equally terrific snapshots of the real Rotterdam.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Mondig Zuid (René van Zundert, 2022)

The most recent edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam saw its RTM strand showcase a dozen works from local filmmakers, and word has it that the 2023 festival will place an even greater emphasis on films made in the city on the Maas.  What is interesting about the RTM strand is that it almost acts as a festival inside a festival: there are a mix of shorts, features, series and documentaries, and the makers of the selections range from those just starting out to those who have long since been established in the world of cinema.  Highlights of the 2022 RTM selection included Christiaan van Scheermbeek's Altijd alles anders, which detailed Paul Röttger's work with the Rotterdams Centrum voor Theater, and So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us, a raucous and ridiculously entertaining short focusing on some particularly fanatical Feyenoord supporters.

Also among the offerings in this year's RTM was René van Zundert's hour-long documentary Mondig Zuid which, as its name suggests, fixes its gaze on the south side of the city.  Within this geographical area, van Zundert's focus is on three young people—Tamia, Selena and Darlin—all of whom are dealing with that well-known issue of growing up; as most adults will confirm, this experience can bring more than its fair share of complications.  The bright, articulate Tamia finds herself well and truly up against it as she strives to become a spoken word artist; Selena is from Bloemhof—which in 2009 was placed fourth in then-Dutch Minister of Housing Eberhard van der Laan's list of "40 problem neighbourhoods"—and writes daily letters to her sister, who has been been placed in a youth institution on account of her behaviour; and Darlin, who is originally from Curaçao, aims to finish school, find a job, and stay out of trouble.

While all three of the film's subjects face various challenges, there's a lot of hope on offer in Mondig Zuid—which carries the alternative title Talk is Cheap—as we watch these children attempt to figure out solutions to their problems.  The film is an unsentimental, pragmatic affair, one from which we get a fine sense of how daily life is for Darlin, Selena and Tamia, and while its fly-on-the-wall format may be very familiar, it's the most effective way to capture the moments of isolation and confusion that are common to, well, virtually everyone who's ever gone through the ritual of growing up.  Which is not to say that Mondig Zuid is all about the solipsistic mindset: Darlin, mindful of his own experiences when he first arrived in the Netherlands, happily helps out at Dutch language classes aimed at those who have immigrated to the country; similarly, Selena seems keenly aware of the situation in which her sister finds herself, and her long-distance efforts to support her absent sibling come across as heartfelt and genuine.  

While it's inherently televisual, Mondig Zuid's true achievement lies in its editing; presumably, countless hours of footage had to be distilled down into the crisp, easily digestible finished product, which feels just about right in terms of duration.  To present normal people carrying out everyday tasks isn't difficult, but making such a spectacle engaging requires considerable skill, and van Zundert has crafted a film that is always compelling.  Of course, it helps that the trio of Selena, Darlin and Tamia are likeable and relatable, and most viewers will be willing them to overcome the various obstacles that are placed in their paths.  While it may be the case that Mondig Zuid will hold most appeal for those familiar with Rotterdam, there's a universality to the film: the world is full of similar young people, all employing various strategies as they attempt to navigate the many forks in the road. 

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR

52nd IFF Rotterdam (25/1/23–5/2/23)

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) presents a new team line-up and structure ahead of its upcoming 52nd edition, which will take place from 25 January to 5 February 2023. Vanja Kaludjercic, Festival Director at IFFR, said: “IFFR is completely unique - our team and our programme each year are testament to our commitment to bold and thought-provoking cinema - and we’re excited to be entering into a new chapter in our history. This year, we’ve had the challenging experience of looking at our organisation and asking difficult questions about how we become more inclusive and more sustainable for the decades to come - and as a result have made some significant changes. Now we are looking forward to delivering IFFR 2023 and beyond through a revitalised team consisting of many of our existing programmers as well as adding new voices. We can’t wait to be back in-person with audiences next year to present a line-up of surprising, challenging, and exciting cinema and visual arts.”

The selection committee for features consists of former IFFR programmers Stefan Borsos (South and South-East Asia), Michelle Carey (English speaking territories), Evgeny Gusyatinskiy (Central and Eastern Europe, Israel), Mercedes Martínez-Abarca (South and Central America, Mexico, Caribbeans), Olaf Möller (German speaking territories, Nordic countries, the Cinema Regained programme), Lyse Nsengiyumva (Sub-Saharan Africa), Olivier Pierre (French speaking territories), and Delly Shirazi (Middle-East, Northern Africa, Iran, Turkey), former Shorts programmer Koen de Rooij (Netherlands, Flanders), and new hires Rebecca De Pas (Italy, Spain, Portugal), and Kristína Aschenbrennerova (South Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan).

The Shorts programme will be curated by the selection committee for shorts consisting of Rebecca De Pas, Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss, Lyse Nsengiyumva, Ivan Ramljak, Koen de Rooij, and Leonie Woodfin. The Rotterdam dedicated programme “RTM”, which aims to encourage Rotterdam film talent development, becomes more central to the programming and is led by Ronny Theeuwes as Head of Year-round events, Talks & Unleashed. The scouts for IFFR’s upcoming programme are: Hiromi Aihara (Japan), Robert Gray (French speaking territories), Wu Jueren (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Ralph McKay (North America), Ivan Ramljak (Former Yugoslav countries), and Susana Santos Rodrigues (Latin America). 

IFFR also welcomes Bianca Taal as Head of HBF, Inke Van Loocke as Head of Pro, Charlie Vermeulen as Head of Programme Operations, Alessia Acone as Manager Pro, Sara Juricic as Manager Talent. Other posts announced include: Barbara de Heer as Chief of Funding and Business Growth, Marije Stijkel as Chief of Operations, and Anne Wabeke as Head of Communications. Overall, six permanent roles in total were made redundant across the organisation as part of the restructure. IFFR’s festival strands consist of: Tiger Competition, Big Screen Competition, Tiger Shorts Competition, Bright Future, Harbour, Limelight, Cinema Regained, special programmes (retrospectives/thematic programmes), Shorts, Art Directions. Submissions open from 1 June; check out the submissions page for more details.

Source/images: IFFR

Altijd alles anders (Christiaan van Schermbeek, 2022)

When you hear the name Paul Röttger, there's a good chance that you might think of his starring role in the TV adaptation of Jan Terlouw's Oorlogswinter, a series that was first broadcast all the way back in 1975 on what was then known as Nederland 1 (now NPO 1).  A few years later, Röttger was seen on the big screen in another tale of the Netherlands under German occupation, Wim Verstappen's Pastorale 1943.  The part of Michiel van Beusekom in Oorlogswinter might quite reasonably be viewed as Röttger's defining screen role, although he also played the title character in Simon Winner and appeared in the Dutch version of classic British sitcom Porridge.  Yet for the past three decades or so, Röttger has been more or less exclusively focused on theatre; his pioneering efforts with the Rotterdams Centrum voor Theater (RCTh) have rightly earned numerous plaudits for the actor–director, who also founded the institution.  

What sets Röttger's work with the RCTh apart is that, at its core, it's all about inclusivity, and his company Theater Babel Rotterdam consists of performers from all walks of life—race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, or mental condition form no obstacle for those who'd like to work in one of Röttger's productions.  There's no gimmick here—Röttger has complete belief in this project, and he has worked tirelessly to carve out a space for people who are shunned by so many; this fine film from Christiaan van Schermbeek captures the sincerity of a man who has devoted himself to providing opportunities for anyone and everyone who harbours the desire to work in theatre.  Van Schermbeek is no stranger to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where Altijd alles anders is currently premiering in the RTM strand, and over the past twenty years a number of his medium-length works—most notably the Simply Cinema series of films—have played at the festival.

While Altijd alles anders generally takes a holistic view of the work of Theater Babel Rotterdam, it does spend some time on individual interviews with a number of the company's members beyond Paul Röttger, and such segments frequently prove to be both illuminating and moving.  One of the film's most touching moments comes fairly early on, when Stijn, a likeable young man with a real talent for drumming, rues the day when he came close to joining a band.  The reasons it didn't work out had nothing to do with his musical ability, and Stijn says that he doesn't consider it to be a missed opportunity; rather, he views the way he is as being the real missed opportunity.  There's something quite heartbreaking about the highly perceptive Stijn's candour, yet he's a great example of the sort of individual who, without the exceptional tutelage of Paul Röttger, would most likely have spent much if not all of their life on the margins of society.   

As a documentary, Altijd alles anders is something of a no-frills affair, with van Schermbeek opting for a pragmatic approach as he gets up close and personal with both Röttger and the actors he's guiding; it's fascinating to watch the company's rehearsals from the vantage point of a camera that's quite literally among the actors, and such a bold move captures both the immediacy and energy of the group in a way that could never be matched by the fly on the wall technique.  What if any difference this strategy might make to the performers is impossible to gauge, but you sense that van Schermbeek is just as well to jump right in like this; after all, as the great ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch once pointed out, subjects will always be affected by the presence of a camera.  In a way, Christiaan van Scheermbeek's approach mirrors that of Röttger's: both men are keen to roll up their sleeves and cut directly to the heart of the matter.  Altijd alles anders is both a fine record of Paul Röttger's work with RCTh and a deceptively simple film; it contains moments that stay with the viewer for a long time after the end credits have rolled.

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR