WHEN it was launched 25 years ago the Rotterdam International Film Festival attracted just 17 people to its opening presentation, the Iranian director Darius Mahrjui's The Postman but it also attracted such notable guests as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Abel Gance and Wim Wenders. The Postman drew a substantially bigger attendance at Rotterdam this year when the entire 1972 inaugural programme was rescreened to mark the event's 25th anniversary. Attendances were remarkably high day and night through this year's festival, which closed last Sunday, and the event registered more than 188,000 paid admissions over the course of 12 days.
I was in Rotterdam for a wind 48 hours in the middle of last week, as one of the international panelists at the Festival Film School, a well structured three day event for film students which covered the progress of a movie through all the key stages from concept ion to release. The film school was just one of the many practical elements in a multi layered festival which also hosts the imaginative CineMart parallel to the packed programme of new international cinema.
Started five years ago by Wouter Barendrecht and Janette Kolkema, CineMart is designed for writers, producers and directors with projects in development. The organisers help bring the film makers together with other filmmakers and potential financiers, sales agents and distributors during the festival, and this year over 2,700 appointments had been set up by line Mart before any of the film makers set foot in Rotterdam. As many as 48 works in progress went through the CineMart process this year and the best possible indication of the event's success is the fact that 10 of last year's CineMart projects have been completed or are in production at present.
Elsewhere on the hectic Rotterdam schedule there was the Exploding Cinema programme, a digital playground where visitors were invited to experiment with the Internet, computer and arcade games and other interactive media. Every night at 10 p.m. and at midnight in the festival's head quarters in the Hilton hotel, visiting directors participated in lively Talkshows. And every evening the largest auditorium in the Nightown entertainment complex was converted into a disco and festival hang out "for festival goers who don't want to go to bed", the programme brochure advised.
There were 15 feature films in competition for the annual Tiger awards the tiger is the festival's motif and a live tiger was on stage at the opening party and the jury, which included Scent Of The Green Papaya director Tran Anh Hung and actresses Adrienne Shelley and Renee Soutendjik, split the award between three movies, each of which received cash prizes of $10,000 from sponsor PolyGram Filmed Entertainment Zhang Yuan's Sons from China, Hashiguchi Ryosuke's Like Grains of Sand from Japan, and Gilles MacKinnon's Small Faces from Britain.
MacKinnon, who made The Playboys and Trojan Eddie in Ireland, returns to his native Glasgow for Small Faces, which he wrote with his brother Billy, the film's producer. Set in 1968, the film centres on the MacLean family, the widowed Lorna (Clare Higgins) and her three teenage sons Bobby (J.S. Duffy) who has joined a violent gang the sensitive Alan (Joseph McFadden) who wants to escape, his surroundings and go to art school and the impish and inquisitive 13 year old Lex (Iain Robertson).
WHEN Lex accidentally shoots a psychopathic gang leader (Kevin Trainspotting) with an air pistol he triggers off a running battle leading to repercussions all round. Although not entirely convincing, Small Faces is made with a strong feel for its period and with affection for his characters, and it quite judiciously cuts from moments of abrupt violence to offbeat humour.
Pick of the films showing in Rotterdam's Dutch Perspective sidebar programme was Robert Jan Westdijk's very clever and resourceful film, Little Sister, which deals with the incestuous feelings a young man has harboured for his sister since childhood. The film begins when the brother returns home from London on the eve of his sister's 20th birthday and what is unique about the story is that it is told almost entirely from the subjective perspective of the brothers' cam corder. Consistently intriguing, Little Sister only loses its momentum in the closing stages. Made with minimal finance and by a cast and crew all of whom were under 30, the film was shot on video, on Betecam SP, and very successfully transferred to 35m m. Already a significant art house hit in Amsterdam, Little Sister proved a very strong audience favourite at Rotterdam.
The audience rated each film in the festival on a scale of one to five and the runaway winner of the Citroen Audience Award, with an average of 4.66, was the moving Australian film Angel Baby, which marks a strong debut for its, writer director Michael Rymer.
An unflinching and, unpatronising picture of the many problems faced by two clinically psychotic young people when they fall in love, it is charged with anger, feeling and wit, and by vivid, deeply immersed central performances of Jacqueline McKenzie (from Romper Stomper) and the Irish actor, John Lynch, on terrific form.
