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Rotterdam 2004
Rotterdam Reflection
By Mark Peranson

As the calendar flips over, my excitement for the International Film Festival Rotterdam grows each day, not just because it provides an opportunity to escape from the ridiculous Canadian winter at its harshest. More to the point, I know I'll be in a friendly, accommodating and intellectually stimulating environment with colleagues and filmmakers, able to preview 2004's best work (a crucial task for a magazine editor), and will have the opportunity to sample some of the best Chinese cuisine that middle Europe has to offer, twice a day. That's a joke.

This year, though, the Rotterdam whirlwind comes with a heavy heart - as everyone knows, after eight years Simon Field is stepping down as the co-director of the festival to pursue his lifelong dream of acting for the stage. While I have no doubt that Rotterdam will continue to mature with Sandra den Hamer as the sole director, it won't be the same without Simon. And I have no doubt that Simon's last year will be a ten-day party.

I've been coming to Rotterdam every year beginning with 1999, when I participated in the young critics' trainee program, and now consider myself extremely lucky to be part of the festival, having helped out last year the retrospective of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, highlighted by the premiere of his installation Cowards Bend the Knee, which has since screened in festivals and theatres worldwide. The newest feature from Canada's greatest import since hockey, The Saddest Music in the World, is screening in this year's festival, and might be the best-ever Super 8mm melodramatic musical that speaks out against American cultural imperialism.

With experience and hindsight, I'm able to look back fondly on those early idealistic years, where a 260 minute by Alexander Sokurov (1998's Confession) still struck me as an alien experience. (Five years later, I relish brevity.) That was a time when I still qualified by my age to be a young anything, before I started a film magazine in Toronto, and before I started working for another film festival, in Vancouver. I met the festival's director, Alan Franey, here in Rotterdam, and sitting down for a conversation at the Pathe after we both walked out of a film that was presented in its original language with Dutch subtitles (a mistake I make at least once each year, which sometimes proves rewarding).

Rotterdam was the first international film festival I attended, and those first few years remain precious in my mind as a time of nascent cinephilia, opening my eyes to filmmakers that I never would have discovered staying at home even in such a film savvy city as Toronto, who has its own excellent festival; anyone concerned that Rotterdam has grown unwieldy in recent years should come to Toronto and try to find anything like a familial environment or an unheralded discovery. One example: If I hadn't come to Rotterdam, I never would have seen films by past Directors in Focus, Sicilian renegades Cipri and Maresco, returning this year with The Return of Cagliostro.

Since 1999 I have traveled more extensively to film festivals in places like Cannes and Buenos Aires, and have often found solace in the company of likeminded individuals who I came to know through Rotterdam, foremost among them being Simon Field. Part of the fun with Simon is willingly subjecting myself to his constant scoffing, whenever I register an assessment that he finds too negative, his open-mindedness makes itself known with a simple rebuke, wine glass in hand: "Oh, you critics!"

In my first few years cavorting about town, I quickly came to associate the festival with two general categories of movies: slow, Asian film, and porn. Rotterdam was one of the first festivals to show a commitment to East Asian filmmakers who are now lauded at Cannes, and whose films are now distributed both in the Netherlands and worldwide; also, one of my first years saw a retrospective of the films of provocatrice Catherine Breillat. Like the crowds that later gathered at the retrospective of the late Japanese director Fukasaku Kenji, I remember the lines outside the theatres showing Breillat's films growing as the days went on. This taught me a very important lesson I have since come to apply to programming: nothing sells better than sex. Another lesson from Rotterdam: the films at the bottom of the audience polls are generally the best.

But Rotterdam means much more to me than just Asian porn. (That I can get at home.) Rotterdam is also the festival that I associate most with surprises, and surprise is an undervalued attribute in a formulaic industry that often overvalues complacency. There's something intangible that makes each festival a different experience to a foreign visitor, especially those deranged by way of drug and jetlagged-fuelled delirium.

This has something to do with, I think, the breadth to the program, and the willingness to avoid "big names." In comparison to other festivals like Toronto, there are an unheard of number of countries represented (many from the so-called Third World) in Rotterdam, along with a commitment to young filmmakers, to experimental filmmaking and installations - and less of a commitment to sales agents. Sure, there are films that I'd never, ever see elsewhere (which is at times a bad thing), but I'm also completely serious when I say that every year I've been to Rotterdam, I've looked through the program months afterwards and kicked myself for missing something that I didn't even notice was playing. That's not a joke.

Over the past five years, I've easily come to prefer Rotterdam to Toronto because of these programming choices, and because of the attitude that underlies them. Festivals exist as gathering places for professionals and to service a local community, but they also differ in terms of their commitment to an ideal of cinema. In Rotterdam, there are many ideals standing alongside each other, not in competition; this pluralistic sense of open-mindedness is what draws me back each year. While there may be some concessions to the audience, the same is true with any festival, whether we're talking about Toronto or Cannes. Rotterdam is an embarrassment of riches each year, and I'm proud to be one of those people who are the most embarrassed.

© Mark Peranson, January 2004

Mark Peranson is the editor in chief of the Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope (www.cinema-scope.com).

This text is re-printed with kind permission of Mark Peranason and of "De Filmkrant in Rotterdam", the daily festival edition of the Dutch film magazine "De Filmkrant".

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