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From Argentina to Zambia: The Rotterdam Film Festival Finds Movies that Matter

Published on April 17, 2007

by Macauley Peterson

"The future of cinematography is not to be expected from Europe or the United States, but all the more from lesser known film cultures." - Hubert Bals

The International Film Festival Rotterdam took place January 24-February 4, 2007 in the Netherlands. Founded by Hubert Bals in 1972, the festival has always focused on innovative, independent cinema from around the world, actively embracing more offbeat non-commercial undertakings.

"Huub was an absolute passionate film lover," say Marianne Bhalotra, who coordinates the cultural development organization that shares his name. Bals was very much involved with the filmmakers he discovered, offering financial support out of his own pocket, and lobbying the Dutch government for additional funding.

Shortly after his death in 1988, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of Development Aid decided to make the requested funds available, but instead of calling it the "Tarkovsky Fund" as planned, they opted to name it after Hubert Bals. Since then, the Hubert Bals Fund has supported over 600 projects from the "Global South," loosely defined to include all developing countries, from Latin America and the Caribbean, to Africa, the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet republics, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The structural criteria are equally broad; films may be narrative features or documentaries so long as they raise awareness about local cultural issues or human rights. Twice a year, the HBF accepts some 350 proposals of which about two dozen are offered seed funding ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 euros, for script development, post-production, or distribution in their country or region of origin. These are small sums, even in the context of a low-budget feature, but they're symbolically important, says Bhalotra. "Often the Fund is a kind of seal of approval for other financers to step in."

Some uncertainty looms, as a bureaucratic restructuring within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs threatens to cut off funding to the HBF and other small cultural development groups within the Netherlands. Bhalotra stresses that the proposed cuts are not politically motivated. "For us it's a Kafka situation," she says, "because they admit in the rejection that we are offering a very relevant product and we are very successful...so it's pure protocol." She is confident that the government support, which provides sixty percent of the HBF budget, will be renewed in another form.

As one of Europe's major film festivals, along with Cannes, Venice and Berlin, Rotterdam has the reputational heft to open doors for new filmmakers. Hubert Bals Fund staffers are particularly proud when their humble seed funding bears fruit. Bhalotra cites, as a recent success story, Grbavica (Jasmila Zbanic, 2006), which won top honors at the Berlin International Film Festival, en route to worldwide theatrical release.

Rotterdam's own competitive category, the Tiger Awards, has also served as a launching pad for HBF-funded films. The 2006 co-winner The Dog Pound (Manuel Nieto Zas) is a Hubert Bals alumnus. For this year's festival, two films were selected into Tiger Awards Competition, and the Malaysian video feature, Love Conquers All (Tan Chui Mui, 2006) took home a Tiger.

Love Conquers All is the first beneficiary of a brand new category within the Hubert Bals Fund: The Digital Production grant. Launched last September, this program offers twenty thousand euros for micro-budget video projects costing less than one hundred thousand euros in total.

Piers Handling, who also directs the Toronto International Film Festival, spoke on behalf of the five member jury, calling Love Conquers All, a "very subtle and highly sophisticated portrait of a young woman living a normal life until her relationship with a young man moves her in a direction that seems to be beyond her control."

The film's director, Tan Chui Mui, could barely control herself while accepting the award. "I think I'm too lucky," she started out, but didn't make it very far through her thank-yous before breaking into tears.

This year's Tiger Awards were a bit unusual in that the jury could not settle on just three films -- the historical norm. After deliberating until 3am the morning of the awards ceremony, they decided to split the third award between the Danish faux documentary, AFR (Morten Hartz Kapler), and Bog of Beasts (Claudio Assis), a harrowing tale of poverty and sexual abuse in rural Brazil.

The two films could scarcely be more different. AFR, which postulates the assassination of current Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was one of the cleverest features I encountered at Rotterdam. It seamlessly blends found news footage of world leaders, with staged interviews and, controversially, interviews with Danish political figures obtained under false pretenses. In obliterating the line between reality and fiction, AFR gets squarely in the faces of politicians who have championed free speech. In his acceptance speech, director Kapler expressed his gratitude to the jury for the recognition, saying, "it will really help me a lot back in Denmark when I'm showing the movie, having the debate and so on."

Half a world away, the life of everyone in Bog of Beasts is typified by one man who, in Brechtian fashion, is digging a never-ending cesspit. Life is a day-to-day struggle going nowhere, and no naïve dream, nor good deed, goes unpunished.

If the The Tiger Awards represent the brain of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, then the Hubert Bals films represent the heart, while other regular programs provide the flank. The Sturm und Drang program, which takes its name from the late 18th century period of German literature, is distinguished in part by the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards. In Rotterdam film-speak, Sturm und Drang features works mostly by young filmmakers who are investigating new approaches to cinematography. Time and Tide accentuates Rotterdam's global perspective, focusing on "the heartbeat of the world," with features and documentaries that reveal the social, political and cultural commitment of filmmakers.

Now in its 5th year, the Movies that Matter Award went to Time and Tide selection The Mark of Cain (Marc Munden, 2007), which offers a fictional account of Iraqi prisoner abuses at the hands of British forces. Although conceived well before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the film mirrors real life events, and was based in part on accounts of British soldiers returning from tours in Basra and southern Iraq.

Movies that Matter is supported by Amnesty International, which holds its own international film festival in Amsterdam and The Hague, in mid-March.

Macauley Peterson is a New York based writer & video editor, currently in the University of Amsterdam's MA Film Studies program. He can be reached at www.MacauleyPeterson.com.

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