Playlist
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) announces the first titles for its next full in-person edition from 25 January to 5 February 2023. Here is our Science New Wave selection.
<p>A film made in collaboration with Sophia Wang. Originally developed as an intermedia/movement piece in 2014, which circles around the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The word image, the breath of speech, the gesture of movement, looked back on from ‘before name’, ‘between name’ and beyond classification as purely didactic vessels.</p>
<p>Sometime, hopefully not too soon, in a place wherever but not here, all life will have moved underground after a failed uprising. Everybody wears a mask, more often than not of the variety seen only at Halloween these days. In this scary universe (that on closer inspection looks like a twisted, perverted version of our here and now...), a man with a gorilla mask is searching for a little boy with a hessian hood. His quest leads him into a maze of depravity, a pandemonium of all our nightmares and darkest desires – where something awaits that he had already given up on: love.</p> <p><strong>2551.02 – The Orgy of the Damned</strong> is as unique as it gets: a dream-like horror movie that is wordless but full of music and noises. A tribute to silent cinema and its aesthetics that never tries to imitate the cinema of a century ago but creates a modern, disturbingly contemporary poetic from its themes and tropes. This makes <strong>2551.02 – The Orgy of the Damned</strong> as much a darkly trippy avant-garde piece as a full-blown scare fest for every genre aficionado.</p>
<p>Eleven-year-old Sophie is on a budget holiday in Turkey with her young divorced dad Calum. On the cusp of adolescence, she is perceptive towards the pains of growing up as well as her dad’s subtle shifts in mood. As an adult, Sophie sifts through the home video footage she made on the trip, which continues to haunt her.</p> <p>Shot through with sun-bleached nostalgia, Aftersun reassembles Sophie’s well-worn memories with an eye for the most intimate details, searching them for emotional clarity. The film eschews predictable narrative beats of revelation, and invites us to linger in its very particular heartbreak: what it’s like to love someone without ever fully understanding them.</p>
<p>Another spring is a medical thriller that takes place in the spring of 1972, when the deadly smallpox virus was brought into Yugoslavia from the bazaars in Iraq. The disease was spreading for a whole month before it was discovered in Kosovo, while in Belgrade, it continued spreading undetected. Smallpox is the deadliest disease in human history that killed almost 500 million people in the 20th century alone, and it is the only deadly virus eradicated by humans, which is regarded as the biggest achievement of our civilization. In the story that united the entire world, the Yugoslavian epidemic, the final outbreak of smallpox in Europe, is still remembered as one of its most horrifying and inspiring chapters. Reconstructed from the 50 years old archive film footage, the film offers the experience of another time and the society very different to the one today, which never felt more relevant.</p>
<p>A group of passengers cross a river on a small ferry. Fog, laughter, whispers and faces inhabit a floating, suspended space. Time passes, the shore is now closer and people prepare for another part of their journey. <strong>Aqueronte</strong> summons the essence of cinema to transport us to unreal spaces where life is crystallised in a changing landscape of light and shadow. In this cinematic trip, Manuel Muñoz Rivas reaffirms the fabulating power of moving images.</p>
<p>“...to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry.” – Hélène Cixous</p>
<p> </p> <p>Baba is a six-year-old boy with an extraordinary gift. His home life, marred by an undercurrent of harm, provides little comfort. As a means to protect himself against a world he can’t understand, he teleports to tranquillity. A vividly layered story about the effects of abuse, its nuances, and the resilient power of childhood imagination.</p>
<p>A film concerned with the chaotic sphere of disengagement invoked by the threatened subsumption of the sensitive and vibrational biorhythm into the cold and regulated logic of algorithmic, capitalist automation. Explored through abyssal bridges of language, towards the conspiratorial, intersubjective, and irregular oscillations of life as resistance.</p>
<p>It’s all the rage to evoke spectacular ‘immersive’ cinema today, but nothing matches the immersion effect of a Siegfried A. Fruhauf film. Agglomerating the textures of cave surfaces with the material traces of filmic processes, <strong>Cave Painting</strong> offers a trippy visual and sonic journey for the senses that evokes an avant-garde, grunge version of the psychedelia in Stanley Kubrick’s <strong>2001: A Space Oydssey</strong>. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss something good. As always, Fruhauf conjures a new world.</p>
<p>A Peruvian father labours patiently, chipping at the white volcanic stone that forms an extraordinary landscape. His son is part of the modern world: he uses cameras and drones in order to create the digital model of a church on a computer. Separated by the mysterious death of the wife/mother figure in the family, these men do not connect. And yet their paths cross in a ghostly manner, as do their professions: each in their own way works with textures and volumes, sensations and perceptions. Can the realm of digital art recreate and revivify the old world? Can it also awaken hearts grown lonely and cold?</p>
<p>A woman contemplates her fear of falling. Because everything falls: cigarette ash, people in funny videos and eventually, gravity even pulls our skin downwards. All we can do is let ourselves be carried along by the waves. Until they too, break and fall – as in a Hokusai print.</p>
<p>Ernst Mo works for courier service Delivery Dancer. Every day, she transports an endless stream of parcels, following algorithmically generated routes through a labyrinthine Seoul. After she runs into an alternative version of herself, her reality slowly starts to crack – with all the attendant consequences. In her own unique style, artist Ayoung Kim creates a fascinating and pretty disturbing world.</p>
<p>The cityscape of Brasília: a clogging of industry, automobiles and endless looping paved roads and highways. Occasionally a displaced wild animal, be it a monkey or an ant eater, scampers across a street. The unlucky will be casualties on the road, and the lucky will end up in a zoo. In her striking debut feature, filmmaker Ana Vaz weaves a mesmerising, poetic odyssey exploring the contamination of urban expansion on the natural world.</p> <p>Shot on grainy 16mm, a format itself looming towards extinction, Vaz’s feature frames the landscape in the day-for-night wet blues of an endless twilight. Incorporating the eeriness of eco-horror with the ethnographic nature of a documentary, as the animals peering back at us from their cages and enclosures morph into a dizzying, poignant symbol of colonial displacement. A haunting, almost militarised score by the late legendary composer Guilherme Vaz propels us through this deeply textured and memorable meditation.</p>
<p>A surgical assistant robot spends his days making incisions and closing wounds with precise, AI accuracy. Longing for connection, he plays chess with nurses. This routine, lonely existence is upended with the arrival of a mysterious woman: his upgraded version. In Eno Swinnen’s sensuous and lyrical hand-drawn animation, the complexities of a relationship between two machines reveal a tender, nuanced humanity.</p>
<p>Among the many glorious sub-categories of cinema we also find one dedicated to donkeys. Which is to say, films whose protagonists are furry, walk with an inimitably cheerful elegance, have the most communicative ears, and surely the deepest of all eyes.</p> <p>The latest ass to grace the screen is the protagonist of IFFR-darling Jerzy Skolimowski's <strong>Eo</strong>. What a simple name! And simple its life is: Eo performs in a circus together with kind Kasandra, who knows how to keep her fleecy friend happy. That is, until the animal rights activists turn up at the circus gates and demand freedom for these docile creatures that probably know no other life. Soon, poor Eo gets turned into a beast of burden, a commodity on a gallivanting trip through Europe at the mercy of strangers he meets on his way, some of whom want to own and (ab)use Eo, while others are just glad to make his acquaintance.</p> <p>Thus, humankind is mirrored here at its best and worse through the presence of the only animal God chose for His voice (Numbers 22:28 & 22:30). But that the donkey seems so dear to Him won't spare it from the saddest of all fates – the fate of all of us.</p>