Competition selections and jury members; Films in world premiere

38th International Film Festival Rotterdam
21 January – 1 February 2009

PRESS RELEASE 12 December 2008

· Competition selections and jury members
· Films in world premiere

Jury members
The VPRO Tiger Awards jury that will choose three winners from fifteen features includes the artist Marlene Dumas (South Africa/Netherlands) – her MoMA exhibition ‘Measuring Your Own Grave’ opens December 14, the Turkish film maker Yesim Ustaoglu – her film Pandora’s Box screens in the festival, the Hungarian film maker Kornél Mundruczó, whose latest film Delta is in the festival selection and Park Ki-Yong (South Korea), film maker, director of the Film Academy in Seoul and co-director of the Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival.
The Tiger Awards Jury that is choosing the three winners in the short-film competition comprises Tan Chui Mui, a film maker from Malaysia who is represented at the festival with seven short films, Maria Pallier, buyer and a programme maker for the Spanish broadcasting company TVE, and the British journalist, curator and artist George Clark.

New in Competition
Among the films selected for the 2009 VPRO Tiger Awards Competition are: Dogging: a Love Story by Simon Ellis (United Kingdom), in which a boy from Newcastle becomes acquainted with the world of car-park sex, Be Calm and Count to Seven by Ramtin Lavafipour (Iran), a feature made with a contribution from the Hubert Bals Fund about smugglers on an Iranian island; Dark Harbour by Naito Takatsugu from Japan, about life in a small Japanese fishing village; Breathless by Yang Ik-June (South Korea) about the relationship between a merciless gangster and a cheeky schoolgirl; and finally No puedo vivir sin ti by Leon Dai (Taiwan) about a father who is in danger of losing his daughter because of his life as a vagrant.
The complete Competition will be announced in early January.

World premières
The 38th edition of the Festival presents plenty of films having their world premiere in Rotterdam spread over the three main sections of the programme. Among them is Film Ist. A Girl & a Gun, a new musical and visual feast of archive film images put together by Gustav Deutsch (Austria). The Armenian director Harutyan Khachatryan made Border with a contribution from the Hubert Bals Fund; the film shows everyday life in village against the background of Armenian-Azerbaijani border conflicts. The documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi by Ian Olds (USA), shows revealing images about the work and tragic fate of a ‘fixer’, a guide and translator, hired by journalists for reports in the Afghani theatre of war.
From Holland there are world premieres of new features by Cyrus Frisch (Dazzling, with Georgina Verbaan and Rutger Hauer), Diederik van Rooijen (Bollywood Hero, with Egbert-Jan Weeber), Noud Heerkens (The Last Conversation, with Johanna ter Steege) and Maartje Seyferth & Victor Nieuwenhuijs (Crepuscule, with Nellie Benner and Titus Muizelaar).

The 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam takes place from 21 January to 1 February 2009. The programme will appear online on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com and as a magazine with the Dutch daily Volkskrant on Thursday 15 January. Online ticket sales start at midnight on the night of Friday 16 to Saturday 17 January; the festival box office in the Doelen Centre is open from Tuesday 20 January.