Alexander Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, Ed Lachman attend Rotterdam

PRESS RELEASE January 22, 2008

* Alexander Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, Ed Lachman attend Rotterdam
* Memento Film picks up Tiger Awards Competition film El cielo
* Rotterdam Lab receives fifty-three young producers

The International Film Festival Rotterdam which opens January 23, expects 2,600 film industry delegates from around the globe to attend. Among the 350 filmmakers to visit Rotterdam are Alexander Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-hsien. The festival opens Wednesday January 23 with the world premiere of Lamb of God (Cordero de Dios), début feature by Argentine filmmaker Lucía Cedrón, produced by Lita Stantic. Lamb of God is selected for Rotterdam’s Tiger Awards Competition.

Returning to Rotterdam after ten years, Alexander Sokurov presents his latest film Alexandra. The Rotterdam festival honours his long-time collaborator Svetlana Proskurina with a retrospective tribute as ‘Filmmaker in Focus’ that includes the international premiere of her most recent film Best of Times.
Tsai Ming-liang presents Is It a Dream?, an installation within the exhibition ‘New Dragon Inns’ that includes, among others, installations Crude Oil by Wang Bing (China) and Black Air by a group of Thai filmmakers advised by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Is It a Dream? marks a striking step in the career of Tsai, who is taking cinema into the exhibition space.
Other filmmakers who will attend the festival are, among others, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Béla Tarr, Ulrich Seidl, Masahiro Kobayashi, Svetlana Proskurina, Carlos Reygadas, Abolfazl Jalili, Jafar Panahi, Aramaki Shinji, Rosa von Praunheim, Darrell James Roodt, Júlio Bressane, Xie Fei, Lee Kang-sheng, Robert Breer, Jacques Nolot, José Luis Guerín, Wang Bing, Tonino De Bernardi and Garin Nugroho. Cinematographer Ed Lachman attends the Rotterdam festival to present two of his latest films: Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export.

Memento Films International has picked up international rights to VPRO Tiger Awards Competition film The Sky, the Earth and the Rain (El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia), fiction feature début by Chilean filmmaker José Luis Torres Leiva. The film was supported by Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund. Earlier, Memento acquired rights to Wonderful Town by Aditya Assarat (Thailand) and Eat, for This Is My Body (Mange, ceci est mon corps) by French-Haitian filmmaker Michelange Quay.

Rotterdam Lab, the international trainee project of Rotterdam’s CineMart, welcomes fifty-three participants. The participants of the Rotterdam Lab are starting producers, who are ‘nominated’ by several international training bodies, festivals and funding agencies with which the CineMart has partnerships. Panel discussions with experts from the industry are organised on topics such as production, sales, financing, distribution, press & promotion and television. The participants take part in three afternoons sessions of “speed-dating”, during which they have time to meet personally with industry delegates and receive advice on their own projects.