Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films & Spectrum Shorts-program

42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam
23 January – 3 February 2013

PRESS RELEASE 7 January 2013

• 23 works in Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films
• Spectrum Shorts to show 186 short and medium length films

Short and medium length films receive prime attention at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Twenty-three films compete for the three equal Canon Tiger Awards for Short Films (see full list below). Spectrum Shorts comprises 186 short and medium length films and will be screened during IFFR at festival location LantarenVenster from Thursday 24 until Monday 28 January. It includes a tribute to Finnish filmmaker and visual artist Mika Taanila, the ‘Mind the Gap’ program of audiovisual live performances in festival location WORM and two programs of recent short films from the Middle East. The complete line up of IFFR 2013 will be online on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com on Thursday 17 January; the festival opens on Wednesday January 23.

Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films
This year’s Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films includes twenty-three titles. Among the competing films are world premieres by Mika Taanila (Finland), Sergei Loznitsa (Russia), Nicolas Provost (Belgium) and Guido van der Werve, David Verbeek and Erik van Lieshout (The Netherlands).
The jury consists of Joost Rekveld (visual artist, The Netherlands), Phil Collins (filmmaker,photographer and producer, United Kingdom) and Solange Farkas (curator and director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Brazil).
Each of the three equal Canon Tiger Awards for Short Films comes with 3,000 Euro and a video camera. The winners will be announced on Monday evening 28 January in festival location WORM, Rotterdam.
(See full list of Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films and jurors’ biographies below)

Short Profile: Mika Taanila
Mika Taanila (1965, Helsinki, Finland) is an artist working fluently in the fields of documentary filmmaking and visual arts. He has created works in film, video, photography, sound and installation. His works deal with the alarming issues of human engineering and urban artificial surroundings. Taanila specializes on the futuristic ideas and utopias of contemporary science. Besides his most important earlier films, IFFR presents the world premiere of his latest film SIX DAY RUN in the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films and his two recent installation works MOST ELECTRIFIED TOWN IN FINLAND and STIMULUS PROGRESSION (ROTTERDAM) at festival location TENT.

Spectrum Shorts
IFFR’s Spectrum Shorts program is among the largest in Europe and attracts many short film professionals to Rotterdam; the selected films – fiction, documentary, animation, experimental - vary in length between one and fifty-nine minutes.
The 2013 selection includes new works by Tiger Award for Short Film winners Makino Takashi (Japan) and Nathaniel Dorsky (USA) and by, among many others, Shambhavi Kaul (India), Serdar Yilmaz (Turkey), Charlotte Lim Lay Kuen (Malaysia), Sandro Aguilar (Portugal), Michael Robinson (USA), Marina Abramovic (USA), Hito Steyrl (Germany) , Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (France), Johan Grimonprez (Belgium), John Smith (UK), Michael Almereyda (USA), Ben Rivers (UK), Rosto AD (Netherlands) and John Skoog (Sweden).
Spectrum Shorts is brought together by IFFR’s short films editorial committee, consisting of Juliette Jansen, Erwin van ‘t Hart, Theus Zwakhals, Maaike Gouwenberg, Peter Taylor and headed by IFFR Programmer Peter van Hoof.
The full line up of Spectrum Shorts will be online on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com from Thursday January 17.

Mind the Gap-Nights
As part of Spectrum Shorts, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Gonzo (circus) magazine present Mind the Gap Nights, a late-night program running Thursday 24 until Monday 28 January in festival location WORM. Mind the Gap includes five evenings full of unique collaborations between musicians and video artists, and filmmakers and other producers of images. Among the performers are German composer/musician Felix Kubin and American film artist Martha Colburn; Belgian 16 mm-wizard Floris van Hoof, artist/musician Félicia Atkinson and Makino Takashi (Japan); Abattoir Fermé's resident composer Kreng and cellist Okkyung Lee; Dutch jazz krautrock band Knalpot and glitch artist Rosa Menkman, Swedish composer Marcus Fjellström, French video and performance artist Romain Kronenberg, Canadian, Berlin-dwelling dub tech pioneer Deadbeat and Rotterdam-based musician Harry Merry.
The Mind the Gap-program, supported by Goethe-Institut Nederland & Stichting Verzameling Van Wijngaarden-Boot, is online on the IFFR-website here and on the Gonzo (circus) website.

Close Encounters: Peripheral Images and Histories of the Present.
As a continuation of last year’s program ‘Power Cut Middle East’, Spectrum Shorts includes two short films programs with recent Middle Eastern works brought together by Omar Kholeif and IFFR programmer Peter van Hoof. The two ‘Close Encounters’-programs seek to articulate the present with one eye on the future and another inextricably linked to the past. Can an image narrate a history? How do we deal with a history that brims so close to the present that it is
impossible to distance one’s self from it? In Larissa Sansour’s NATION ESTATE (2012) the Palestinian territories are re-imagined into an Arab futurism, all-together occupying one sleek industrial high rise. In parallel, Sharif Waked and Tarzan & Arab can be found appropriated mass media imagery into pastiche that is simultaneously hilarious as it is uproariously violent. Tangentially, artists such as Mahmoud Khaled, Roy Dib and Maha Mamoun open up questions about how a collective sense of identity is constructed through imagery that exists both in the mainstream and on the periphery.


Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films 2013

• THOUGH I KNOW THE RIVER IS DRY, Omar Robert Hamilton, United Kingdom/Palestine, 2013, 20’, world premiere
• ATROPA, Peter-Conrad Beyer, Germany, 2013, 24’, world premiere
• IMMORTELLE, David Verbeek, Taiwan/Netherlands, 2013, 17’, world premiere
• LETTER, Sergei Loznitsa, Russia, 2013, 20‘, world premiere
• KUUDEN PÄIVÄN JUOKSU (SIX DAY RUN), Mika Taanila, Finland, 2013, 15’, world premiere
• TOKYO GIANTS, Nicolas Provost, Belgium, 2013, 23’, world premiere
• FIKON (FIGS), Tony Cederteg, Sweden, 2013, 5’, world premiere
• NUMMER VEERTIEN, HOME (NUMBER FOURTEEN, HOME), Guido van der Werve, Netherlands, 2012, 54’, world premiere

• DA VINCI, Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 2012, 25‘, international premiere
• DENTRO (INSIDE), Emiliano Rocha Minter, Mexico, 2012, 15‘, international premiere
• ERIS, Claire Hooper, United Kingdom, 2012, 36’, international premiere
• THE TIGER'S MIND, Beatrice Gibson, United Kingdom, 2012, 20’, international premiere

• GREYSTONE, Kerry Tribe, USA, 2012, 29’, European premiere
• AGIT (THE LAMENT), Aydin Ketenag, Turkey, 2012, 30’, European premiere
• INSIGHT, Sebastian Dias Morales, Netherlands/Argentina, 2012, 12’, European premiere
• BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING, David Gatten, USA, 8’, European premiere
• CONTINUITY, Omer Fast, Germany, 2012, 41’, European premiere
• MAE (THE MOTHER), Pimpaka Towira, Thailand, 2012, 15’, European premiere

• DIE ARBEITERINNEN VERLASSEN DIE FABRIK (WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (AGAIN), Katharina Gruzei, Austria, 2012, 11‘
• UNSUPPORTED TRANSIT, Zachary Formwalt, Netherlands, 2011, 15‘
• SECRETION, Willie Doherty, Ireland, 2012, 20’
• MUSEUM OF IMAGINATION, Amit Dutta, India, 2012, 20’
• JANUS, Erik van Lieshout, Netherlands, 2012, 51’

Jury of the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films 2013:
Joost Rekveld (1970, Netherlands) makes abstract films and kinetic installations, designs projections and lighting for various dance and theatre productions and works as a curator and teacher. His work is based on the idea of visual music for the eye. For most of his animated films, he used the computer as a controller and composition machine in order to orchestrate the precise movements of optical components.

Director, photographer, interviewer and producer Phil Collins (1970, United Kingdom) currently lives in Berlin. He studied Drama and English at the University of Manchester, and Fine Arts at the University of Ulster. In 2006, Collins was nominated for the Turner Prize, a prestigious award presented to a British visual artist every year. Collins often investigates the complex and ambiguous relationship between the camera and its subject in his work.
His films that we sceened at IFFR in recent years: Return of the Real (2005), He Who Laughs Last Laughs Longest (2006), zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) (2008), soy mi madre (2010), marxism today (prologue) (2010), the meaning of style (2012).

Solange Farkas is a curator and the director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil. She created and is the chief curator of the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, which has become a reference for artistic production from the geopolitical South of the world (Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, part of Asia, and Oceania) and brought exhibitions of renowned international artists, such Akram Zaatari, Bill Biola, Gary Hill, Peter Greenaway, Marina Abramovic, Olafur Eliasson and Walid Raad. As guest curator she participated of the 10th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2011), the 16th Cerveira Biennial (Portugal, 2011), the 5th Videozone: International Video Art Biennial (Israel, 2010).

(End of press release)

Note to the Editor:

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