Bright Future bursting with premieres

40th International Film Festival Rotterdam
26 January - 6 February 2011

PRESS RELEASE 5 January 2011

Rotterdam’s Bright Future section bursting with premieres

The Bright Future program section, in which International Film Festival Rotterdam presents debut or second feature films, will this year screen eighteen world premieres, ten international premieres and eleven European premieres. Both fiction films and documentaries are included, as are many films that have little time for such distinctions. The selection as a whole, which encompasses a wide range of subjects and filmic forms, demonstrates young filmmakers’ unflagging faith in the possibilities offered by film as a means of expression. In total, this year’s Bright Future is made up of eighty films selected from thirty-eight countries.

Fifteen of these films received support from IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund. These include the world premiere of Yulene Olaizola´s impressive fiction debut, Paraísos artificiales (Mexico) and the international première of Theo Court’s debut film Ocaso (Chile). Chinese independent filmmakers supported by the HBF devote attention to rural settings: Zhang Miaoyan’s second film, the black-and-white drama Black Blood (picture), and Li Ruijuns engaging Old Donkey, focus in on people who for one reason or another have not left for the mega cities.

Bright Future also presents a number of highly individual documentaries, a striking feature of which is that the makers have often spent many years working on these: a method facilitated by today’s film equipment, and resulting in revealing documents about a changing world.
In his first full-length film, Twin Brothers, 53 Scenes from a Childhood, young Swede Axel Danielson follows his nephews for ten years, from age 9 to age 19. CalArts graduates Lee Anne Schmitt and Lee Lynch (USA) spent five years working on their surprising film The Last Buffalo Hunt.
Spanish/Venezuelan filmmaker Andrés Duque used material gathered over a period of several years for his poetic travelogue Color perro que huye. Belgian filmmaker Lotte Stoops recorded life today in a five-star hotel built in the 1950s in Mozambique – now a shell, stripped of all fittings, fixtures and decoration. With Imagine, the Sky, another European filmmaker in Africa, Swiss Brigitte Uttar Kornetzky has made an observing film about an institute for the blind in Sierra Leone. The absurd reality of life in China’s cities is presented in Tape by performance artist/dancer Li Ning, who allowed his life to be filmed over a period of years, turning it into a work of art.

Korean visual artist Park Chan-Kyong (brother of Park Chan-Wook) has created a fascinating film essay, with fictional elements, about the Korean city Anyang. His countrywoman Son Kwang-ju’s moving debut film is a psychological drama dealing with the creative process of movie-making, entitled Characters. In world cinema, globalization is no longer a development, but a fact, as shown in the stylish Water Hands, a film set partly in director Vladimir Todorovic’s current home, Singapore, and partly in the country of his birth, Yugoslavia.

The vitality of the American independent film scene is shown by the world premieres of three fiction films, all set deep in the American heartland: Matthew Petock’s A Little Closer, about the quest of a mother and her two sons for love and sex; Malcolm Murray’s Bad Posture, about the underbelly of Albuquerque, and New Jerusalem by R. Alverson, which deals with feelings of displacement and evangelical zeal, and has lead roles for Will Oldham and Colm O’Leary (picture). A fourth selection is Behind the Red Motel Door, homage to Hitchcock’s Rope by the filmmaker known as TheWorldFamous Ike.

Pleasantly unclassifiable is Jerôme le Maire’s Grand’route, about group thirty-somethings who leave everything they have, for a quasi-realist, quasi-medieval foot-trip through Belgian forests, from one carnival to another. From Russia, Pavel Kostomarov, the DOP of How I Ended This Summer co-directed with Alexander Rastorguov a raw portrait of youth in Rostov-on-Don. Finally, from the Argentine hinterlands near Cordoba, comes a world premiere of Rodrigo Guerrero’s tale of six outsiders looking for love, El invierno de los raros.

IFFR 2011, Bright Future: list of world, international and European premieres
(Note that the complete Bright Future line up will be available on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com from January 20)

World premiere
El invierno de los raros / The Winter of the Odd Ones Out, Rodrigo Guerrero, Argentina
Le Grand'Tour, Jerôme le Maire, Belgium
Grande Hotel, Lotte Stoops, Belgium
Black Blood, Zhang Miaoyan, China/France (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Roozi ke man napadid shodam / The Day I Disappeared, Atousa Bandeh Ghiasabadi, Iran/Netherlands
Paraísos artificiales / Artificial Paradises, Yulene Olaizola, Mexico (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Ja tebya lublu / I Love You, Alexander Rastorguev, Pavel Kostomarov, Russia
Water Hands, Vladimir Todorovic, Singapore/Serbia/Montenegro
Characters, Son Kwang-Ju, South Korea
Anyang, Paradise City, Park Chan-Kyong, South Korea
Color perro que huye / Color Runaway Dog, Andrés Duque, Spain
PangPang bröder, 53 scener från en barndom / Twin Brothers, 53 Scenes from a Childhood, Axel Danielson, Sweden/Denmark
Imagine, the Sky, Brigitte Uttar Kornetzky, Switzerland/Sierra Leone
New Jerusalem, R. Alverson, USA
The Last Buffalo Hunt, Lee Anne Schmitt, Lee Lynch, USA
Bad Posture, Malcolm Murray, USA
A Little Closer, Matthew Petock, USA
Behind the Red Motel Door, TheWorldFamous Ike, USA/Mexico

International premiere
El agua del fin del mundo / The Water at the End of the World, Paula Siero, Argentina
Neverquiet (Film of Wonders), Felipe Bragança, Marina Meliande, Karim Aïnouz, Ivo Lopes Araujo, Gustavo Bragança, Helvécio Marins Jr., Clarissa Campolina, Caetano Gotardo, Raphael Mesquita, Leonardo Levis, Carolina Durão, Andrea Capella, Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas, Brazil
Primordial Ties, Otto Buj, Canada
Ocaso / Decline, Théo Court, Chile/Dominican Republic (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Je suis un No Man's Land / Unplugged, Thierry Jousse, France
La BM du Seigneur / The Lord's Ride, Jean-Charles Hue, France
Belkibolang, Agung Sentausa, Ifa Isfansyah, Tumpal Christian Tampubolon, Rico Marpaung, Anggun Priambodo, Azhar Lubis, Wisnu Surya Pratama, Edwin, Sidi Saleh, Indonesia
Hot as Hell: the Deadbeat March, Okuda Yosuke, Japan
Hinter diesen Bergen / Beyond These Mountains, Michael Krummenacher, Switzerland/Germany
Speak, Yes! That's Us, Uganda, South Africa
Septien, Michael Tully, USA

European premiere
Fortune Teller, Xu Tong, China
The Old Donkey, Li Ruijun, China (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Tape, Li Ning, China
Piano in a Factory, Zhang Meng, China
Soul of Sand, Sidharth Srinivasan, India (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Qarantina, Oday Rasheed, Iraq, Germany (Hubert Bals Fund supported film)
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Wang Jing / Anocha Suwichakornpong / Kaz Cai, Singapore
Karma, Prasanna Jayakody, Sri Lanka
Tyrannosaur, Paddy Considine, United Kingdom
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, Brent Green, USA


(End of press release)

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