In an interview a few weeks ago, Vanja Kaludjercic, director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), said she wants a festival that is accessible. She was referring broadly to the desire to reach every kind of audience, not only those interested in avant-garde, independent and experimental cinema — the kind of cinema for which the IFFR, held every January and the first major European festival of the year, is best known. Like many major festivals, however, the IFFR also strives to programme some films accessible to visitors with visual or hearing impairments, as well as screenings designed for highly sensitive viewers, while also providing detailed information about physical accessibility at all festival venues. As for reaching a large audience and not only specialised cinephiles, attendance in Rotterdam’s cinemas shows that the goal has been achieved. Audience involvement is especially important for awarding the Audience Award, which at the 55th edition was won by I Swear by Kirk Jones, a film about Scottish activist John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo), who helped make Tourette syndrome better known in the United Kingdom. A work that combines biographical storytelling with an effort at social awareness, it first shows the appearance of symptoms during adolescence, when Davidson’s life was turned upside down by the onset of motor tics and coprolalia (which compelled him to shout inappropriate phrases out loud); then his adult life, marked by ongoing difficulties in being socially accepted but also by crucial encounters with people who helped him on his path to becoming a public example and an effective communicator able to explain his condition to fellow citizens. It is not a strictly realistic reconstruction; for example, it completely omits the fact that his public recognition largely came from several BBC documentaries, and some painful situations are clearly dramatized to give greater weight to the positive ending. Yet a few emotional concessions can certainly help to normalise, for a wider audience, a condition that can easily become embarrassing when encountered by people who do not recognise it. If this film has good chances of being released in Italy as well, the same cannot be said for many other remarkable films shown at the IFFR. As a hope for future distribution, here is a selection of noteworthy titles from the festival’s two main competitions.
Variations on a Theme
Tiger Competition
In the film directed by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, winner of the festival’s main competition, the story of South African soldiers sent to fight in Europe during the Second World War is recalled through the contemporary lives of their descendants. In particular, the daughter of a soldier — now an elderly goat herder — is among those involved in a scam promising supposed compensation to the soldiers’ heirs. Set in the mountainous rural areas of South Africa, landscapes that seem to resist the passing of time (and perhaps for this reason are also places where a shared historical memory survives, though known by too few), the film manages to build a bridge between different generations still searching for the recognition of their dignity, a dignity that the protagonist expresses with quiet and stubborn pride.
A Fading Man
Tiger Competition
One day Hanne finds her ex-husband Kurt standing at her door, still convinced he lives there — even though they divorced many years earlier. Kurt is ill and suffers from degenerative memory problems, and his daughter (from another relationship) lives abroad. Hanne and her partner Bernd decide to take care of him, even though every day he must learn again everything he has forgotten. Because nothing is shown of the couple’s shared past, their relationship is relived from the beginning through an unusual bond that mixes suddenly revived and intense memories (including the happy ones, not only the conflicts that led to their separation) with the feeling that, by starting from scratch, a new and different relationship might be built. Yet precisely in making it clear that one cannot return to the past, the film quietly acknowledges the limits of human relationships that ended abruptly without resolution; leaving the viewer, through the faces of the two protagonists, with the sense that what is evaporating from Kurt’s increasingly fragile mind settles like a thin mist in Hanne’s memory.
The Gymnast
Tiger Competition
It is often said that anyone can temporarily experience what disability means — all it takes is an accident. For sixteen-year-old Monica, however, a serious knee injury and the resulting surgery above all mean having to give up artistic gymnastics for a long time and perhaps even abandoning altogether her dream of competing in the Olympic Games, her greatest goal. In Charlotte Glynn’s film we see a young girl accustomed to strict discipline suddenly lose the structure that once guided her days. Used to thinking only about gymnastics, she struggles to manage her relationship with a father who never truly understood her and with immature classmates she spends time with simply to forget the sporting world from which she has been forcibly excluded. Her sudden emotional fragility reveals that, in someone so young and unprepared for life’s unexpected turns, mental strength had been closely tied to physical strength: in this classic coming-of-age story, growth comes through accepting the limits and imperfections of one’s own body.
My Semba
Tiger Competition
“For an African, it is a paradox not to be able to stay in the sun.” The Angolan protagonist says this, in poetic form, at the beginning of Hugo Salvaterra’s film: he is a young man with albinism, an aspiring poet, raised in an orphanage where he met the most important people in his life — his closest friends, who grew up with him, and the priest who educated them. The film is not only a lucid and never self-pitying account of the difficulty of being accepted in a society that pushes aside those who are different, the weak and the poor: above all, it expresses the pride of finding a creative path to make one’s own voice heard — the voice of one’s generation and of all those on the margins — with a powerful and innovative impulse.
Roid
Tiger Competition
In a remote village in Bangladesh, a man finds a wife, but when he realises she is far too eccentric and completely different from what he imagined a proper housewife should be, he tries — unsuccessfully — to get rid of her, simply because he cannot understand her. In this story written and directed by Mejbaur Rahman Sumon, we observe a context very distant from our own yet marked by universal elements: the exaggerated expectations of married life, the social pressures surrounding how people are expected to behave in every situation, and the difficulty of relating properly to someone who (through no fault of their own) does not conform to the roles assigned within the community because they live with a form of neurodiversity that the community does not recognise.
Butterfly
Big Screen Competition
The death of a Norwegian woman in the Canary Islands gives her two daughters the opportunity to meet again in the place where they had grown up but later left, unlike their mother. The older sister (Helene Bjørnebye) is an insecure and ordinary woman who walks with a crutch, perhaps because of a psychosomatic condition; the younger (Renate Reinsve, Oscar-nominated for Sentimental Value) is an eccentric and abrasive artist. They could hardly be more different, and the management of grief and complicated bureaucratic procedures quickly creates tension between them. Burdened with doubts and inner and outer wounds, they embark on separate yet parallel journeys — toward the same destination — which, through rediscovering the distant figure of their mother, allow them to find a luminous path toward a happiness that had seemed lost or impossible.
The Arab
Big Screen Competition
“An Arab”: this is how, without a proper name, a crucial character in Albert Camus’s famous novel The Stranger was referred to — a choice that today appears symptomatic of a colonising gaze. Drawing inspiration from Kamel Daoud’s book The Meursault Investigation, Algerian director Malek Bensmail, best known as a documentary filmmaker, imagines that this “Arab” had not only a name but also a mother, a brother and a story to tell; and it is precisely that brother, now elderly, who wishes to preserve his memory by speaking about him with a journalist. Starting from a fragment of Camus’s work — with images that, by coincidence, also recall the recent black-and-white adaptation directed by François Ozon — the film opens a historical panorama of French colonial occupation, the war of liberation and the unresolved conflicts that still shape Algerian society: if the best way to tell the story of oppression is to allow the oppressed to speak for themselves, then their account should at least be sincere, even if it does not hide the controversial aspects of their own history.