‘Art is art! I salute art. It is the beautiful, the divine, the spirit of the world and the pride of life!” The words of the flamboyant Léon, who makes his way through 17th-century Portugal, could just as well have been in the opening speech of IFFR. Providence and the Guitar – an artful comedy about Portuguese artists who resist their time – was an appropriate opening to the 55th edition of IFFR. Rarely has the festival, like the film, placed so much emphasis on art as a form of resistance in a polarized world.
International Film Festival Rotterdam is in good shape. After the pandemic disaster years, the festival has taken a new course in recent years under the leadership of artistic director Vanja Kaludjercic. The cherries were picked off the cake, the festival shrank to eleven days: ‘impact over scale’ was the philosophy. And there was a renewed focus. IFFR has always been the festival for high film art that you watch with a cup of mint tea and a frown. But in recent years there has been more attention for genre films (action, comedy, thriller, horror): films that are often overlooked at the larger festivals that IFFR navigates between: Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes. “We want to be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible,” Kaludjercic told entertainment trade magazine this year Variety. There’s even a Baby Film Club, and no Romanian existentialism is shown there.
The strategy worked. Last year, the pre-pandemic visitor figures came into view for the first time: 296,000 occupied seats, with more than 482 films. An increase of 12 percent compared to 2024, and proportionately almost as much as ‘the last normal year’ 2019, when the festival attracted around 327,000 visits. This year the festival continues that trend, with prize fighters such as The Secret Agent (two Golden Globes) Sirat and Jim Jarmusch’s Palme d’Or winner Father Mother Sister Brotherwith focus programs around the ‘Egyptian James Cameron’ Marwan Hamed and with Japanese V-Cinema: the sometimes bloody, sometimes erotic shock films that pulled the Japanese film industry out of the doldrums last century. Although IFFR remains a place for experimental films; there are few other places where you regularly see halls overflowing.
$100,000 to make a short film
But this year something seems different: the festival has not often been so activist and concerned with the world. This year, the first films from the Displacement Film Fund will premiere. Last year, co-creator Cate Blanchett announced the fund in Rotterdam: five displaced filmmakers, who fled Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan and Somalia, each received $100,000 from the fund to make a short film. Not necessarily about politics, oppression or flight, but about whatever they want – money to experiment.
The IFFR also incorporates current events into the program in other ways. This year’s main guest is actress Hiam Abbass: ‘the face of Palestinian film’. Her movie new movie Palestine 36 premieres in Rotterdam, about Palestinian resistance against the British authorities before the establishment of Israel.
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Experimental, activist, entertaining. It is this edition of IFFR in three words, but also characterizes the film Providence and the Guitar with which the festival launched itself on Thursday evening. Two penniless troubadours, Léon and Elvira, travel through a picture book-like nineteenth-century Portugal in search of a stage. They are striking figures: he moves as if he is doing kabuki theater, she radiates the tranquility and superiority of a descended primordial goddess.
As the film begins, they arrive in the town of Covarronca, where they encounter a “tragic madness,” a cursed place full of “pigs, dogs, commissars” and giggling child demons in the darkness. Art dies here before it reaches the shelves. But despite permit issues, corruption and financial setbacks, the city must and will be entranced by their flowery theater of infatuation.
Providence and the Guitar
Providence and the Guitar is a surprising adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s (Treasure Island) book of the same name. Just when you think you’ve exposed the film as a charming but irritating costume comedy, it suddenly jumps to the present. We see exactly the same characters, but as they would be in our time: he is a cynical rock star who sings monotonous songs about assassinating the president, she is a political activist with an office job (and his biggest fan). The contrast could not be greater – but the past and present appear to share many challenges.
On the one hand it is Providence and the Guitar a funny comedy. With songs, Bassie and Adriaan villains and a lesson for the present. On the other hand, it is absurdist arthouse, where you have to ‘do a lot yourself’. If you go along with it, the film has a charming message. There is a pull on those who want to live freely, who want to make art. From big money: how do you earn money from painting? From politics: how do you convey a message with your songs? From the corrupt government. Léon and Elvira fight to keep their art pure; an expression of love for life and for each other. And that in itself is an act of resistance against “the hardships of life.”
It was fodder for debate on the opening evening of IFFR: many could not tolerate this slow, deliberately affecting absurdism and left the room. Others liked to rave about Léon and Elvira. In short, the 55th IFFR has started.
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