The festival feeling is back at the opening of IFFR

In the middle of her opening speech, Vanya Kaludjercic, director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) since 2020, has tears in her eyes. A light shines on the aisle where the IFFR employees are standing. Kaludjercic: “Your love for the festival is one of the most inspiring things I have ever experienced.” And: “If you talk about the real tigers, there they are!”

Her emotion comes across as sincere. Firstly, because Kaludjercic took over as director three years ago (for the fiftieth edition of the festival) but has never organized a physical festival due to Covid-19. Secondly, because the pandemic has put IFFR’s viability under pressure. Due to disappointing ticket sales during two digital editions, the pot of financial reserves has been drained: the budget shrunk from almost ten million euros to less than eight. And the third reason is that this is really Kaludjercic’s team. Since she took office, almost seventy employees have left, voluntarily and involuntarily. She was accused of “autocratic micromanagement” in an urgent letter from (former) employees.

For all these reasons, expectations for IFFR 2023 are high: is the difference in budget noticeable? And that alleged iron grip of the new festival director, what is noticeable about it? There are hundreds of film producers, directors, actors and journalists in De Doelen in Rotterdam (if the roof collapsed, the Netherlands would no longer have a film industry). And they are all waiting for the tip of the veil.

Kaludjercic doesn’t give much away. There is a retrospective on corona, a thank you to, and a spotlight on, mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, and a heartfelt story about the connecting power of film (“which cannot be imitated by installing a beamer in your living room”).

The only thing she says about the program: IFFR must reflect on current times. They do this by selecting films from countries that are not often seen by film festivals – Japan, Indonesia, South India… IFFR also selected both the blockbusters with mainstream potential and the small, frustrating, difficult films.

At the end of the speech, Kaludjercic says that film should above all be subversive, uncomfortable. So no consensus films. It’s almost too fitting that the opening film is about the Norwegian Edvard Munch, one of the least conventional painters of the twentieth century.

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Universal

Munch is not your standard biographical film, as Hollywood makes them. The film is divided into four parts, each representing a formative period in the painter’s life. The gimmick: There are four different actors playing him. The actors also do not look alike and one of them is a woman with old man make-up.

This choice immediately makes the career of the painter more universal. The viewer is forced to distance, not attach, to reflect on the meaning of the events in Munch’s life, rather than the feeling those events evoke.

It is reminiscent of Todd Haines’ biofilm about Bob Dylan: I’m Not There. In it, the different guises of Dylan are played by different actors. Although it works better in that film: Dylan had different forms, in which he was idiosyncratic. Munch’s life was more straightforward, the seeds of his time in an asylum, for instance, having been planted in his youth.

Visually, the film succeeds well in conveying Munch’s emotions. Young Munch, who experiences his first crush on a painting retreat, moves through a warmly lit Garden of Eden.

De Munch in Berlin, just after his major exhibition at the Berlin Art Association was canceled because his paintings were ‘too simple’, is gritty, shot realistically, with harsh lighting. Except when he is sitting dreamily on the back of his mistress’ bicycle, then the outside air is plastic and colourful, in the style of Munch’s paintings.

When Munch drinks himself into a psychiatric institution and his life hangs on only a few neurons, we see black and white images with high contrasts. And if Munch is an old man in Oslo, a peaceful but dying hermit, afraid of the Nazis, then the light is soft, as if it could die at any moment. In combination with Tim Fain’s beautiful music, it brings you emotionally close to the depressed painter – the often ramshackle dialogues do not.

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Festival feeling

Where Munch really surprised in the third gimmick of the film: the period in Berlin does not take place at the end of the 19th century, but in the present.

It’s the time Munch was in the limbo of the subversive artist: brilliant but not yet recognized. To end up in the big museums he would have to conform, he didn’t. By placing the conversations about this in contemporary Berlin, director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken forces you to think about the boundaries of ‘accepted art’ in our time. In addition, it also provides us with a scene with Munch, the Swedish author, painter and photographer August Strindberg (a woman in this film) and the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland in a German techno club. That’s why it’s brilliant.

Although the film does not follow a Hollywood pattern in structure, escapes Munch not to Hollywood morals. Ultimately, the message (implicit and explicit) is that Munch was so brilliant because he was so crazy, and vice versa. We know the tortured artist. It’s ironic: such a conventional film about such an unconventional artist.

A strong film, not brilliant. But only afterwards does it become clear why it is a perfect opening film. Until long after the credits have rolled past the set catering section, dozens of groups of attendees are discussing in the cinema room. About ‘the tortured artist’, about subversiveness as the goal of art, or about: ‘Who did you think was the most beautiful Munch?’ Kaludjercic and her team can be happy. IFFR has started and the festival feeling also seems to have been rediscovered.