If one wanted to make a documentary about this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival, I saw with my own eyes something that would be suitable for the opening scene. A boy with an accreditation badge around his neck walked into a crowded bar in the afternoon. He looked around for a while before finally stopping his gaze on the most distinctive man in the room, an award-winning director who, in his long black coat and jackboots, looked a bit like a supporting character from Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. The boy overcame his shyness, walked up to the director, and in a stage whisper asked, “Excuse me, sir, where will the best party be tonight?” I didn’t hear the answer, unfortunately, but I inferred from the smile on the boy’s lips that it was a satisfying one. The reason I mention this story is that I almost immediately realised that, as a festival juror, I am a bit like this party-hungry teenager. After all, it is my duty to pick out the most original film from the crowd and address the right question to it.
This time, my task as a juror seemed appealing, as the festival space seemed to be populated by truly unusual characters. The films in competition featured, among other figures, a horny Taiwanese ophthalmologist, an authority-free Montenegrin prince, an unconventional dog therapist and even a talking tree. I deliberately include non-human characters in my enumeration because it was their significant representation that led me to reflect that the key protagonists of the most interesting competition films were also cities. This observation resonated with me strongly, due to the specificity of the place hosting the festival. Rotterdam is, after all, a metropolis with a distinct identity and a dramatic history: it was completely destroyed during the Second World War and then rebuilt in a modern style. This is also a city that has been celebrating its progressive character, which has also inspired the identity of the festival.
Rijeka, captured by Igor Bezinović in Fiume o morte!, which won both the FIPRESCI and Tiger Awards, also appears to be a space marked by a painful past, though it is invoked without a shadow of martyrdom. In this film, which combines the wisdom of an essay with the lightness of a frolic, the director goes back one hundred years to the period when troops led by the poet and fascist Gabriel D’Annunzio occupied the town that was the subject of a dispute between Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The Italian adventurer held on to Rijeka, then known as Fiume in Italy, for several months, during which, with his penchant for nationalist excesses and pompous celebrations, he proved that tragedy and farce, instead of following one another on the stage of history, can perform a grotesque synchronised dance.
While recalling this forgotten episode of the 20th century, Bezinović ensures that his film cannot be treated only as a historical curiosity. In order to give Fiume o morte! a contemporary dimension, the director stages scenes from D’Annunzio’s life embodied by amateur actors selected in a casting call. The sequences in which the successive actors play the roles of a fascist dignitary, usually recruited from among local pensioners eager to escape their routines, have an undeniable comic force, but they also conceal something more. While some of the actors can’t help but dismiss D’Annunzio’s pathetic tirades with a healthy, loud laugh, others seem mesmerised, inclined to blur the lines between fiction and reality and believe in their own sense of power.
Similarly ambivalent feelings are aroused by the moments when D’Annunzio, accompanied by extras dressed in historical uniforms, walks through the centre of Rijeka. It is frightening to realise that the majority of citizens and tourists, apparently used to seeing smooth-shaven young men march past, shouting hateful slogans, react with indifference. Fortunately, Bezinović proves that there are noble exceptions to this rule, as when an elderly woman accosts one of the “soldiers” and, in simple terms, explains to him that he should stop wasting his time, drop his uniform, and take some girl to a disco. The endearing simplicity of this short scene fills us with optimism, gives us hope that all is not yet lost, and that there are still people among us who know that slogans such as “Fiume o morte!” actually represent a false alternative. Instead of beating yourself up or dying, you can always go dancing.
A reluctance to be part of the mainstream, to succumb to collective eruptions of anger and bursts of enthusiasm, also pervades the protagonists of the second most interesting film in this year’s Tiger competition: Ridhwan Saidi’s Tears in Kuala Lumpur (Air Mata di Kuala Lumpur). Two women, representing different generations but united by a mutual emptiness associated with the loss of a loved one, seem equally mismatched to the contemporary nature of the Malaysian capital. Instead of surrendering to the momentum of the booming metropolis, they prefer to take an unhurried stroll and alternately dwell on their idealised past or seek escape from it in their brief admiration of a place they have just spotted or a person they have accidentally met. In this way, they also discover for themselves the new face of the city, which reveals a poetic and unhurried side accessible only to insiders. The younger of the women, Jay, an artist who looks at Kuala Lumpur through the prism of her camera, is particularly skilled in this. For the girl, taking photographs seems to be the equivalent of extracting tears; although marked by sadness, these tears also carry the promise of purification. The phrase “Kuala Lumpur is like a cemetery,” repeated several times in the film, also has a similar dimension. Large necropolises, after all, often function not only as memorials, but also as ideal spaces for quiet, reflective walks. Saidi’s Tears confirms that people in Kuala Lumpur seem to know this as well as those in Rotterdam, Rijeka, and other cities whose proud, modern image has been built on the ruins of a complicated past.
By Piotr Czerkawski
Edited by José Teodoro
Copyright FIPRESCI