Fewer projects but more attendees signal the way ahead for CineMart, director Marit van den Elshout tells Nick Cunningham

As doors closed on CineMart 2010, director Marit van den Elshout reflects on the event’s continuing importance as a key facilitator within the finance of global independent cinema. “Last year’s CineMart was played out against a mood of depression – people were anxious about what was going to happen finan-cially,” she points out. “But this year the market was extremely active. We received great feedback about the selection and all of the projects had a very impres-sive schedule of meetings.”

TargeTedWhat seems evident this year, she claims, is the ex-tent to which participants had prepared in advance for the event, resulting in a less scattergun, more targeted, assessment of the market offerings. “This is what we have seen this year,” she confirms, “and

that’s why we’ve decided to present a smaller selec-tion.” In 2010, thirty-three projects were selected, a marked contrast to the forty-eight presented in 2007. Illuminations Films Keith Griffiths concurs. “Different people approach CineMart in different ways,” he stresses. “Some visit every table and every project, but I am much more choosy. I am a small cot-tage industry, not a major production studio. If I can find one really good project during CineMart, then I’m very happy. So I select at the beginning and rarely choose more that four projects to talk to.”

MeeTing of MindsThis reflects Van den Elshout’s belief that less seems to be more, as this year’s market attracted approxi-mately 890 participants: a 20% increase on 2009. She expressed further satisfaction with a Rotterdam Lab programme that is now considered a staple of the Rotterdam and CineMart experience. “We had a diverse group of 67 new producers this year, for whom we provided a very strong schedule of events. I thought that Tuesday’s case-study on post-produc-

tion was excellent, as was the case-study on Agua Fría de Mar about the construction of a Latin American/European co-production. The Rotterdam Lab is such a solid part of CineMart and will allow it to evolve and professionalise even more. Maybe one thing for the coming years is to combine the emerging produc-ers and their established counterparts in a meeting of minds; a think-tank to help cook up what the future of CineMart may be.” Future plans, Van den Elshout suggests, may include a series of work-in-progress screenings of HBF and CineMart projects.“But I’ve been using these last few days to talk to the industry about what we should be doing,” she contin-ued. “And in general, people say don’t change any-thing. Yes, we have a problem in that we are crunched between Sundance and Berlin, but I don’t think that we should change our dates because of that fact. Rotterdam and CineMart constitute the start of the European film year. Once again, we have received af-firmation that what we are doing has a purpose, that the organisation is good and that we enable people to achieve as much as possible in a short period of time.”

CineMa reloadedVan den Elshout seems generally pleased with the Cinema Reloaded experiment initiated this year, as well as the debates the project has spawned, but was realistic about the level of future endeavour necessary to see one or more of the projects come to fruition. “There was a great energy around the project,” she confirms. “It has indicated to both the industry and our audiences just how willing we are at Rotterdam to try anything, to experi-ment, to see what the future may be. We are not claiming to have devised a new model. But in terms of success, we had a great rapport with the filmmakers and I think that they have seen from all the discussions around the topic that they re-ally need to be a little more proactive in the fu-ture. After the festival, I’ll be calling to get them blogging and to get more and more stuff up on-line: communication with the audience is key to the success of the project.”

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photo: ruud Jonkers

“During the film festival you see rotterdam at its best – and rotterdam at its cultural best,” pointed out rotterdam’s Alderman for Culture rik Grashoff (second from right) during Monday evening’s iFFr Buyers and sellers dinner. “We are a multicultural city. We are a cosmopolitan a city with the biggest port in Europe. We have had a focus on the world for centuries,” he said in a speech to diners, “The film festival has had a focus on the world for decades.”

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Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu found inspiration in Dante and hieronymus Bosch for his Tiger competitor The Temptation of st. Tony, Geoffrey Macnab reports

Õunpuu is busy with final rehearsals of a new stage adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Garbage, The City and Death and so won’t make it to Rotterdam until the end of the week.By that time, some Rotterdam audiences will already have seen the astonishing opening sequence of The Temptation Of St. Tony, in which we see a car drive through a funeral cortege, crash spectacularly and spin upside down into the sea. No, the director says, the scene wasn’t easy to shoot. The first time he attempted it, the effect wasn’t spec-tacular enough. “I suggested to the stuntman, who is a bit crazy, that it was too meek. He got offended. The second time, he overdid it. For a while, I was re-ally afraid he was dead. What we had agreed was that he would instantly tell me over the walkie-talkie that he was alright. But I didn’t hear anything because his walkie-talkie had fallen off into the water. I was terri-fied that something was really wrong.” Speaking by phone, Õunpuu explained his decision

to quote Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark”) at the start of the film. “I thought I needed to give one possible key to interpret the following events,” the writer-director suggests. The film, shot in black and white, is a surrealistic black comedy about the travails of a middle-aged man, adrift in the Estonian countryside and trying to cope as his life unravels around him. It has been suggested that The Temptation Of St. Tony is an allegory on the new ‘wolf-like’ capitalism

in Eastern Europe: an interpretation the director firmly rejects. Ask him about his dark and surrealistic storytelling style and he says, “the Estonians have lived through a lot at the end of the 20th century. This sense of ab-surd, maybe Beckett-like feeling is there. Maybe the sardonic humour is a bit Estonian – it’s about the disintegration of a soul.” The first point of inspiration for Õunpuu was the cel-ebrated painting of The Temptation Of St. Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch. The filmmaker studied paint-

ing himself and says he has always warmed to both the apocalyptic side of Bosch and his “fierce com-mentary on society… he’s almost like a mad, raving prophet.” As for the decision to shoot in black and white, he attributes that to Bela Tarr. The Hungarian auteur once remarked that he shot in black and white to make sure audiences realized they were watching a film, not looking out of the window. “I wanted to make the point that people should be aware every moment that it is a film, a work of art.”Õunpuu is shortly to start work on a new screen-play with the very engaging title Free Range Fred. He describes it as “an anti-Western road movie” about “what it means to be free.” In the meantime, he is busy working on the Fassbinder play. Õunpuu is a great admirer of the German writer-director. “He made 40 films. Half of them are good and some are just exceptional. I’ve always admired these artists who’ve managed to die young.” Is this an aspiration of his own? “Not really, but I admire artists who man-age to live without any concern for their well-being.”

VPRO Tiger Awards CompetitionThe Temptation of st. Tony – Veiko ÕunpuuThu 04 22:00 PA1, Fri 05 13:30 PA3, Sat 06 10:45 PA3

Chinese director yang heng returns to rotterdam with his Tiger competitor sun spots. Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic about this follow-up to his award-winning debut, he tells Mark Baker

Sun Spots (Guang ban) is Chinese director Yang Heng’s second film, and his third time in Rotter-dam – his debut Betelnut screened here in 2007, and in 2008 he created the video installation Nirvana for IFFR’s Exploding Cinema: New Dragon Inns section. Originally, Yang had wanted to make Sun Spots as his first film, he reveals. “I ended up making Betelnut first,” the director says ahead of tonight’s European Premiere: “I had the idea for Sun Spots first, but then I wrote the script for Betelnut; it was a stronger story, with more tension – and therefore maybe more ac-cessible to audiences, I thought. Sun Spots is much more about mood and atmosphere, although it does have a story too.” Shot in Yang’s home town of Jishou, in a remote part of China’s Hunan Province, Sun Spots – like Betelnut –

is shot in long shots with a static camera, and gives a contemplative sense of the languid pace of life in that part of the world. Winning the New Currents Award in Pusan for Betelnut really helped get Sun Spots off the ground – as did funding from IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund – Yang says. “Suddenly producers were coming to me, want-ing to produce my second film. This helped with the finance, and ultimately with making the film I really wanted to make. But it was a still a hard struggle get-ting everyone to understand the idea,” the director reveals. “Even my some of my friends didn’t get it at first.” “There are connections between the two films, but Sun Spots has a completely different story,” Yang says. “The producers also initially wanted me to make something very similar to Betelnut, and I had to argue very hard to make the film the way I wanted to. Sun Spots is more about the landscapes, the col-ours and the atmosphere,” Yang says. “There is also a tension between the lovers which is reflected in the tension between the city and the countryside, but this is not something I really stress in the film. If the

audience picks up on it, that’s great, but if they don’t notice it, that’s OK too.” Asked whether the mood and feel of Sun Spots is in any way intended as a comment on contemporary China – at one point we hear television reports of politically charged events taking place in Beijing – Yang stresses that this “is a more personal film, about my world and that of my contemporaries. Of course, China is changing and developing at a great pace, and there is an increasing emphasis on materi-al goods, but I didn’t set out to specifically represent this in Sun Spots.” Yang is currently looking for finance for a new project “about love and family”, but doesn’t want to reveal any specifics yet: except that he would consider moving the camera in the next film. “The next one will be a very different film again, different from both Betelnut and from Sun Spots,” the director reveals.

VPRO Tiger Awards Competitionsun spots – Yang Heng Thu 04 16:00 PA4, Fri 05 13:00 PA1, Sat 06 15:45 PA4

sun spots

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realisTiCCommenting on this year’s CineMart, Frans van Gestel of Amsterdam-based production house IDTV stresses how he saw a move on the part of investors to target more commer-cially-oriented projects rather than ostensibly festival fare. “I feel in my mind that people are looking to the market,” he pointed out. “They look very carefully at projects from the start and tend not to gamble. They don’t want to speculate over a number of projects.” Trust Nordisk’s Susan Wendt also recognised the need for continuing financial prudence. “It feels like everybody is more realistic about the potential and possibilities of the projects, and of course the economic situation worldwide means that you have to be a lot more creative in finding other types of investment and back-ends to get the money back,” she stresses. “Eve-rybody knows that right now it’s not that easy, so everybody has to be flexible.”

long relaTionsHiPVan den Elshout stresses that, whatever the financial climate, CineMart will continue to provide the conditions for fruitful co-produc-tion collaboration. “A good project will get made eventually if it has good partners, a solid finance structure, an excellent script and a very persistent producer,” she concludes. “But CineMart can speed up the process. In the end, making a co-production is like being in a marriage. It’s the beginning of a long relation-ship. At CineMart, we create the atmosphere in which people can work together, feel safe and develop a sense of mutual trust.”

[foto Marit Van den Eslhout]

The Temptation of st. Tony

photo: ruud Jonkers

Marit van den Elshout

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Dutch producer hetty Naaijkens-retel helmrich beat an acute illness to continue producing, and has now directed her first film, she tells Geoffrey Macnab

Five years ago, Dutch producer Hetty Naai-jkens-Retel Helmrich, boss of Rotterdam-based Scarabee Films, was enjoying a thriving career. She had overseen her brother Leonard Retel Helmrich’s feature doc Shape of the Moon, a win-ner of major awards at Sundance and IDFA. Then, she was struck down by an acute rheumatoid con-dition that left her wheelchair-bound and faced with the prospect of never walking again. Retel Helmrich has now made a near-miraculous recovery. “They have asked me to write a book about it,” she says. When she was ill, she steeped herself in medical literature and consulted top specialists from both East and West. “What I did was find the right button to recover. Inside every human body, there is the possibility of self-heal-ing… and I found the right button!”

feaTure debuTThe filmmaker has been in Rotterdam this week introducing the Made In Rotterdam festival screening of Contract Hotel – Djangan Loepah!, her first feature doc as director. The film, which tells the story of Dutch and mixed-blood Dutchmen from Indonesia forced to repatriate to the Neth-

erlands in the 1940s, has attracted over 10,000 visitors in the Netherlands and has picked up a Crystal Film award in the process. In the documentary, memories and stories are

illustrated with never-before-seen newsreel foot-age of life in Indonesia before WWII. The film is close to its director’s own experience. Born in In-donesia to a Javanese mother and a Dutch father,

she moved with her family to Holland at the age of two. Retel Helmrich is back working with her brother Leonard on Position Among the Stars, in-tended as the third part of the “Indonesian” tril-ogy that began with Eye of the Day and continued with Shape of the Moon. The Sundance Film Fund and the Dutch Film Fund are among the backers of the new project, which again focuses on the same Indonesian family. The aim is to have the film, edited by her son Jasper, ready for IDFA next November and for the Sundance Festival in early 2011. Meanwhile, Retel Helmrich is plotting a new directorial venture in similar vein to Con-tract Hotel. Her idea in the new film is to explore the experiences of second and third-generation Dutch Indonesians in the Netherlands. There are currently 1.2 million citizens with a Dutch Indonesian background in the country. “Though people think they are the best integrated people in Holland, there are a lot of problems,” she sug-gests. “You can compare it to a burn. If you don’t tend it, it will hurt that much more.”

insPiraTional sTorYRetel Helmrich is also contemplating making a film about her own recovery from illness – a story that she hopes will inspire and inform others. One unexpected benefit is that she now has a disa-bled parking badge. This means, she confides, she can park wherever she likes – quite an advantage for a producer always on the move.

pushiNG ThE riGhT BuTToNs

pApEr pLANEs

Argentinean Ayar Blasco discusses the thrill of improvisation in making El sol, his post-apocalyptic portrait of Buenos Aires. By Javier Alcácer Mackinlay

Mad Max wouldn’t last a day in El Sol’s post-apocalyptic Buenos Aires, crowded with crook-ed politicians, mutant potatoes, Greenpeace zombies and junkies. “I always wanted to make something post-nuclear set in Buenos Aires,” says Ayar Blasco, “and actually I believe that that Buenos Aires isn’t very different from the one we have nowadays.” A self-taught illustrator, Blasco has made sev-eral short feature animation films (which can be seen at www.chimiboga.com) and in 2002 he co-directed, with Juan Antín, his first long feature, Mercano, el marciano. This was the genesis of El Sol. “Originally, the movie was about the twi-light of mankind. It was something dark, quite terrible. But when voice actors and illustrators started working, things started mutating to-wards comedy and black humor.”In animation, it’s hard – not to say impossible – for independent filmmakers to compete against heavyweights like Pixar, Dreakworks and Dis-ney’s technical resources. But Blasco had an ace up his sleeve: creativity. “We had a very small crew, and the whole movie is made on Adobe Flash, so I wanted to use to the maximum the freedom we had.” Improvisation was key in the

making of El Sol, which was supported by the Hubert Bals Fund. “Do you know when you are making a film and doing jokes about it? Well, that’s the spontaneity I wanted for the film! In fact, we recorded the voices first, and plenty of improvisation took place.” One of the actors, who plays both the narrator and a minister, is Doc-tor Tangalanga, an elderly Argentinian phone prankster who has mastered the art of cursing; in fact, being able to add swearwords to his lines of dialogue was the sole condition he attached to his collaboration on the film. Of course, Blasco immediately agreed. “We only started with the pictures after we had the radio play,” Blasco adds. “We didn’t use sto-ryboards or sketches.” Films tend to be carefully planned, and more so animation films, but in this case Blasco chose an open-minded approach: the fast-paced narration is open to digression, so there’s no way of foreseeing what’s coming up next. “That’s exactly what I wanted: I’m sicked and tired of films where you know everything that’s going to happen,” concludes Blasco, who now wants to make a movie with actors. El Sol’s sense of humor goes from childish to twisted without warning and, in the same unexpected way, the strange ending adds a layer of melan-choly and tenderness; the results reveal a delicate sensibility behind all the outrageous display.

El sol – Ayar Blasco Fri 05 14:30 VE2, Sat 06 22:45 CI2

hetty Naaijkens-retel helmrich photo: ruud Jonkers

“This film is a letter to my father,” director of Lost persons Area Caroline strubbe explains to Nick Cunningham

Strubbe’s debut film, selected for Cannes 2009 and screening in IFFR 2010’s Bright Future was, she stresses, inspired by an Elliott Erwitt photograph of lonely women on a bench beneath a Lost Persons Area sign. But the film suggests more Richard Ave-don’s bleak portraits of the disenfranchised poor within America’s Midwest, a view underlined by Strubbe’s extraordinary transformation of the Rot-terdam landscape into something resembling the wide and dusty prairie. “I loved the open space, the flat open horizon. In some ways the film resembles a western, but it was suggested to me by a journalist that normally the hero enters the town and saves it. In this film a man enters the town and everything ends in tragedy.” In the film, the disillusioned Marcus – together with wife Bettina and daughter Tessa – has opted out of what he considers a society tainted by con-sumerism. He works as a foreman repairing power lines while his wife runs a canteen for his co-work-ers. Tessa meanwhile is a serial truant who collects ephemera from her surroundings to remould as be-spoke items of sculpture. Into their lives comes the initially itinerant but reliable – and increasingly fatherly – Szalbocs, a Hungarian engineer. Benign and non-confrontational, his immersion into the

story results in tragedy’ however. “My father was a pilot, so I spent a lot of time in the airport canteen with my mother and my two sis-ters,” comments Strubbe, as she unpicks the auto-biographical elements of the tale. “We were always waiting for him at the weekends, playing pinball, eating chips, and my mother was a very beautiful lady entertaining the men. I liked very much to ob-serve the world of adults. And my father was like a hero. But then he couldn’t fly anymore and he lost all confidence and began to terrorise us and neglect us through frustration. My father was very nice and very original, and like Marcus he was also against society, but then we saw that his strength was like paper. When he couldn’t fly he wasn’t strong any-more. He became a mean person.”So is a co-production about a bunch of Europeans gathered in one remote place, speaking mainly the lingua franca of English: a viable and re-usable busi-ness template to attract wide international audi-ences in the future? “Sometimes this construction can seem artificial,” Strubbe laughs. “But in this case it seemed very organic – maybe it was uncon-scious, with the film set in a sort of no-man’s land, and with English being such a universal language. For me, it was exactly the way I wanted to go. But it also made the financing of the movie very easy.”

Lost persons Area – Caroline Strubbe Fri 05 17:45 CI4

WAy BEyoND ThuNDErDoME

El sol

Lost persons Area

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Former iFFr Trainee project for young Film Critics member Gaitano Maiorino on returning to the festival, as a jobbing film journalist

One year after. Back to Rotterdam, one year later. Colder than I imagined; as cool as I re-membered. Familiar faces make my arrival at De Doelen a long sequence of happy greetings and nice memories. The press badge hanging round my neck re-minds me why I’m here, so I start browsing the catalogue looking for the best way to plunge into the programme of IFFR 2010. I take my time, put a cross next to Kore-eda’s Air Doll, underline Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising (missed in Venice), try to decide what to watch among the films in competition, sched-ule interviews. I feel as if I’ve grown up. Back enthusiastic to IFFR one year later. This is my second time, but it feels like my first. That’s because this year I can experience IFFR in a freer way. In 2009, I attended the Trainee Project for Young Film Critics and as a trainee I had FIPRESCI jury duties, meetings, assign-ments and deadlines I had to respect. That was excellent for me, I learnt how to work in a team in order to prepare a daily festival newspaper, I better understood how a big film festival is organized: I really wanted to draw on as much as I could from that experience and I did my best. But the other side of the coin was that I had very few opportunities to select what I re-ally wanted to watch. Now, I have to choose on my own and go on my way; this year, it’s up to me to decide, to pick out which movies could be the most interesting to review. For me it’s a new way to approach this festival, a different one, an exciting occasion to put Trainee Project teachings into practice. Maybe the best chance to feel that I grew up.

BABYLON AND ON

uK filmmakers Fiona howe and Gareth Jones have secured €100,000 from The Media programme’s ‘Media international’ for ‘Babylon international’, the new global version of their Babylon training initiative, ‘Babylon Europe’. Geoffrey Macnab reports

The Media International funds have been complemented by investment from the Ni-gerian Film Corporation and other sources, giving the initiative a working budget of around €200,000. Babylon is an audiovisual development programme assisting filmmak-ers of migrant and diasporic origin to break through into the international mainstream. In Berlin later this month, ‘Babylon Interna-tional’ will be holding its inaugural work-shop for 14 projects. Seven are European and seven West African. ‘Babylon Europe’ runs on an annual budget of around €75,000. Howe and Jones are in Rotterdam this week, hosting a four-day residential ‘Babylon Eu-rope’ development workshop for 14 selected projects during the Rotterdam Film Festival (02-05 February 2010); with script consul-tancy, marketing and production analysis, screenings, case studies and networking fo-rums. Among the filmmakers who’ve passed through Babylon workshops in recent years are Mohammed El Daradji, whose Son of Ba-bylon (formerly Um-Hussein) played recently at Sundance and will be seen in Berlin’s Panorama, and Mitko Panov, whose feature The War is Over is a Swiss-Macedonian co-production. “We take cultural diversity in a very, very broad sense,” Jones commented in Rotterdam this week. “We believe cultural diversity is the source of the very best stories. We are not a charitable enterprise, although obviously we have a political commitment against social and creative exclusion. But that is only the half they story. The other half is that we believe these voices carry the most interesting films.” Alongside their activities at Babylon, Jones and Howe also run UK pro-duction outfit Scenario, through which they made Desire, which premiered at Sarajevo last year.

producer Antonino Lombardo just missed out on an oscar nomination for Winter in Wartime, but has one of the buzz projects at CineMart. Geoffrey Macnab reports

One of the buzz projects in CineMart this week has been Patrice Toye’s new feature Erased. The €1,900,000 project arrived in Rotterdam with 55% of its f inancing already in place. Producer Antonino Lombardo has confirmed that the f ilm is now on track to shoot later this summer. “There are still important meetings with the Dutch Film Fund and the Walloon Film Fund. If they say yes, and we make some money from a sales agent or pre-sale, we can start shooting in August,” Lombardo comments. The aim then will be to have the f ilm ready for Cannes 2011. Erased is based on a true story about pregnant girls in 1970s Belgium, whose babies were taken away from them and sold. The main cast mem-bers will be teenage girls. Sara De Roo, who has worked often with Toye before, is also set to join the cast. Toye’s debut feature Rosie (1999) sold to 15 territories. Lombardo expressed confidence that Erased can emulate this on the market. Alongside Erased, Lombardo is pushing forward a number of new features through his company Prime Time, founded in 1987. Here in Rotter-dam, the veteran producer revealed that he is working again with young Flemish auteur Fien

Troch (Someone Else’s Happiness, Unspoken) on her new film, Kid. The film will tackle similar themes to those explored in Troch’s earlier work. It’s about a child who loses her parents. “In Un-spoken, it was the grieving parents. Now, it is grieving through the eyes of the child.” The aim is to shoot in 2011. Lombardo was also a co-producer through Prime Time on Ben Yadir Nabil’s Les Barons, about

three Moroccan friends in a poor suburb of Brus-sels. This was made through Entre Chien et Loup. Back in 1995, Lombardo co-produced Oscar win-ner Antonia’s Line. He was hoping for a repeat performance this year with Martin Koolhoven’s Winter In Wartime. In the event, the f ilm – which sold recently to Sony Pictures Classics for the US – slipped at the f inal hurdle, just missing out on a nomination, despite being shortlisted.

Anticipating the renowned VPRO Tiger Awards granted by the International Film Festival Rotter-dam, for the past six years the Lions Club L’Esprit du Temps Rotterdam has granted its Lions Award to a film selected from the Bright Future section, the festival’s platform for filmmakers of the future. The award film symbolizes the spirit of the Lions Club and consists of a cheque for € 2,000.This year’s winner, selected from the three nomina-tions Los Viajes del Viento (Ciro Guerra, Colombia, 2009), Atletu (Davey Frankel and Rasselas Lakew, Ethiopia, 2009) and Donkey (Antonio Nuic Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2009), announced yesterday at 19.30 in Pathé 4, is Atletu by Davey Frankel and Rasselas Lakew.

Antonino Lombardo photo: ramon Mangold

Jordi Ballo photo: Corinne de Korver

Atletu

When he meets the Daily Tiger, Jordi Ballo is the middle of writing an opinion piece for a Barcelona newspaper on a new proposal requiring local cinema exhibitors to provide versions of films dubbed into Catalan as well as Spanish. This kind of engagement with cinema – at once concrete and intellectual – is at the heart of the MA in documentary Ballo founded at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in 1998 (which he is still director of). IFFR features a sample of the extraordinary body of work pro-duced from the course, with nine films by students and teachers in the Under Reconstruction strand in Signals, including acclaimed auteur Jose Luis Guerin’s 2001 Under Construction and the world premiere of Guerin’s former student Victor Garcia’s El ex-boxeador. The highly distinctive course attracts established filmmakers like Guerin, who then involve their stu-dents in a full-length feature production, providing the MA candidates with valuable insight into the creative and production process: “But the teachers, the established filmmakers learn as much also,” says Ballo. At the same time, the students are encouraged to work on their own feature-length projects at the school (all of which involve independent producers like Arte: “It’s important we approach the projects as ‘proper’ films, not as exercises,” says Ballo). Many former students have returned to the course as tu-tors and used current MA participants as crew; a virtuous circle of learning and experience showcased here at IFFR. EL

The winners of the Arte France Cinema Award and the Prince Claus Film Fund Grant were announced last night at the CineMart 2010 Closing Night Party. Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark was awarded the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant of €15,000. The award is given to a CineMart project by a filmmaker from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Caribbean, to support early-stage development. The jury was impressed by the “unconventional epi-sodic storytelling” of Suwichakornpong’s proposal – a highly personal take on contemporary Thailand.

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s feature debut, Mun-dane History, is also competing the IFFR 2010 Tiger strand. Pia Marais’ Layla Fourie received the Art France Cin-ema Award for the best CineMart 2010 Project. The drama, written by Marais (who won a 2007 Tiger for her debut Die Unerzogenen), is set in present-day South Africa and revolves around a single mother who works as a polygraphist in a casino. The €10,000 prize is intended to support the pro-duction of independent filmmaking.

CiNEMArT WiNNErs

CATALAN LiFT

Japanese director sai yoichi is finding watching his oeuvre in chronological order for the first time an elucidating experience, he tells Alain Devraux

Japanese director Sai Yoichi has taken on a vari-ety of genres in his 17-film career: social drama, family drama, ninja action and erotic films to name but four. “It’s actually the first time I’ve watched all these movies in chronological or-der,” Sai says of the retrospective granted to him in Rotterdam’s Signals section. “I saw my debut movie Mosquito On The Tenth Floor here, and that was interesting. I think I set a basic template in that movie – elements of its style show up again and again in my later films. So in that sense I have noticed a continuity to my work. Yet see-ing my movies here has made me aware of both the continuity and changes in my work. It’s given me more than an opportunity to think back. It’s inspired me to look forward and think about my future films.”

osHiMaSai worked as Oshima’s assistant director on In the Realm of the Senses, and Oshima effectively launched his career. Sai worked with Oshima again in 1999, this time as an actor in Gohatto. “In the Realm of the Senses was my only collaboration with Oshima,“ he says. “He told me straight that I didn’t need to learn anything more and that I should be a director on my own. He said that we should be friends rather than colleagues, and that was what happened. I acted in Gohatto because I was his friend. I learned nothing about filmmak-ing from Oshima – he hates to be a teacher. But he did teach me how to drink, that’s for sure.”

evoluTionSai is a director who adapts his style to the de-mands of each project, without applying a rigor-ous theoretical approach. “I do approach the films individually and try and see what’s needed for each one,” he says. “But I do think there is a basic

style to my work which I implement in all my mov-ies. My style changes in each work, but I actually think it’s down to evolution more than anything else.” Sai rejects claims that his works differ because he’s happy to go along with the stylistic demands of his producers. “People say that I look like a director who’s willing to give in to the demands of the pro-ducer, but that‘s not true,“ he says. “I don’t think I have ever complied with any stylistic changes sug-gested by a producer or the film company. Most of what is in the films comes straight from me.”Sai points out that as a “non-genre” director he’s

in good company in Japan. “There are a few di-rectors in Japan who are called non-genre – that doesn’t mean that they don’t work in genres, but that it’s very difficult to pigeonhole them,“ he says. “That’s me, Kitano Takeshi and Sakamoto Junji. We’re not terribly conscious of our own style, but that doesn’t mean we’re devoid of style. We have our own style, but we try to harmonise it with the needs of the film we‘re working on.”

fusion CulTureSai is an ethnic Korean who grew up in Japan. Jap-anese-Koreans are treated as second-class citizens

in Japan, a subject covered in Sai’s 1993 drama All Under The Moon. It’s tempting to attribute his interest in outsiders and marginalized characters to his ethnicity, but Sai denies this interpretation. “I was born a Japanese-Korean, but I don’t think this has any influence on my films. I was raised in a fusion culture, if you like. But I was never really conscious of that. There are a lot of people in Japan and Korea who see the influence of my outsider/Korean roots in all of my films. I don’t think that is correct. Out of all the films I have made, there are only two which feature Japanese-Koreans. I don’t like this reductive approach to my filmmaking.”

MAN oF MANy pArTs

sai yoichi photo: Corinne de Korver