First five films selected for the Hivos Tiger Awards announced.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has revealed the first five titles selected for the Hivos Tiger Awards Competition, which aims to give up-and-coming talent “the opportunity to shine on a global stage. They are:

Concrete Clouds, Lee Chatametikool
(Thailand/Hongkong/China, 2013, European premiere)

New York based-currency trader Mutt returns home to Bangkok after the death of his father amidst the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. He faces past family and relationship issues in this first feature by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s editor. This project received IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund support for script and project development.

Happily Ever After, Tatjana Bozic
(Croatia, 2013, world premiere)

Filmmaker Tatjana Bozic grew up in Croatia before the Balkan War and ended up settling in The Netherlands. Her first feature-length documentary is a tragicomic portrait of her own love life. She revisits her past love affairs in a desperate effort to save her present relationship.

Vergiss mein ich (Lose My Self), Jan Schomburg
(Germany, 2014, world premiere)

Schomburg’s second feature shows a successful woman suffering from retrograde amnesia: her whole biographical memory disappears from one moment to the next. The film evokes questions about the construction of identity and includes a leading role by Maria Schrader.

Riocorrente (Riverrun), Paulo Sacramento
(Brazil, 2013, international premiere)

São Paulo is on the verge of exploding in Sacramento’s fiction debut. A woman is torn apart by a variety of desires for two very different men - a journalist and an ex-con - in this drama on contemporary Brazil, where everything is set in irreversible motion after ten years of economic growth.

Anatomy of a Paper Clip, Akira Ikeda
(Japan, 2013, European premiere)

Akira Ikeda’s second feature is a dark fairytale revolving around Kogure, a paperclip bender in a paperclip factory, a man without characteristics and a stoical loser. One day he finds a butterfly in his flat. She becomes his wife, but is even stranger than the bizarre minimal world he lives in.

The complete line up of the 15 first or second features competitng for the three equal Hivos Tiger Awards of €15,000 each will be revealed on Jan 9.

The 43rd IFFR runs from Jan 22 to Feb 2, 2014. The festival’s Official Selection includes 220 feature films and 320 short films out of 60 countries.

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