Vanja Kaludjercic, festival director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) made an impassioned opening-night speech that broached how film festivals can make space for emotional and complex conversations about geo-politics, ahead of the gala screening of Jonathan Ogilvie’s New Zealand comedy drama Head South.
“The Israeli invasion of Gaza has joined headlines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and become the cause of heated and often incandescent and immovable opinions, with furious expression of convictions, hurled with vitriol on social media and in the pages of quality newspapers alike,” said Kaludjercic.
“Whether it’s this or that. Choose. This is the what the world gets too often, too easily and too casually reduced to.
“IFFR, as we imagine and build it, is an attempt to challenge the reductionism and the extremism of either/or. To embrace life in all its multitudinous form. We offer a discursive space for films of many kinds, to delight and inspire, and also question all those who come to watch and engage them.”
The festival director said each film the team invites becomes part of the community, “And as our audience is huge and diverse, we offer a vast selection of films, ideas, points of view, aesthetics and genres. The plurality we aim for requires space and creates space. Instead of either/or it’s all about combinations, relations and complexities.”
Kaludjercic pointed to the selection of Bright Future title Necrose by Lebanese filmmaker Francois Yazbeck, about the Lebanese capital Beirut.
“When we invited the film, Lebanon was not yet in the news on a daily basis,” Kaludjercic explained. “Since then, Hamas killed more than 1,000 innocent Israeli citizens on October 7. Israeli retaliated by invading Gaza, resulting in violent deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians. This led to reigniting of smouldering military conflicts among others at the border of Yemen and indeed in Lebanon.
“In the last four months, if that hadn’t happened, then this film would be more of a poetic, political think-piece about the past that throws long shadows into the future whose shape is undecided. But it’s not the case anymore,” Kaludjercic continued. “What it is now? We will find out soon. What else it can be? It’s up to time. Once we invite a film, we never know what the specific resonance of the film will be at the moment when the festival begins.”
The Head South gala took place in the presence of Susannah Gordon, New Zealand’s ambassador to the Netherlands, and the outgoing mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Abouotaleb, a longtime supporter of IFFR.
It was the first IFFR opening night for managing director Clare Stewart. “It is an absolute privilege to have joined this beloved festival as managing director. A festival that is truly lodged in my heart as it is the first festival I came to find outside Australia 25 years ago, as a young programmer,” Stewart told the audience. “IFFR is valued globally for its commitment to discovery, its support of new talent and for its welcoming, risk-taking audiences.”
Stewart, renowned for her colourful, themed outfits during festivals, was wearing an eye-catching tiger-patterned dress.
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