[caption id="attachment_2397" align="alignnone"]SUDOESTE (SOUTHWEST) by Eduardo Nunes[/caption]

The International Film Festival Rotterdam announces the first five films selected for its Tiger Awards Competition 2012. Polish-American co-production IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE by Anka and Wilhelm Ankal ventures into the darker sides of country life. Midi Z’s RETURN TO BURMA is a rare contemporary fiction from the Southeast Asian country. Eduardo Nunes’ black and white, fairylike SOUTHWEST from Brazil has been supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund. A FISH from South Korea is the first 3D-film in the Tiger Awards Competition. Focusing on the plights of a young adolescent girl, Huang Ji’s EGG AND STONE from China will receive its world premiere at the festival.

Only first or second films can be selected for IFFR’s Tiger Awards Competition. All the films mentioned here are first fiction features. A jury will decide on three equal Tiger Awards, each with prize money of 15,000 Euro. The Tiger Awards Competition will comprise approximately fifteen titles.

The first five films selected in the Tiger Awards Competition 2012 are:

JIDAN HE SHITOU (EGG AND STONE) by HUANG Ji
China, 2012, World premiere

Huang Ji shot her feature début drama in her Hunan province hometown with a cast of non-professional actors. Like numerous others in China, the 14 year old protagonist is living with relatives because her parents are working a big city. She has few friends, and at home she tries to keep her door shut.

Z DALEKA WIDOK JEST PIEKNY (IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE) by Anka & Wilhelm Sasnal
Poland/USA, 2011, International premiere

In their début feature film, renowned visual artists and painters Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal explore the dark and antisocial sides of life on the beautiful Polish countryside, where in a hot summer everything seems to fall apart.

GUI LAI DE REN (RETURN TO BURMA) by Midi Z
Burma/Taiwan, 2011, European premiere

Film maker Midi Z, born in Burma and raised in Taiwan, shot his début feature film in his native country, working with non-professional actors. A realistic and authentic portrayal of daily life in the least known and least accessible Southeast Asian country, RETURN TO BURMA will see its European premiere in Rotterdam.

SUDOESTE (SOUTHWEST) by Eduardo Nunes
Brazil, 2011, European premiere

Eduardo Nunes made several successful short films, three of which were screened at IFFR. A tale of fantasy and mystery shot in stunning black-and-white, his fiction feature début SUDOESTE is situated in a sleepy Brazilian coastal village. Here, a baby, a girl and a woman named Clarice seem to live their (or is it her?) life in one single day.

MULGOGI (A FISH) by PARK Hong-min
South Korea, 2011, International première

Park Hong-min’s first feature film A FISH will be the first 3D-film in the Tiger Awards Competition. Produced for only about 100,000 Euro, A FISH tells a tragic absurdist tale of a professor who travels South in search of his wife who apparently has deserted him to become a shaman.

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Recent films by Chinese documentary makers and films by versatile artist Ai Weiwei will be screened during the 41st edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The films highlight hidden aspects of Chinese society in an intimate and surprising way. These films and Ai’s work will be shown in Hidden Histories, a themed program of the IFFR main Signals section.

Signals: Hidden Histories

What the films in Hidden Histories have in common is that their makers focus on hidden aspects of Chinese society such as for example poverty, corruption or misrule. The ‘hidden’ aspect also applies to the films themselves: screenings and distribution are often thwarted. In spite of this, the makers have managed to create convincing, substantively strong and visually impressive work on minimal budgets.

As part of Hidden Histories, the festival will also be showing works of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: six long films which he refers himself to as ‘social documentaries’ and four documentary art videos. There is a remarkable difference between Ai’s sometimes highly conceptual art videos and his social documentaries. For the latter, he acts – before and behind the camera – as a committed research journalist, persistent to bring injustice in the open. Hidden Histories is being compiled by IFFR programmers Gertjan Zuilhof and Gerwin Tamsma.

Documentaries in Hidden Histories

Hidden Histories will include the film APUDA by He Yuan. This film won the main prize at Yunfest in China and its only other prior screening was during the Vancouver film festival in Canada. APUDA provides a sober portrayal of the daily life of a carpenter and his dying father.

Hidden Histories will also be showing BACHELOR MOUNTAIN, the new documentary by Yu Guangyi and the sequel to his SURVIVAL SONG, which was screened at IFFR 2009. In BACHELOR MOUNTAIN, Yu returns to the barren north of China and provides an intimate portrait of the uneasy friendship between a lumberjack and the women he has taken a shine to.

The documentary SHATTERED is filmmaker Xu Tong’s third work. In 2010 and 2011, the IFFR screened his films WHEAT HARVEST and FORTUNE TELLER. In SHATTERED, socially committed Xu once again films the daily lives of those on society’s margins in a very straightforward manner. This time around he follows with his camera a retired railway worker and the former’s daughter, who is also active in the underworld.

The complete line up of Hidden Histories will be available online at www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com as of Thursday 19 January 2012.

About Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, who was born in 1957, is a conceptual artist, political activist and philosopher. He is a multifaceted artist who also engages in architecture, photography and film. He is also known for his criticism of the social and cultural changes in his country, and this has resulted in his being hampered in many ways by the Chinese authorities. Spring 2011, Ai Weiwei was imprisoned for 81 days. He was released after being issued a hefty fine for alleged back taxes. Recently Ai paid the bond raised by supporters from China and abroad.

Ai grew up in Sianking in the northwest of China. Because his father – a famous writer, painter and poet – was banished to a labour camp twice during the 1950s and 1960s, the family lived in poverty. In 1975 they moved to Beijing. Ai enrolled at the film academy and was a classmate of, among others, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. After living in New York for 12 years, Ai returned to Beijing. In 1999, he founded the gallery Chinese Art Archive & Warehouse in the south of the city with Dutch artist and collector Hans van Dijk and the Flemish art collector Frank Uytterhaegen. From the mid-1990s onwards, Ai often exhibited his large-scale installations in and outside China, founded a firm of architects, wrote books on the new generation of artists in China and collaborated on the design for the Olympic stadium (the bird’s nest) in Peking. At the moment, Ai is China’s most famous artist and this year he topped the magazine ArtReview’s ‘Power 100 List’.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam has a long tradition of screening independently made feature films, shorts and documentaries from China. In recent years, some of these films came about thanks to contributions from the Hubert Bals Fund, including, for example, the epic TIE XI QU: WEST OF THE TRACKS by Wang Bing. In 2012, the IFFR intends to continue on this course and will select films from China for several parts of the programme. On Thursday 19 January 2012, the full festival programme will be made available as an insert in the Volkskrant newspaper and online at: www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com. The 41st edition of the festival is set to take place from 25 January – 5 February 2012.

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