IFFR 2007

James Herbert

Beautiful kids exchange psycho-sensual stories against the background of a Tuscan landscape. An intriguing combination of experimental narrative style, landscape poetry and beautiful photography.

Maestros: Kings & Aces

Abandoned House

Jean-Claude Brisseau

Brisseau is famous and notorious for his respectable porn films. In this film, a filmmaker goes looking for the right actresses for a special film project in which sex may or may not be simulated. Higher powers, the angels of revenge from the title, even medal with his project and the director soon loses control.

Les anges exterminateurs

Don Askarian

A series of controlled improvisations. They focus on the holy Armenian mountain Ararat that is out of reach in Turkey. The filmmaker looks at his mountain as a poet, a dancer, a painter. And of course, eventually also as a filmmaker.

Ararat - Fourteen Views

Hiroki Ryuichi

Documentary about the skilful and erotic bondage of female models by sadomasochistic masters who have turned knotting into an art. Not for Boy Scouts. By the makers of Vibrator. See also the erotic feature M in this festival.

Bakushi

Alain Resnais

Film version of the play Private Fears in Public Spaces, this time situated in a snow-covered Paris. Old and young from the affluent middle classes worry about love out of reach. Directed wonderfully by Resnais.

Coeurs

Jia Zhangke

Documentary project that put Jia Zhang-ke on the trail of his film Still Life, which won a Golden Lion. Portrait of the leading Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong, working upstream of the Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan and in Bangkok.

Dong

Kore-eda Hirokazu

Captivating samurai film in which a beautiful, humorous and entertaining story is told for a change and there is hardly any fighting. In an 18th-century Japanese slum district, an old conflict simmers. Murder has to be avenged. That would only lead to more revenge and more deaths and so the heroes seek an other way out.

Hana

Lav Diaz

Majestic masterpiece by the Filipino Lav Diaz who takes his time to tell a story with great emotion. In meditative black &amp; white images, the fateful life of travelling salesman in the countryside comes to life slowly but surely. He is the victim of corruption and theft, but his spirit doesn’t seem breakable.

Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess)

Tsai Ming-liang

Minimalist and sensually charged investigation of the sultry relationship between a homeless Chinese, an illegal worker from Bangladesh and a waitress from Kuala Lumpur.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Girish Kasaravalli

A young man appears in the village and alleges he is the reincarnation of the husband of Venkatalakshmi who died 22 years ago. After initial hesitance, she accepts him as her husband. Excellent acting and cinematographic and musical brilliance characterise this feature by the former Filmmaker in Focus Kasaravalli. Permeated with sympathy for the human condition.

In the Shadow of the Dog

Benoît Jacquot

The quest of a young French actress for the Indian man who might be her father. With no more than a name in her pocket, she travels to the Indian subcontinent. There everything is colourful, lively and unpredictable. In this world she knows nothing about, she gets to know herself.

L'intouchable

Otar Iosseliani

When a successful minister is kicked out of office, he loses his power, his mistress and his money. Condemned to a simple life, a much more valuable life unfolds in front of him. An allegory that plays with cliches and expectations filled with irony. With Michel Piccoli as the very old mother (!) of the protagonist.

Jardins en automne

Pedro Costa

About how beautiful sombreness and decay can be. The old Cape Verdean Ventura is sad about his wife Clotilde who ran away. He writes her a choking letter. The poverty stricken district of Fontaínhas in Lisbon is portrayed as an ominous backdrop. Connoisseurs deemed the film the real winner at Cannes.

Juventude em marcha

A master of Japanese pink pictures (often described as soft porn, but they’re not that soft) makes a psychological drama about a housewife with a double life. Hiroki draws on his own experiences in porn to tell a serious and exciting psychological story about a woman with a horrific secret and an intriguing and violent sexual fantasy.

Jafar Panahi

Docu-drama about Iranian women who are mad about football but the law always puts them offside. What is real and what is not? Ninety minutes sitting on the edge of your seat for a film about soccer in which there isn’t a player or a ball in sight.

Offside

Garin Nugroho

Breathtaking masterpiece by an Indonesian filmmaker who introduces baroque to Javanese culture. Age old story about desire and jealousy, portrayed by a fantastic combination of old and new music, dance and visual art. A spectacle.

Opera Jawa

Goran Paskaljevic

Paskaljevic (The Powder Keg) completes his Serbian trilogy with unfounded and naive optimism. A cardiologist, desperate believers and a young gambler are skilfully misled in this five-part masterpiece, with star actor Lazar Ritovski in the leading roles.

The Optimists

Kon Satoshi

Sparkling animation film in which the world of dreams can be entered as if it’s an amusement park. A dream machine is stolen from a laboratory. Dream detective Paprika, the alter ego of the female doctor Atsuko Chiba, takes up arms against an intangible enemy. Visually virtuoso and very entertaining.

Paprika

Luc Moullet

Old hand Luc Moullet (Les naufrages de la D17) plays himself and yet also someone else in his own film. He switches identity with a dead man, but that doesn’t do him any good. Razor sharp humour in a story inspired by Cecil B. DeMilles The Whispering Chorus.

Le prestige de la mort

Werner Herzog

A second homage by Herzog to the indestructible urge to survive of the pilot Dieter Dengler who was shot down during the Vietnam war and had to conquer imprisonment in the impenetrable jungle. Physical and challenging role for Christian Bale, who shows himself to be a worthy successor to Klaus Kinski.

Rescue Dawn

Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The literal translation of the Japanese title of the film is ‘The Scream’. In the case of Kurusawa Kiyoshi you may think both of the psychological fear of the painter Munch or of the fury of a Japanese horror ghost. A horror film for people who don’t like horror films. Intelligent and exciting.

Retribution

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

The Iranian film master set off for India for this philosophically tinted associative road movie with breathtakingly beautiful shots. An Iranian couple on their honeymoon is looking for religious and spiritual answers, just like many Westerners do.

Scream of the Ants

Surprising winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In one of the towns that will disappear under water through the rising waters of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam, a man is looking for the woman he deserted years ago and the woman is looking for her missing husband. Alongside a brilliant exercise in filming with high-definition, an emotional and social masterpiece. See also Dong.

Still Life

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

There are filmmakers who return to their childhood for beautiful atmospheric films, but the imaginative Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns to the time before his parents found each other. Yet his childhood is also evoked in two parts. A sunny part for his mother and a cool and occasionally bizarre part for his father.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025