IFFR 2009

Carlos Reygadas

Début by Carlos Reygadas is a short Super-8 film with a man, a coffin and a dramatic setting.

Signals: First Things First

Adulte

Tsukamoto Shinya

Made a year before Tsukamoto's breakthrough with Tetsuo. Super-8 and no-budget spectacle about a bullied schoolboy, a nice girl, time travel and the battle against vampire domination.

The Adventure of Denchu Kozo

Ulrich Seidl

Seidl's second academy film is about the high school graduation party in his birthplace Horn: ritualized hypocrisy and gluttony. This work got Seidl kicked out of school.

Der Ball

Alexander Kluge

Peter Schamoni

Début by Kluge is an analysis of the Nazi system based on the architecture it left behind. This experimental documentary - ending a period of denial in German cinema - also marked the start of the Neue Deutsche Welle.

Brutalität in Stein

Albert Serra

Loving cult film and idiosyncratic musical portrait of summer festivities in the Catalan village of Crespià, with early performances by the well-known faces from the work of Serra (Honor de cavalleria and El cant dels ocells).

Crespià: The Film Not the Village

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien started his unsurpassed career with three commercial, melodramatic trivialities that were intended as vehicles for the now almost forgotten Hong Kong pop star Kenny Bee. Love between the land surveyor and the city girl who is promised to another is set in the countryside of Thailand.

Cute Girl

Ermanno Olmi

Oldest remaining film by the maker of The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a sober and stylish documentary made in his years as a film maker working for Edison Volta in Milan.

La diga del ghiacciaio

Lisandro Alonso

Catriel Vildosola

Début by Lisandro Alonso (Los muertos, Liverpool) is about the length of one take from his features.

Dos en la vereda

Manoel de Oliveira

Now 100 years old, the Portuguese master De Oliveira is still more innovative, fresher and active than the average debutant. His lyrical documentary debut from 1931 about life by the Douro is also a delight to watch.

Douro, faina fluvial

Portrait of a man 4 foot 7 inches tall, but without the relevant sympathetic paternalism. The very first Seidl.

Einsvierzig

Philippe Garrel

Garrel, the 'Rimbaud of cinema', made his first short 35mm film when he was 16. A boy and a girl flee school and family.

Les enfants désaccordés

Alexey German Jr.

Academy film by German Jr. (Last Train, Paper Soldier). Two losers are suddenly stuck: one finds the perfect woman, the other can finally make a long desired journey.

Fools

Kore-eda Hirokazu

Kore-Eda (Nobody Knows, Still Walking) started as a documentary maker with this beautiful portrait about the life and work of the head of Japanese social work. Yamanouchi Yoyomori devoted himself to the victims of the Minamata disease, caused by methyl mercury poisoning.

However...

Lars von Trier

Graduation film by Lars Trier. Even then it was unusual, controversial and not always equally understandable in its intentions. About the last days of the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Images of Liberation

Bong Joon Ho

As a student at the KAFA, Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Memories of Murder) made this beautiful trilogy about hypocrisy and stupidity of authorities, still his favourite subject.

Incoherence

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

With his lyrical short film début, Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak, Three Monkees) won the Golden Palm at Cannes. An elderly couple live separately. They have pinned all their hopes on an encounter that has to heal old wounds.

Koza

Jean-Marie Straub

Danièle Huillet

Début by Straub already shows his cinematographic style and political preoccupations in a short film about the former Nazi colonel Machorka Muff who was rehabilitated by the Adenauer government.

Machorka-Muff

Von Trier's first film academy exercise is a stylistic precursor of his The Element of Crime. It follows the hallucinating experiences of a woman with sunlight phobia - the first of many of Von Trier's heroines with a limitation.

Nocturne

Michael Glawogger

Glawogger, a mate of Seidl since the 1980s and maker of for instance Workingman's Death, started his career with beautiful studies like this.

Pacific Motion

The prototype, as it were, of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the classic cyberpunk film that was to make Tsukamoto famous.

The Phantom of Regular Size

Lucrecia Martel

First short fiction film that Martel was able to realise when she won a screen play competition is often regarded as the starting point of the New Argentine Cinema. Domestic violence situated in north-eastern Argentina.

Rey muerto

Chantal Akerman

Youthful perfection by Chantal Akerman. The ideal lesson for every young film maker.

Saute ma ville

Otar Iosseliani

'Sapovnela' means 'the flower that no one can find'. A combination of music and colour. First film by Otar Iosseliani.

Song About a Flower

Chris Marker

Alain Resnais

First documentary by Marker and a cooperation with Resnais. About the role of the West in the demise of African art.

Les statues meurent aussi

Street Noise

Terence Davies

In the first three autobiographically inspired short films by Terence Davies, we see the development of his unique poetic talent. A rich variegation of scenes from a human life, shaped by Catholicism and homosexuality, which have not lost anything of their power and ability to move.

The Terence Davies Trilogy

A man sentenced to death has ten minutes left to finish reading his book.

Tod eines Lesenden

Lukas Tiberio Klopfenstein

Clemens Klopfenstein

A son revises his father's graduation film. Shot in 1968 in Zurich and in 2008 in Umbria. A gangster fleeing after a failed raid.

Weg nach Rio

Jonas Mekas

The first images shot with the film camera that Mekas bought in 1950 after arriving in New York form the 'diary images' of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The poetry of everyday life.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025