2022 Official Selection – Press & Industry
07 January 2022
With lockdown in the Netherlands forcing IFFR to cancel cinema screenings and host the festival online, IFFR is pleased to still be able to provide a platform for the more than 200 festival selections, including those in our flagship competitions, that will not screen in our IFFR 2022 Selection for audiences online in the Netherlands. The Press & Industry Selection 2022 provides a vital service for IFFR picks to meet the festival’s community of local and international press and industry via Festival Scope Pro.
The Press & Industry Selection includes titles selected for the Tiger Competition, Big Screen Competition and Ammodo Tiger Short Competition, with Harbour, Bright Future, Limelight, Cinema Regained, Short & Mid-length programmes and more. Programme highlights will be sent to accredited guests throughout the festival period. Take a look below at the extended selection.
Tiger Competition
IFFR’s flagship Tiger Competition is the festival’s platform for emerging film talent and features a selection of 14 titles for this edition. The lineup includes the neon-coloured satire in overdrive Met mes, another effervescent film from Dutch director Sam de Jong. In Achrome, Russian director Maria Ignatenko investigates the Nazi occupation of the Baltic states with a poetic, grim, yet icily beautiful film. Paraguayan director Paz Encina also competes with the magic-realist indictment of deforestation in her home country, EAMI.
The Tiger Jury consists of film industry expert Zsuzsi Bánkuti, director Gust Van den Berghe, film producer Tatiana Leite, actress Thekla Reuten and writer and thinker Farid Tabarki. The jury will grant three prizes: the Tiger Award, worth €40,000, and two Special Jury Awards, worth €10,000 each.
Full Tiger Competition selection
Big Screen Competition
The Big Screen Competition bridges the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema. An audience jury will grant the VPRO Big Screen Award to one of the nine titles competing in the lineup. The winning film receives a €30,000 prize, guaranteed theatrical release in the Netherlands, and will be broadcast on Dutch TV by VPRO and NPO.
Romanian animator Anca Damian is selected with The Island, a comical, surreal musical take on Robinson Crusoe, featuring refugees, NGOs, and mermaids. Polish-Dutch filmmaker Urszula Antoniak makes quite a different use of an island setting with Splendid Isolation, a minimalist, allegorical film about two deserted lovers.
Full Big Screen Competition selection
Ammodo Tiger Short Competition
16 short films compete in the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition. Taiwanese director Hsu Che-yu is selected for The Making of Crime Scenes, a forensic portrait of film producer and gangster Wu Dun. Chilean director Diego Escobar explores toxic masculinity through personal narrative, family legacy, and video games in the quiet and diaristic film El nombre de las cosas. A collage of cinematic moments make up Nazarbazi by Iranian artist and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory – examining the ban on depictions of men and women touching in Iranian cinema.
The jury consists of filmmaker Tim Leyendekker, image-maker Nduka Mntambo and curator Rieke Vos. They will determine which three titles will receive three equal Ammodo Tiger Short Awards, each worth €5,000.
Full Ammodo Tiger Short Competition selection
Harbour
The festival’s newest programme is home to the broadest range of contemporary cinema found at the festival. Tiger Award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui demonstrates her martial arts skills in her most recent film, Barbarian Invasion. On the day World War Two breaks out, a group of people discuss the state of the world in a little bar on a South American beach in vetran Brazilian director Ana Carolina Teixeira Soares’s Paixões recorrentes. “A terrifying thing, sunk into the abyss of man,” is how South Korean director Lim Sang-Su describes his first feature film, the disturbing psychological thriller Drown.
Bright Future
The Bright Future programme is dedicated to young and emerging film talent. Hong Kongese filmmaker Chan Tze-woon explores the socio-political upheaval following the protests in Hong Kong in Blue Island. Presenting her feature debut, Russian filmmaker Tamara Dondurey’s Stand By Me offers an intimate character study of a young woman on the verge of an existential breakdown. Indian director Krishnendu Kalesh explores themes of war, love, migration, capitalism and eco-fascism in his experimental fantasy drama Hawk’s Muffin.
Limelight
The Limelight lineup showcases avant-premieres and cinematic highlights from the year’s festival circuit. Titles available include Bruno Dumont’s irony-laden media satire France, Gabriele Mainetti’s lush fantasy Freaks Out set against fascist Rome, and Fabrice du Welz’s 70s-style thriller Inexorable.
Focus: Amanda Kramer
After years helming her own underground dance label, American author, musician and filmmaker Amanda Kramer has turned her vibrant vision to the realm of film. Kramer takes inspiration from art, theatre, music and fashion to push cinema to its limits. This Focus programme proudly presents a series of shorts and four feature films, including two world premieres: Give Me Pity! and Please Baby Please, which opens IFFR 2022 for audiences in the Netherlands.
Focus: Amanda Kramer selection
Focus: Qiu Jiongjiong
A selection of films from one of China’s most innovative artists and filmmakers are presented in this Focus programme. Intimate memory and national history resonate in Qiu’s baroque rhapsodies of music and design. A series of his films are presented, including his latest masterwork A New Old Play. Its overview of China from the 1930s to the 1980s, filtered through the semi-fictionalised life of a Sichuan opera star, won the Special Jury Prize at the 74th Locarno Film Festival; the film was supported in development by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund.
Focus: Qiu Jiongjiong selection
Cinema Regained
Cinema Regained offers audiences restored classics, documentaries on film culture and explorations of cinema’s heritage. Italian filmmaker Augusto Contento interrogates images and propaganda from 1960s Italy in Viaggio nel crepuscolo. In Infinity According to Florian, Ukrainian director Oleksiy Radynski honours the expansive oeuvre and unique contribution to Modernism made by (Soviet) Ukrainian architect, painter and thinker Florìan Jur'jev. Ida Lupino: Gentlemen & Miss Lupino by Clara and Julia Kuperberg praises the only woman with a serious career as a director in 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood.
Full Cinema Regained selection
Short & Mid-length Film
The Short & Mid-length Film programme offers a unique showcase of films under 63 minutes, divided into three collections. The Artists’ Moving Image collection of experimental works includes Netherlands-based Iranian video artist Sara Rajaei’s yet another leap year – a visual and psychological investigation into the shooting down of an aircraft. The more narrative-friendly Stories collection features a young widow’s poetic monologue on the legacy of war in The Kitchen by Angolan filmmaker Ondjaki. The Mid-length collection includes Hyperlink, where young South African makers reflect on the seductive and illusory reality of the internet with humour, suspense and social criticism.
Full Short & Mid-length selection
Scopitone
Scopitone presents a genre-defying programme of music documentaries. Just before British anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba hit rock bottom, they became an instant one-hit wonder. I Get Knocked Down by filmmaker Sophie Robinson and frontman-turned-filmmaker Dunstan Bruce documents their highs and lows. Music Pictures by American filmmaker Ben Chace gives us a personal glimpse into the lives and craft of four distinguished elders of the New Orleans jazz scene – often considered its birthplace. Chinese filmmaker Dongnan Chen examines a Christian choir turned propaganda machine in a Miao village in the mountains of Yunnan Province in Singing in the Wilderness.
RTM
RTM is IFFR’s Rotterdam programme in which local films and makers are put in the spotlight. The selection includes Aruban–Dutch filmmaker Shamira Raphaëla’s Shabu, an infectious coming-of-age documentary set in the Peperklip, a striking residential complex in Rotterdam’s Feijenoord neighbourhood. Rotterdam-based Italian director Lavinia Xausa presents So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us, winner of the RTM Pitch in 2021, which explores the faith, love, compassion and vulnerability of a group of Feyenoord football supporters.
