IFFR 2001

Claire Denis

Denis' adaptation of Melville's 'Billy Budd', about a commander who helps an innocent sailor to his end, is a story of soul-warming sternness about the strange world of the men of the Foreign Legion in Djibuti.

critics' choice

Beau travail

Susant Misra

Portrait in different shades of grey of an intelligent young man who is imprisoned in the contradictions of life in Puri, an old Hindu religious centre. Critics' Choice from Indian filmcritic Vidyarthy Chatterjee.

Biswaprakash

Michael Haneke

In a gripping film, Haneke (Funny Games) again reveals human shortcomings not by showing the explicit violence in fragments but by showing the poison under the surface. With e.g. Juliette Binoche.

Code inconnu

Matteo Garrone

Comedy in which an art director, his beautiful assistant and a down-and-out actress carry a gigantic globe through Rome which is filled with scaffolding for the Holy Year.

Estate Romana

Sakamoto Junji

This film, that attracted large audiences after the Japanese première, takes a penetrating look at a woman who flees after committing murder and depicts the loneliness of the modern individual, augmented by the power of her sincere encounters with 'the other'. Critics' choice of Yamane Sadao, Kinema Junpo.

Face

Michael Almereyda

This version of the Shakespeare drama is set in today's New York, where the masters of the universe rule from the Elsinore Hotel. The Danish prince (played by Ethan Hawke) is a contemplative multimedia artist who is as fluent with video as with film. Critics' choice by Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly/Harpers Bazaar.

Hamlet

Alexei German

Film about an army doctor/general, whose fate in life is shaped by the absurdity of Stalinist Moscow and then, after the famous Stalin-inspired 'affair of the Jewish doctors', but the nightmare of a prison camp. Chosen by the Russian critic Andrei Plakhov.

Khrustalyov, Get my Car!

Abel Ferrara

Critics' choice by Frédéric Bonnaud of the French magazine Les inrockuptibles, is one of Abel Ferrara's (Bad Lieutenant) most controversial films. Bonnaud explains why it is so special.

New Rose Hotel

Emmanuel Finkiel

Old Jews as fictional travellers, that carry something with them that is deeper and more complex than the visible wounds of the Nazi atrocities. This latest story manages to portray the world as a place where the signs of the camps are not to be found on the arms of the prisoners, but in the abuse of the weak.

IFFR 2024
24 Jan – 4 Feb 2024