IFFR 2006

Ang Lee

A beautiful film version of an already classic short story by Annie Proulx, brought Ang Lee a Golden Lion. The story of two cowboys who looked after sheep for a summer in the 1950s. In the wilderness, far from the watching our eye of society, their love blossomed - but there's no room for it in the real world.

Kings & Aces

Brokeback Mountain

Michael Haneke

Book programme presenter Georges gets mysterious video recordings of himself and his family, accompanied by worrying drawings. He soon becomes convinced that his Algerian adopted brother must have sent them. This intellectual thriller won a prize at Cannes.

Caché

Alexei Balabanov

Gangster film shows a caricature of the situation in Russia during the 1990s, when the Mafia blossomed and created its own culture (bling avant la lettre). With Nikita Mikhalkov in his first role as antihero.

Dead Man's Bluff

Rosa von Praunheim

Oppressive Kammerspiel about the man who tries to cheer up his depressive friend with sadomasochistic role-play. Then they decide to play out the true story of the Rothenberger cannibals...

Dein Herz in meinem Hirn

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is among the best-known artists in the world. His wife Björk is pop singers. And the Nisshin Maru is the crown jewel of the Japanese whaling fleet. Together they show something of their most enigmatic side. About giant jellies as art and other Japanese surprises.

Drawing Restraint 9

Alain Cavalier

Film Master Cavalier records his everyday life in the smallest and most intimate details. A revealing and moving portrait in which the maker allows the viewer to come stunningly close and this time shows his true face, and for a very special reason.

Le filmeur

Abolfazl Jalili

Iran is not the country for idiosyncratic ambitions. But that doesn't get rid of the ambitions: the energetic young protagonist wants to teach in rainy and literature and is harshly confronted by bureaucrats. Love provides even greater obstacles. Charming and comic social realism. By master Jalili.

Full or Empty

Patrice Chéreau

Isabelle Huppert stars in a baroque looking costume drama about the demise of a perfect marriage, based on a short story by Joseph Conrad. Behind the very detailed mise-en-scène is a worryingly topical eloquence.

Gabrielle

Miike Takashi

Virtuoso and fantastic children's film by the most adult filmmaker in Japan. The master of hard cult film restrains himself, apart from on the level of the imagination. Then people say it's for young and old. And in this case that's not an empty slogan.

The Great Yokai War

Ken Jacobs

Beautiful and sparing percussion by Reich. Beautiful and sparing images of trains by Jacobs. Two great masters in a small film.

Let There Be Whistleblowers

Jan Švankmajer

The young man ends up in a surrealist lunatic asylum. In this philosophical horror film, in which live action is combined with animation, Svankmajer investigates themes such as absolute freedom and oppression by civilisation.

Lunacy

Jon Jost

A psychological drama as political pamphlet. Very beautifully photographed. A beautiful Italian villa. A couple of very experienced actresses. Together ingredients for a very outspoken film.

La lunga ombra

Manoel de Oliveira

A film that is shot on parchment, as it were. A classic in the most complete sense of the word. A rich woman wants to see the Virgin Mary in a vision. You haven't had your say yet. By ever-vital old master film maker.

Magic Mirror

Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara's answer to Mel Gibson is a contemporary Bible story in which the paths cross of a director who is playing Jesus in his own film (Matthew Modine), the actress who plays Mary (Juliette Binoche) and a journalist.

Mary

Avant-garde master makes Laurel and Hardy hallucinating. The warning reads: not for epileptics. For the connoisseur, that should say enough.

Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly!

Tonino De Bernardi

Personal, and urgent film in which the maker allows images from the past two melts with those of the present. Are present in which there is worry about Italian society and politics and the future of the fine arts there.

Passato presente, angeli laici cadono

Quay Brothers

Incomparably designed combination of animation and live action tells the bizarre story of the opera singer Malvina, who is killed and brought back to life by Dr Droz on a desert island where machines driven by the tide define events.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Suzuki Seijun

Youthful and wild fantasy about a crafty old master. A cheerful and bizarre mixture of styles and stories. About the love of a princess. And about the love of a film maker for telling stories with images.

Princess Raccoon

Sharunas Bartas

No real talkers, Bartas' characters. On the steppes of the Crimea, a group of dropouts, losers and criminals come together. These sombre and drinking men and nervously smoking women, the derelict houses and impassable roads, blocked by apparently deserted cattle and poultry have been portrayed blindingly.

Seven Invisible Men

Kitano Takeshi

Kitano does what he likes. After the success of Zatoïchi, he presents a subversive exercise that holds the middle line - in as far as there is a middle line - between his own rain-of-bullets cinema à la Sonatine, sublime banalities à la Getting Any? and Fellini's Otto e mezzo. So it's a mocking, almost surrealist film about the star Kitano, his oeuvre and his failed alter ego.

Takeshis'

Hong Sangsoo

Hong is the great contemporary poet of advanced drunkenness and of intelligent deconstructions of the lack of love. In his sixth film, we especially see the second side, in a dry, humorous story in two mirrored parts. Part one: a young man bumps into an old flame and after failed sex they decide to commit suicide together. Then the cinema empties and everything starts again...

Tale of Cinema

Boris Lehman

A filmer reveals his all. Literally and metaphorically. Between exhibitionism and philosophical diary Lehman makes films that can only be compared with his other work. All revealing diaries. Not on video, but on film. Like a writer who insists on writing with a fountain pen.

Tentatives de se décrire

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Three love stories in three different eras (1966, 1911 and 2005) in Hou's characteristic, philosophical and aesthetic style. The different couples are each played convincingly by Shu Qi and Chang Chen.

Three Times

Terry Gilliam

Strikingly quiet yet totally crazy film by Terry Gilliam that is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland on the prairie. Small girl is confronted with very strange adults, talking squirrels and manipulative Barbie heads.

Tideland

Chris Petit

A film essay about stalking and being stalked, based on the memoirs of a British academic, but also own meditation by the film maker about cinema, cities and history.

Unrequited Love

Clemens Klopfenstein

The films of Clemens Klopfenstein have been screened in Rotterdam for decades: often with the regular actors duo Hofer and Rüdlinger, now looking for their former director to convince him to make a sequel to Das Schweigen der Männer. With Klopfenstein himself in a major role, the story refers with healthy and intelligent irony to his earlier work.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025