IFFR 2011

Koen Mortier

If Tiger film Ex Drummer was the hammer blow, then 22 May is the slowly settling dust after the bang. About the insignificant guard at the shopping centre where a young man detonates a rucksack full of explosives. Hypnotic, worrying and moving meditation about love and terror.

RotT

22 mei

Pablo Trapero

Trapero (Tiger winner in 2000 with Crane World) made a dastardly film noir set in the not-very-touristy suburbs of Buenos Aires. There, a fateful love develops between an A&amp;E doctor (played by Trapero's producer and wife, Gusman) and a lawyer who knows a lot about accidents.

Carancho

David Verbeek

Made as a guerilla project while waiting for finance for R U There. Verbeek, a Tiger candidate in 2008 with Shanghai Trance, proves that his creative production is on the rise and that China seems an endless source of inspiration in this drama about a gigolo club for nouveau riche women in Shanghai.

Club Zeus

Naomi Kawase 

A poetic film for women who want to have children, have them already or might want them. Maybe also for new or future fathers. Less for people who are not enamoured with the art of natural birthing. Kawase's Tiger film Suzaku won the Fipresci Award in 1997.

Genpin

Sinisa Dragin

Played out against the background of the sombre and corrupt Balkans is this story about two fathers. One is looking for the corpse of his son, killed in an accident; the other is looking for his daughter who has ended up in prostitution. The dramatic situations are laced with black humour by Dragin (Tiger Award winner 2002).

If the Seed Doesn't Die

Iván Fund

Santiago Loza

Loza (Tiger winner in 2003 with Extraño) made this portrait, with his young colleague Iván Fund, of three women who try to provide health care in a tropical corner of Argentina plagued by dengue fever and poverty. Fiction with beautiful documentary elements. Or vice versa.

Los labios

Kelly Reichardt

Meek wants to lead colonists to Oregon, by using a shorter route. Hardships mount up quickly. A real Western yet very topical.

In 1845, Meek wants to lead a group of colonists to Oregon, by using a shorter route straight across unknown mountain ridges. Hardships mount up quickly in Reichardt’s (she made Tiger winner Old Joy in 2006) first historic film. Indeed, a real Western yet very topical.

Meek's Cutoff

Hong Sangsoo

With his debut, Hong Sang-Soo won a Tiger Award in 1997. In his 12th feature, structured as four short films about a three-cornered relationship, he narrates with ironic wisdom about the differences between men and women, jealousy, dipsomania, cinematic art and related neuroses.

Oki's Movie

Alex Stockman

Girlfriend temporarily in New York and himself, all alone, at home in Brussels with every possible means of communication: how fragile modern love can be becomes apparent when Sam’s computer is hacked. Plenty of modern romance and paranoia in this atmospheric second film by Stockman (Verboden te zuchten/I Know I'll See Your Face Again).

Pulsar

Patrick Keiller

After London (1993) and Robinson in Space (Tiger Award winner in 1997), the mysterious Robinson returns in an essayist quest around Oxford for ‘places of historic and scientific interest’. A melancholy ode and bitter indictment at the same time, with a voice-over by Vanessa Redgrave.

Robinson in Ruins

José Luis Torres Leiva

Torres Leiva (winner of the Fipresci Award with El cielo, la tierra y la lluvia) takes a sympathetic look at the emotions of the landscape and what people do with them. It feels like a gentle after-shock, this film essay shot soon after the destructive earthquake in Chile in February 2010.

Tres semanas después

Chang Tso-chi

There are good reasons why women are the boss in this warmly observed film, widely regarded as his best, by Chang Tso-chi (in the Tiger Competition with Ah Chung in 1997), in which the cadenza of family life shapes the rhythm. In a restaurant in the suburbs of Taipei, a death reveals secrets.

When Love Comes

Tan Chui Mui

A sensitive film, constructed as ebb and flow. In the first part, old friends look back on their childhood by the light of the moon. In the second part, young people come together in a place in the sun. The director of Love Conquers All, Tiger winner in 2007, shot the film in the Malaysian village where she was born.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025