What makes the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) so endearing beyond its penchant for experimentation is an atmosphere that’s joyful and devoid of stress or self-importance. That was evident at this year’s festival, inside theaters where it seemed like the experience was about sharing cinematic pearls and not about arranging financial deals. The film selection was once again a delightfully uneven mishmash of bold stories with, perhaps, a through line having to do with our complicated relationship to otherness.
In Ulaa Salim’s Eternal, this otherness takes the shape of the Earth itself and of a woman’s body. These two are metaphorically linked through the figure of a fracture, which appears as a sign of the end of times after an earthquake in Iceland cracks the Earth open, and is poetically mapped onto the body of Anita (Anna Søgaard Frandsen) when she and Elias (Viktor Hjelmsø) first have sex. At the start of the film, Elias enters Anita’s “fracture,” resulting in a pregnancy that only he wants to terminate. Their love story doesn’t survive the episode.
Later in life, Elias (now played by Simon Sears) is a renowned deep-sea diver and on a mission to go down to the Earth’s core and patch up the aforementioned fracture, which threatens human existence after having accelerated global climate change. Anita (now played by Nanna Øland Fabricius, better known by her stage name Oh Land) comes back into his life some 15 years after their traumatic break up, in his memories and—by chance—in real life, right when Elias is supposed to conclude his mission. But it turns out that, despite the highly developed tools (both technological and emotional) at his disposal, fractures aren’t that easy to suture. Eternal, then, makes a smart connection between the recklessness of humans regarding the planet and that of self-obsessed heterosexual men regarding women.
At times the motif of linking woman to Earth feels graceful, other times too insistent and on the nose. Sequences where the planet is the muse of the film, and Elias travels the depths of the ocean for altruistic and narcissistic reasons alike (shades of Brad Pitt in Ad Astra), are much more engrossing than the plotline around the regrets over the loss of coupledom. The opening sequence where an elderly man in a remote area feels the violent aftershocks of the Icelandic quake is particularly riveting, and reminiscent of Marlen Haushofer’s cult novel The Wall, where the sudden sprouting of an invisible wall divides the protagonist’s immediate surroundings from the rest of the world, which becomes frozen in time. Eternal exists in a liminal space between a gripping big-budget thriller with philosophical gravitas and a melodrama with a sentimental soundtrack and scenes with the aesthetics of a medicine commercial, lens flare effects and all.
In Julia De Simone’s Praia Formosa, the tension isn’t over a world that’s about to end, but making due with the ruins of a not-so-bygone society. Muanza (Lucília Raimundo), a woman from the Kingdom of Kongo enslaved by the Portuguese in the early 19th century, pops up as if by magic in present-day Rio de Janeiro—in an area known as Little Africa. A film about how the ravages of history function as both maps, scripts, or limits for those who survive them, and for the descendants of those who don’t, Praia Formosa begins in a villa in tatters. The home is the embodiment of the decrepitude of a dying system, it seems, where a white woman (Maria D’Aires) tries to cling onto the last remnants of Muanza’s servitude. But Muanza feistily refuses subjection in simultaneously small and enormous ways, such as talking back to the woman who enslaves her, refusing to console her, lying to her, or mocking her descent into madness.
The film eventually lets go of its purposeful theatricality in favor of a faux-documentary aesthetic once Muanza turns up in present-day Rio, but it’s a wonderful sequence from the beginning that proves to be the most haunting. In it, the white woman dictates a letter to Muanza for one of her relatives. But as Muanza listens to the slave owner, she jots down something else altogether. She writes her own letter, to her own addressee, ignoring what the white woman has to say. Here, too, the figure of the other is fundamental to the characters—the other that must be conjured up if one is to outlive misfortune.
In Portrait of a Certain Orient, Brazil is also the destination for another life to be forged, even if the mark of death may accompany some wherever they go. Based on Milton Hatoum’s novel, director Marcelo Gomes tells the story of two Catholic siblings, Emilie (Wafa’a Celine Halawi) and Emir (Zakaria Kaakour), who leave their native Lebanon in the 1940s on a ship headed toward the Amazon. On the ship, Emilie falls in love with Omar (Charbel Kamel), a Muslim salesman, and triggers her brother’s wrath. Emilie and Omar’s relationship ends up blooming throughout their long journey to Brazil anyway, leaving little room for Emir to matter, as if one previously incompatible other had replaced Emir’s existence in regards to Emilie.
Gomes’s film gives life to a particular tale of history that cinema has rarely told. But this mission seems to matter for Gomes much more than the characters, who never feel quite real, or multi-dimensional enough. Portrait of a Certain Orient lacks psychological depth and emotion as it flirts with a light-hearted humor, at times bordering on the puerile. But it features a memorable mango-sucking sequence in the jungle between the prohibited lovers, which gives way to the carnal consummation of their love—enough to wake Emir up from a long coma of sorts.
Heterosexual relations seem so much easier and carefree in How to Have Sex, at least on the surface. Writer-director Molly Manning Walker presents British sexuality in all of its vulgarity as three 16-year-old girls spend a spring break-like vacation in a section of Crete tailor-made as a kind of Disneyland for horny vape-smoking teens. Here kids can act out the nasty consequences of puritanism, incapable of making contact with one another outside of a state of trance. Women’s bodies are predictably interchangeable and boys will be boys. That is, they’ll call a girl “babe” as they sexually assault her the first, the second, the third time around.
The way that Manning Walker’s film sees it, there’s no distinction between heterosexual culture and rape culture; the violence that girls suffer at the hands of boys, so naturalized that it could almost pass for fun or even love, is the only lingua franca possible. And even the most extreme of alcoholic stupors isn’t able to numb—not even for a second—the pain of being a girl in the face of emotionally irresponsible boys, for whom everything is so easy, and easily forgettable. At its best, How to Have Sex exposes a culture in desperate need of a reinvention, if not intervention.
Alternatives to the brand of toxic heterosexuality depicted in Manning Walker’s film could be seen IFFR’s Big Time Sensuality selection of mostly queer/trans shorts. The program included a fantastically bizarre story from South Korea featuring trans-species erotic relations between humans and horses (Han Changlok’s “Peeper”), a cryptic exercise in slithering queer viscosity set in the Colombian jungle featuring a fisting scene that recalls the final sequence of João Pedro Rodrigues’s O Fantasma (Analú Laferal and Tiagx Vélez’s “El tercer mundo después del sol”), as well as an experimental take on the science of the feminine orgasm as sonic data with a little help from Slavoj Žižek (Quentin L’helgoualc’h’s “Molecular Delusions”).
A highlight from the program was “You can’t get what you want but you can get me,” by real-life trans masculine couple Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh. Using photos, screengrabs, and text messages, the film tells the story of their relationship starting from the day they met. This domestic-epistolary archive points to other ways of doing and undoing gender, where repetitions are dismantled by reconnecting with the potential playfulness of the materiality of the body. The creative ethos of trans-ness is captured in images of Elagoz sporting a T-shirt that features a trompe l’oeil image of a bodybuilder’s torso (shades of Jiawei Han’s muscle suit), or in the way that Walsh getting top surgery feels like just another erotic ritual between lovers.
That’s not to say that the surgery is done on a whim, but because the rites associated with trans-ness are eroticized, perhaps fetishized, as a fundamental core of trans love. The film refreshingly, and with much more modesty than Elagoz’s previous Seek Bromance (though in the same exact vein), proposes transness as a fleshly transformation that’s collaborative. The other isn’t just an addressee, but invited to interact with the work, or to become it.
International Film Festival Rotterdam runs from January 25—February 4.
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