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41st InternatIonal FIlm FestIval rotterdam #2 FrIdaY 27 januarY 2012

medicine manthis year, the IFFr focuses in on Finland with a programme dedicated to movie poly-math Peter von Bagh. By Geoffrey macnab

Writer-director-curator-historian and all round movie polymath Peter von Bagh, whose career is celebrated in a special Signals sidebar, was 13 years old when he first became infected by acute cinephilia. Von Bagh used to ride his bicycle three kilometres to the centre of Oulu, his home town in the north of Finland, where there were several excellent cinemas. “It must have been films like Elia Kazan’s East of Eden. In a flash, I understood, this was more than the usual trash!”The young cinemagoer (born in 1943) didn’t know who Kazan was, but admits to being captivated by James Dean. “The mythology (of Dean) came to this distant corner of Europe. It came slower than nowadays, but with even greater force.”His mother had died when he was very young, so he was a solitary kid. “Cinema was a medicine for loneli-ness,” he says. “You look for some company that can fill your life with meaning.” The family home didn’t have a television. “It was a privilege to live in a time when the only living pictures you saw were on film. Film took a very special hold on you. Film was an overwhelming experience, always.”Von Bagh’s father was a psychiatrist. Yes, he muses, his father’s profession may have helped him develop those probing interviewing skills he has brought to bear on big-name film directors who’ve visited the Midnight

Sun Festival in Sodanklyä over the years. (Many of these interviews feature in Sodanklyä Forever, the docu-mentary he brought to Rotterdam last year and which screens again this year.)At the age of 16, von Bagh was already writing for newspapers. His first article was on Frank Capra’s 1959 film, A Hole in the Head. “I saw it again some years ago. I found a DVD of it. It’s a very bad film actually,” he confides.

autodidactThe young film enthusiast was largely self-educated. Unable to rely on secondary sources, he plunged head-first into his own research. By the time he was 30, he was an absolute expert in cinema history. By the time he was in his mid 20s, von Bagh was making his own films, among them Pockpicket (1968), a twisted homage to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket in which the hero puts money into people’s pockets, rather than taking it out. During his stint as head of the Finnish Film Archive, von Bagh met an opinionated and acerbic younger fellow film enthusiast who used to turn up at all the screenings. This was Aki Kaurismäki (the celebrated director whose latest feature Le Havre screens in Spec-trum). “Aki was very young then. He didn’t even live in Helsinki, but came in every day by train. He didn’t get into the Film School. He has always said that his university and film school was coming to my shows.” In the same way legendary French curator Henri Langlois supported the careers of the Nouvelle Vague directors,

von Bagh helped Kaurismäki establish himself as an auteur. He wrote a huge book, The History of World Cinema (1975), which both Aki and his brother Mika Kaurismäki cited as a key formative influence. “It gave them the idea to become filmmakers,” von Bagh says. Early on in his film career, von Bagh didn’t pay much attention to Finnish cinema. His focus was turned toward international cinema. He admired Finnish directors like Risto Jarva and Mikko Niskanen (who both have films screening at the IFFR), but he only slowly learned to appreciate older Finnish films. Not that this prejudice against his own country’s cinema was unusual. As he notes, the critics behind 1960s English film magazine Movie were equally dismissive of British movies of the time. “They really didn’t under-stand a thing about their own cinema. That seems to be the same in many countries.”

time bandit Von Bagh has written more than 30 books – not all of them about films. (For example, he has published a study of Balzac.) He cites nineteenth-century litera-ture, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway as particular enthusiasms. As if this wasn’t enough, he also runs two film festivals, Midnight Sun in Finland and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Ask von Bagh how he organises his time and he replies: “It’s not organised at all. I never think for a second of organis-ing or planning anything.” If he has five different tasks to perform, his solution is always to find a sixth. The

more work he has, the better he performs. He adds that at both Bologna and Midnight Sun, he has “tremen-dously good teams” to help him.

Flaming passionIn recent years, as big-name auteurs from Bergman to Rohmer, from Chabrol to (most recently) Angelopou-los have died, some have asked if old-style cinephilia is dying. But von Bagh gives short shrift to the idea that he is growing jaded. “I absolutely have the same enthusi-asm! Every day, I try to see a film or two.” Just before setting off for Rotterdam, he tracked down a copy of Howard Hawks’ Red Line 7000, a movie he wrote a “flaming article” about “47 years ago”. To his relief, he found that the film had stood the test of time. “I had secret doubts that maybe the film had faded but no, it was one of the great Hawks films.” Von Bagh’s passion is for celluloid. At the Midnight Sun Festival and in Bologna, he insists on showing films on 35mm prints, rather than relying on digital projection. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that some-times at home, he’ll watch films on Blu-ray, projected on a big screen. “In a way, you can get at least some compensation for the loss of real cinema that is scan-dalous in cinemas. It makes me tremendously sadto see this most beautiful of things becoming lost.”

Peter von Bagh’s ode to the Finnish capital, Helsinki, Forever, screens today at 14:45 in LantarenVenster

“I did a very Chinese thing; I pirated a café from Beijing”, IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof said at the opening of the IFFR’s Ai Weiwei café last night. In tribute to prolific Chinese artist Ai Weiwei – prevented by a travel ban from the Chinese authorities from attending Rotterdam in person – the festival has created a café in his honour. Open daily from 12:00 to 20:00, in

addition to providing café fare and free wi-fi, the café (at Karel Doormanstraat 278) is show-ing installations by Ai Weiwei in the type of intimate gallery setting in which such work could perhaps be seen in China, where it is difficult to screen in higher-profile venues. photo: Lucia Guglielmetti

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IFFR managing director Janneke Staarink speaks to Nick Cunningham about the inaugural Curaçao IFFR

Curaçao IFFR is a collaboration between Rotterdam and the Caribbean island’s Fundashon Bon Intenshon foundation, and will run March 29 – April 1 2012. The new festival will comprise a programme of 20 – 25 films culled from this and previous IFFRs. A key aim of the new yearly set-up is to create an industry hub for filmmakers and financiers from the Caribbean/Latin American region. The current agreement runs for three years, to 2014. Plans to launch the new festival developed quickly after the foundation contacted Rotterdam management after the IFFR 2011. “Within a couple of months, they convinced us that co-operation with them would be a good idea,” Staarink points out. “The people of Curaçao are film lovers, but they are only used to seeing big blockbusters from the US. The Fundashon wants to bring art film to the island.”The initiative is fully financed out of Curaçao (the foundation is the lead sponsor of IFFR 2012), with IFFR lending technical support as well as a bespoke programme. “It took some time to figure out the best way to co-operate, but we will do the programming and they will organise the festival. We will not produce it. But we are really close to their organisation and we will advise them on everything – website, ticket sales, the whole thing.”

IFFR will present a roundtable session this week between Hubert Bals/CineMart staff, representatives from the foundation and industry representatives from the region. “We will discuss what can be done at Curaçao that would be helpful for the local industry, what the filmmakers need over there and what the festival can do to offer extra support,” Staarink stresses. Discussions will continue during the Curaçao event itself.Curaçao IFFR will follow hot on the heels of the Curaçao North Sea Jazz Festival (second edition September 2011), also sponsored by the Fundashon Bon Intenshon. Other Dutch interests of the foundation include former sponsorship of Dutch premier league football club NEC (three years to 2011) and current lead sponsorship of the Sparta-Feyenoord baseball team. The jazz festival sparked a considerable spike in tourism numbers on the island, the Fundashon’s representative in the Netherlands, Michael Elias, points out. He main-tains, however, that servicing the local community is as much of a concern as increasing tourism during the Curaçao IFFR. He is, for example, helping to organise a short film competition for Curaçao residents (aged 14-30) in advance of the event, the prize being a visit to Rotterdam 2013. “We will reach mostly the local Curaçao population during the festival, but with the IFFR and their advertising and their capacity in Holland and beyond, we will reach other people. We won’t expect massive numbers of visitors to come to Curaçao imme-diately – this is our first edition – but I think we’ll be very strongly established after 10 editions.”

The IFFR’s new Eastern Europe specialist brings a depth of knowledge and experi-ence that belies his age. Nick Cunningham reports

“I’m a bit sceptical about Russian cinema,” new IFFR programmer Evgeny Gusyatinskiy comments. “But this is a good thing; it is better than being in love and blind.”  Gusyatinskiy takes over responsibility this year for the programming of films from Russia and Central/Eastern Europe following the departure of Ludmila Cvikova to the Doha Film Institute. For a man not yet a decade out of university, Gusyatin-skiy displays an impressive knowledge not only of the cinema from his home turf, but also of the workings of  the IFFR. After graduating from the prestigious VGIK Institute in 2004, he started working as a jour-nalist and critic, most notably as editor of the Russian academic magazine Film Art – “a Russian Cahiers du Cinema, totally non-commercial, totally tough, made with pure enthusiasm”, he observes. He also became an active participant/contributor at the IFFR follow-ing his selection on the festival’s Young Film Critics Project in 2005, and has attended the festival every year since. Gusyatinskiy charts the recent development of Russian cinema from its pre-perestroika days, dominated by the works and influence of Tarkovsky and what he terms ‘tarkovschina’: acolytes who tried – and failed – to “reach his levels of suggestiveness and profundity”. This was followed by films made against the backdrop of Russia’s new prosperity. “We saw works that were capturing all the atrocities of the new reality – very dark, gloomy, bleak, violent”, he explains. Russia’s new wave of filmmakers, at least those active in the past half-decade, have recalibrated their sense of aesthetic in line with their European and US contem-poraries, Gusyatinskiy argues. “What they have in

common is their artistic approach and how they present themselves. They are not into the mainstream. They are trying to make independent films without caring about the budget or the box-office. They are telling about their own lives, and not trying to second guess the tastes of their audience or the Russian film funds. They are fascinated by a ‘doc’ style, just shoot-ing their daily lives and routines without applying symbolism or allegory.”Gusyatinskiy isolates a number of Russian films in selection this year that reflect this new aesthetic. “Vasily Sigarev (Living, Tiger Awards competition) is a pioneer of this documentary approach,” he opines.

“Very tough, always dealing with the harsh realities that you would never see on Russian TV or in the news-papers, but not judgmental – just trying to get under this stuff and to understand people on a human level.”Nikolay Khomeriki, whose Heart’s Boomerang screens in Spectrum, studied in France under the auteur Philippe Garrel. “Khomeriki is a Russian filmmaker who has absorbed a lot from the recent tradition of European art cinema,” Gusyatinskiy points out. “Heart’s Boomerang is a very subtle, very melancholic, slow and loose film on the complexities of existence. Very calm and without any pathos, like the films we see from many other prominent European filmmakers.”

rotterdam realist

exPandInG HorIzonsThe Poles are setting up their own dedicated screening event to show-case their movies to international buyers and programmers, writes Geoffrey Macnab

The event, titled Polish Days, promises to be a Polish equivalent to such bazaars as the Nordic Film Market and the London UK Film Focus (LUFF). The new venture, announced during IFFR, will take place on 21-23 July 2012 during the 12th edition of the New Horizons Interna-tional Film Festival in Wroclaw (19-29 July 2012). “We will focus on key buyers (distributors and sales agents) and programmers from all over the world,” comments Joanna Lapinska of New Horizons IFF. “We intend to target key festivals, especially those that take place between September and February, such as Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian, Thessalo-niki, Berlin and Rotterdam, to name just a few. We also want to invite important Euro-pean producers to introduce them to Polish talent, hoping that this will result in future projects. We expect around 100 profession-als to attend.” Lapinska declined to give the budget of the new event. However, she confirmed that the Festival would pick up travel and accommo-dation expenses for key guests. Hotel and catering costs for all international partici-pants will be covered. The aim is to focus on quality arthouse f ilms that haven’t had an international premiere. In two days, 5-7 features and around 5-7 works in progress will be showcased. The event is supported by the city of Wroclaw (European Capital of Culture 2016) and the Polish Film Institute. “Poland is a very dynamic country and f ilm production is booming – we want the world to recognize that and prof it from it,” Lapinska comments of the thinking behind the event.

lIBeratInG exPerIenceFrench actress-director Nicole Garcia tells Geoffrey Macnab about her role in 38 Witnesses, new projects and her faith in young French directors

Nicole Garcia breezed through Rotter-dam yesterday to support the screening of opening film, Lucas Belvaux’s 38 Witnesses. In the film, Garcia plays a journalist, investi-gating the circumstances behind the murder of a young woman. No one intervened to help the victim in spite of hearing her screams. The journalist is keen to explore why they were so reticent. “I think it belongs to human nature,” Garcia speculates of the evasive behaviour of the witnesses. “Everybody is worried about their own safety. Not everybody has courage, but what interests me in this movie is the pain and the guilt of the hero… this character has guilt in his own life before this case. It’s not him who did the murder, but he has within himself a great guilt.” Garcia based her character partly on real-life Liberation journalist Florence Aubenas, renowned for her investigative reporting on the Outreau sex abuse scandal… and also for spending several months as a hostage in Iraq in 2005. “She was my model, my example,” Garcia states, adding that, in spite of the dark subject matter of the film, she relished being in front of the camera rather than behind it. Having acted in Belvaux’s f ilm, Garcia has several projects of her own on the boil. Later this summer, she hopes to direct a script she has written herself about the experiences of a young teacher in the south of France. One weekend, this teacher has to take charge of one of his younger pupils. This promises to be a family affair. Pierre Rochefort, Garcia’s son from her marriage to Jean Rochefort, is expected to star in the film. “It’s a very great risk for me to be a director of my own child… for me and for him!” Another Garcia project on a bigger scale is an adaptation of Milena Agus’s Sardinian-set novel Mal de Pierres. Both films are expected to be produced by Alain Attal. As an actress, Garcia has worked with many of the legendary names in French cinema, among them Alain Resnais (on Mon oncle d’Amerique) and Jacques Rivette (Duelle). However, she refuses to wax nostalgic about the glory days of French cinema. “The younger directors are very, very interesting!” she protests. “Maybe there are no masters yet like Resnais or Rivette, Truffaut or Louis Malle… but there is still talent. I think we have a very good generation of young direc-tors.”

Evgeny Gusyatinskiy photo: Ruud Jonkers

curious about curaçao

Nicole Garcia photo: Rogier Maaskant

Janneke Staarink photo: Ruud Jonkers

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sink or swim

teenage clips

A book on traditional shaman rituals on the South Korean island of Jindo was the original inspiration for director Park Hong-Min’s striking debut feature, Tiger compet-itor A Fish, he tells Edward Lawrenson

Telling of the attempt by middle-aged academic Lee (Lee Jang-Hoon) to track down his wife, the film is a rich and atmospheric drama with eerie overtones – and an unfolding sense of mystery that resonates long after the closing credits. “I saw a picture of a shaman with white traditional dress doing a ritual,” says Park in advance of his IFFR premiere. “After that, I drove six hours from Seoul to

Jindo island, and met so many people there. I kept visiting Jindo afterwards; I was deeply attracted to the people on this island. I thought of making films about their modest and sincere lives – the experience enlightened me deeply.”That initial picture was the spur for a screenplay that sees Lee (played with gusto by Lee Jang-Hoon – the character is “naïve and stubborn”, Park says) discov-er his wife has become a shaman and is practicing alongside a spiritual elder (played by traditional singer Kim Myung-Ja). Park shot this debut feature in 3D – a first for him, and for a Tiger film. “I think 3D film is exaggerated, contorted and somehow a violent medium,” he says,

although he was determined not to use the tech-nology – as it tends to be employed – for spectacle. Stressing the film’s exploration of states of “reality and fantasy”, Park shoots in a low-key, subtle style that bucks the 3D convention for visceral effects. Park admits making his first feature in 3D “was sometimes too much”, especially given the low budget, of around 48,000 Euros. Another challenge was location shooting at sea. In one scene, Lee and the actor Kim Sun-Bin (playing a private detective who accompanies him to Jindo) fall from a boat. “There were two scuba divers behind the boat to fish them out if there was an accident. But it was difficult to approach them in the middle of ocean, and it took

quite a long time to take them back to the boat. Mr Kim can’t swim either – it was a real jolt to me!”

Tiger Awards Competition

A Fish –Park Hong-Min Fri 27 Jan 19:30 PA4Sat 28 Jan 09:30 PA2Mon 30 Jan 09:15 PA2 (Press & Industry)Mon 30 Jan 22:15 PA3Fri 03 Feb 13:30 PA4Sat 04 Feb 13:30 PA4

Maja Miloš’ debut Clip uncovers the real-ity of teenage life in Serbia. By Edward Lawrenson

Looking forward to the world premiere of her debut feature, Tiger competitor Clip, writer-director Maja Milos is relatively calm. “The whole festival thing is occupying my mind, so I’m not concentrating so much on the premiere. When I get dressed up, then I’ll be nervous.” IFFR may be hosting the first public screening, but Milos was determined to show the film to a special audience before coming to Rotterdam. A raw, powerful drama about adolescent life in a Serbian small town revolving around teenage Jasna, the movie has already been screened to Milos’ young cast, and – crucially – to the parents of the actors. The film is potentially uncomfortable viewing: there are a number of sequences featuring Jasna and other characters experimenting with sex – which Jasna records on her ever-present mobile phone – and Milos made sure both the actors and their parents were comfortable with such extreme material. “One of the most important things for me is every-thing is very open, very straight, and everybody knows everything. I didn’t want to hide anything. I didn’t want to make a big fuss over sex on film, either,” she says. “With the parents, I went through all the scenes and all the shots so we have everything prepared – partly for practical reasons because we had to have body doubles and so on. They were expecting so much from the film, and when they said that I didn’t displease them – the kids and the parents – it was like one of the greatest things during the film.”Milos spent a large amount of time researching the lives of her teenage subjects. She says: “We did the casting over two years – and intensely for eight

months. I had one hour per person, so I spoke a lot to young people. I asked them what they thought about their experiences. Of course not all of them had sex tapes of the kind Jasna films – but about 80 percent of the cast knew someone who did.”Giving a heartfelt and honest performance, newcom-er Isidora Simijonivic was 14 when production started, as were many of the cast. “I think that gives authenticity to the film,” says Milos. “I also tried with actors a little older – 19 or so. But they didn’t have that strength and passion; they didn’t quite understand how everything functions at that young age. Three or four years is a big difference at that age.”Working with these young actors was clearly intense and enriching for Milos, herself just in her late twen-ties. “I insisted we had a relationship where everything could be said – we don’t judge anybody or anything. We have a loving, trustful relationship – and I hope that can be seen in the film.”Produced on what Milos calls a “low budget”, Clip was funded partly by the Ministry of Culture and a Belgrade culture fund. “So it’s government funded!” Milos says, a little bemused perhaps that this should have been the case with such an unvarnished view of contemporary Serbian reality. The film will be released in Serbia, but has yet to secure a sales agent. “Maybe in Rotterdam!” says Milos.

Tiger Awards Competition

Clip – Maja MilosFri 27 Jan 11:45 PA5 (Press & Industry)Fri 27 Jan 15:30 PA7Sat 28 Jan 21:15 PA6Mon 30 Jan 16:15 PA3Thu 02 Feb 22:15 LV3Sat 04 Feb 21:45 PA5

Two Years At Sea is a study in solitude, director Ben Rivers tells Geoffrey Macnab

“I had a very specific idea in my mind that I wanted to make a film about somebody who lived separately from society.” It was this that first drew Rivers to his protagonist, Jake Williams, who has featured in Rivers’ earlier films and who might best be described as a Scottish version of Thoreau’s literary loner, Walden. Williams lives in Clashindarroch forest in Aberdeenshire. A bearded figure, he looks like a cross between Tolstoy and Charles Darwin, with a touch of Spike Milligan thrown in. He is shown in the film (shot without dialogue and screened in black and white) tramping through the snow, chopping wood, taking a shower, pottering around his ramshackle kitchen. Jake had originally been part of a commune. When that didn’t work out, he took a job in the merchant navy for two years (hence the title of the film), and saved the money to buy himself his bolthole. “The way he explained it was that he just wanted somewhere he knew he wouldn’t have to move from,” Rivers explains of his protagonist’s decision. “He just wanted to be grounded.” Jake may live a hermetic existence but, Rivers points out, he is personable and easygoing. He admired Rivers’ first film about him (“he showed it to his friends and to his mum”), and was open to working with him again. Rivers delib-erately waited to film until the snow began to fall. Watching the film, you half suspect it is being shot in Alaska or some far-flung wilderness, rather than in a forest near the Scottish market town of Huntly.

This – the director is at pains to point out – is not a conventional documentary. Highly stylised, it takes elements of Jake’s life and accentuates them. “He was fully aware that this was a fiction – that this wasn’t a film about his actual life.” The lyrical and pains-taking way in which Rivers films landscape is more reminiscent of a Tarkovsky movie than of a conven-tional fly-on-the-wall doc. In recent years, many British film “artists” (Sam Taylor-Wood and Steve McQueen among them) have moved into conventional narrative filmmaking. Will Rivers do likewise? “Possibly, but not in the same way,” he suggests. His next project is A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, a collaboration with Ben Russell that will again skirt the lines between documentary and fiction. Two Years At Sea (winner of the Fipresci prize in Venice) was shot in 16mm Cinemascope. Rivers used a mix of synched and non-synched sound. In his work, the director deliberately straddles two worlds – the cinema and the gallery space. “But there is something great about cinema that can’t really be replicated in the gallery – that captive audience … sitting with a bunch of strangers in the dark. There is nothing like that,” he says.

Two Years at Sea – Ben RiversFri 27 Jan 09:45 PA2 (Press & Industry)Fri 27 Jan 22:30 CI1 Sat 28 Jan 22:45 CI5Sun 29 Jan 09:45 LV 5 Sat 04 Feb 12:00 CI5

seeing through the trees

A Fish

ClipTwo Years at Sea

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Cornelia at Her Mirror is an atmospheric adaptation of a literary gem. Its director-actress team talk to Edward Lawrenson

Set exclusively in a grand Buenos Aires villa some time in the 1920s, Daniel Rosenfeld’s feature is a haunting and captivating drama about Cornelia (played with poise and poignancy by Eugenia Capizzano), an afflu-ent young woman who arrives there determined to commit suicide. The film is closely adapted by Rosen-feld and Capizzano from a novel by Silvina Ocampo. The writer “is well known in Argentina, but not as much as she deserves”, says Capizzano, in Rotterdam with Rosenfeld in advance of the world premiere of Cornelia at Her Mirror at the IFFR.It is an impressive movie. Charting encounters that the melancholy Cornelia has with three separate strangers who join her in the house, the film has a clas-sical elegance and casts a dreamlike spell. Working with DoP Matías Mesa (a former collaborator of Gus van Sant), Rosenfeld aspired to be true to the elusive atmosphere of Ocampo’s novel. “You have the feeling that everything is changing,” says Capizzano of first reading the original story (from which she and Rosen-feld lifted all their script’s dialogue): “You can’t quite grasp anything.”The house in which they filmed was almost as impor-tant a character as the three strangers who meet Cornelia. “Maybe when we release a DVD we will have a documentary about that location,” says Rosenfeld, “The house has ghosts!”The grandmother of the 89-year-old woman who owns the house, Rosenfeld explains, originally lived there – and was killed by a man who had fallen in love with her. Talking to the present owner, Rosenfeld discovered that the murderer was the great-uncle of Silvina Ocampo. “The moment we found this out,” recalls Rosenfeld of an unsettling coincidence of which the surrealist Ocampo might well have approved, “the lights cut out.” Finishing one another’s sentences and correcting each other’s English during the interview, Rosenfeld and Capizzano clearly enjoy collaborating. Performing in every scene in the movie, Capizzano felt an especial responsibility: “I had a strong connection to the writer and I felt I had to rise to her high level.” The interrupted

nature of the rehearsals and production period compli-cated the process. Capizzano had to prepare with the other three performers – including celebrated Argen-tine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia (recently co-starring with Robert DeNiro in Red Lights) – out of sequence, because of their availability. The shoot took place over a month and a half, but Capizzano and Rosenfeld had to break to wait for the other actors: “It’s actually an 11-day shoot, but stretched out over a much longer time,” says Rosenfeld.“I was afraid of losing my hold on the character,” says Capizzano of this unusual schedule. “You have to go out, and then go back in,” adds Rosenfeld, “but she did it wonderfully.” In its beguiling, unsettling blend of realism and fantasy, Cornelia at Her Mirror owes something to the literary adaptations of the late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz (honoured at the IFFR this year). Rosenfeld, who used Ruiz regular Jorge Arriagada to write his film’s score, doesn’t disavow the comparison, but says that it’s “Ocampo’s surrealistic original novel that is the great connection” between his movie and Ruiz’s sensibility. “He wasn’t a friend, but I met him on a number of occa-sions,” says Rosenfeld. “He introduced me to Jorge, and I wished I could have known him more.” Rosenfeld is very grateful to the Hubert Bals Fund for post-production financing. “Without it, this film would be impossible to do. I’m very proud they backed us. In a way it’s not an experimental film.” “But in a way it is,” adds Capizzano. “It wasn’t easy in our country to find someone to support us.”Rosenfeld is currently finishing his latest film – “a fiction that seems like a documentary (and vice versa)” he says – and then it’s possibly another literary work: the adaptation of a story by Danish writer Karen Blixen. He wants to film it in Patagonia, enthusiastically flipping open a laptop to show some pictures of the location he’d like to use. “It would be nice if Eugenia takes a part,” he says of his current lead actress. “Of course,” she agrees.

Cornelia at Her Mirror – Daniel RosenfeldSat 28 Jan 13:15 PA3Sun 29 Jan 22:15 CI3Thu 02 Feb 09:30 PA5 (Press & Industry) Fri 03 Feb 14:30 CI5

through the looking glass

Eugenia Capizzano and Daniel Rosenfeld photo: Bram Belloni