2010 is shaping up to be a good year for the Dutch, Holland Film managing director Claudia Landsberger tells Nick Cunningham
The 2010 Dutch Treats selection, IFFR's dedicated strand of homegrown work, complements an eclectic range of films that are part of the wider IFFR programme. The strand opens today with Martijn Maria Smits's Tiger competitor C'est déjà l'été, which had its world premiere last night.
Other highlights include Urszula Antoniak's Locarno multi-award winner Nothing Personal, Alex van Warmerdam's The Last Days of Emma Blank, The Storm by Ben Sombogaart and Ramon Gieling's Spanish-language Netherlands Film Festival opener Tramontana. A collaboration between IFFR, The Netherlands Film Fund and Holland Film, the Dutch Treats programme will run to February 2.
“I am very proud of the section this year, as well as the other Dutch films at the festival,” commented Holland Film managing director Claudia Landsberger. “In the festival, we have a world premiere in the Tiger competition, we have three in Tiger shorts, six in Bright Future and two in Spectrum. It is a very good year for the Dutch in Rotterdam.”
Landsberger singled out Smits's C'est déjà l'été and Ineke Smits's festival-closer The Aviatrix of Kazbek for special mention. “In C'est déjà l'été, the director has obviously been inspired by the very tragic Belgian landscape and society we recognise in the films of the Dardenne brothers,” she stressed. “He is a young man and very resolute in his adherence to social realism. Aviatrix is the exact opposite, nothing is realistic, all is fantasy and it is filmed in a completely different style. While C'est déjà l'été is highly realistic, grim and gritty, Aviatrix is very cinematic and the story is told through poetic images. I think Ineke has succeeded in telling a very original story in a very original style. Both films represent very polarised approaches to filmmaking.”
Landsberger also offers up Sander Burger's Hunting and Sons and Mark de Cloe's Shocking Blue, both screening in Bright Future, for commendation. “Hunting and Sons is also highly realistic and very strong,” she opined. “It grips you by the throat but is nevertheless very subtle. Little by little the secret of the film becomes revealed in this bourgeois village in the Netherlands. Shocking Blue is a very well-made dark coming-of-age-story in which the Dutch tulip landscape is depicted in a very beautiful way.”
More about Dutch Treats here.