[The Daily] Rotterdam 2018

The forty-seventh edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam opens today and runs through February 4. Over a month ago now, we started tracking the lineup, which the IFFR unveiled bit by bit every few days, culminating with the publication of the full program just last week. So that entry now serves as an overview of a sprawling array of screenings, talks, performances, and delightful oddities such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, “where sleep and film, ghosts and imagination, the past and the present collide.”

Screen’s Tom Grater offers an extensive preview of this year’s edition, for which he’s spoken to IFFR director Bero Beyer, “who is optimistic about his third year at the helm of Europe’s 2018 festival curtain-raiser.” Beyer promises “at least one masterclass or talk per day” by the likes of Apichatpong, Sean Baker, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Schrader, and Lucrecia Martel.

Martin Kudlac talks with Beyer as well—twice. In his interview for Cineuropa, Beyer discusses, among other things, IFFR Unleashed, a new streaming service available throughout the year. “Yes, there will be films online; yes, you can become a member; and we will be adding films on a monthly basis to extend the catalogue. What is nice about this is not just that many of those films are hard to find elsewhere, but mostly that we try to give the same context and feel that the festival provides. So we are speaking about master classes, discussions, performances and other elements that give it a peripheral context and meaning. You will find them online as well.”

Kudlac’s talk with Beyer opens his preview of IFFR 2018 for the Notebook, wherein you’ll also find notes on some of the more notable world premieres rolling out over the next twelve days.

As reviews of those premieres and more roll in, we’ll naturally be making note of them here. In the meantime, you’ll find dozens and dozens of trailers on the IFFR’s YouTube channel. On this opening day, let me draw your attention to the one for Donal Foreman’s The Image You Missed (that’s a still at the top of this page), an essay executive produced by Nicole Brenez and Philippe Grandrieux in which, as he explains at his site, the “Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland.”

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