It’s tempting to pick nits about the relative merits of prizewinners and other films, and even more tempting to take a handful of the 346 new films as somehow indicative of the festival as a whole, but the truth is that a slate the size of IFFR’s can make proclamations about its strength difficult: two different attendees can carve distinct paths and have dissimilar takeaways. That’s one reason why a festival is more than just the films one watches.
IFFR
After presenting A Brief Excursion in 2017, Igor Bezinović returns to Rotterdam to showcase his latest documentary, titled Fiume o Morte!, in the Tiger competition. The Croatian director uses dramatic reconstructions and nonfiction interludes to explore the complex figure of Italian poet, playwright, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). In his conversation with Documentary, Bezinović unpacks the making of his long-gestated project, its peculiar aesthetic choices, its ambitions, and its worryingly timely connections between past and present.
A publicist for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) remarked to me near the end of this year’s festival that after two years of the COVID