Rotterdam, 1/25.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam opened on Wednesday with Lucía Cedrón's first feature, Lamb of God (Cordero de Dios). It's "an assured debut," writes Geoffrey Macnab in Screen Daily, "a skillfully told and affecting tale which straddles the line between political thriller and family melodrama. The elaborate flashback structure – the film is set in Argentina in 1978, when the country was still under the control of the military Junta, and in 2002, during the economic crisis – is initially disconcerting. It takes a moment or two to realise that we are watching the same characters at different points in their lives. In the long run, though, Cedron's subtle and richly layered storytelling style adds an emotional depth that a more conventional narrative would surely have lacked."

One of the highlights of the festival is surely Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, a series curated by Shelly Kraicer, who writes in his introduction to these 12 Chinese films from the late 70s and early 80s: "The Fourth Generation's double misfortune is to have been squeezed out by two phenomena: one political, the other aesthetic.... This led to their relative obscurity in the West, one that is entirely circumstantial, and not commensurate with their artistic achievements."

Filing a first dispatch from the festival for Reverse Shot, Genevieve Yue writes, "Two visions of rural life, Uruphong Raksasad's short film The Rocket (2007) and Sandra Kogut's Mutum (2007) presented distant places as intimate experiences, timeless wonders with sly hints of the present."

For Twitch, Ardvark reviews "Russian director Alexei Balabanov's newest picture, Gruz 200 (Cargo 200), a film which starts as a 'man meets crazy inbred family' thriller but gradually turns into a very cold kidnap drama.... Balabanov meant this film to be the harshest possible condemnation of early 1980s USSR and wants it to give people who longingly talk about the 'good old days of communism' a good kicking. In the teeth. Hard."

Earlier: James Van Maanen on Mutum.

Posted by dwhudson at January 25, 2008 8:24 AM