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Tag: IFFR 2026

  • Fiji, and Tilda Swinton, Star in ‘Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji.’ Swinton and Her Director Share What the World Can Learn From the Island Nation

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    Fiji, its people, its heart and spirit, and Tilda Swinton star in Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji, the new film from Cynthia Beatt, which world premiered this weekend in the Harbour program of the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The film and its creation reflect the auteur’s personal story of being raised partly in Fiji.

    “After decades abroad, Iona (Swinton) returns to her childhood home on Fiji, sensing that there she might find the answers to many questions she has about civilisation and its discontent,” explains a note about the film on the IFFR website, which describes it as “a speculative autobiography realized as an enchanting hybrid of ethnographic study and essayistic fiction” and “a monumental work of pure cinema!” It may also inspire remedies for the world’s trials, tribulations, and ills.

    Written and directed by Beatt, who produced the film with Philippe Avril and edited it with Till Beckmann, features cinematography by Jenny Lou Ziegel, sound design by Marlon Beatt, and music by Talei Draunibaka, Nemia Vanua, Simione Sevudredre, Simon Fisher Turner, Mia Kami, Dakui Gau, and Polotu Tokalau Village. Heartbeatt Pictures and La Cinéfiliale are handling sales.

    In addition to Swinton, Talei Draunibaka, Sereima Divavani, Simon Fisher Turner, Peter Knaack, Lasarusa Moce, and Esekaia Tukai Sovea also feature in the film. But the island nation itself is the main star. The opening moments of the film, for example, show the text of a famous line from T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land: “Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Shortly thereafter, the screen tells us that we are watching a film by Beatt, followed by the words: “with Fiji” and then “and Tilda Swinton.”

    You can check out a trailer, which will give you a first tiny glimpse of the natural beauty and the serenity that awaits you in Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji, here.

    Born in Jamaica and raised partly in Fiji, yet over the past decades based in Berlin, Beatt headed back to the South Sea archipelago for the production of the film. The cinematic form of her latest feature reminds Rotterdam programmers of her first movie, Description of an Island (1979), co-directed by Rudolf Thome, which they describe this way: “as much an ethnographic study of a Vanuatuan island and its inhabitants as it is an essayistic fiction about documentary filmmaking, featuring Beatt in the main role.” Highlights the Rotterdam team: “This time, it’s Beatt’s by-now alter ego Tilda Swinton as Iona who keeps all the different strands and levels of the film’s story of homecoming, loss and life lessons together, often shot at places remembered and too often found changed from what they once were.”

    Beatt, in a director’s statement, calls Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji “a cinematic essay in the sense that you follow an idea, accepting the detours and unforeseen events that shape the journey.” However, she highlights, “I’m not crazy about labels like ‘hybrid.’ For me, it’s a film that documents, but with setups and fictional elements. If anything, it is an essay film.”

    And she writes: “Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji is a window onto moments of everyday life in Fiji that few people get to experience. It’s an homage, and the sum of a lifetime process of constant reevaluation or self-examination of what it means to grow up in a culture that is not that of one’s parents.”

    The filmmaker calls Swinton “a soul mate, lauding “her quickness, sensitivity, discipline, and flexibility.” In Rotterdam, Swinton and Beatt talked to THR about Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji, their cinematic collaboration, and what the world could learn from Fiji.

    The film, just like its creators, doesn’t need genre labels. Its poetic sensibility left several people who watched it at Rotterdam feeling deeply touched and affected. “Derek Jarman is so important for all of us,” Beatt tells THR. “I never actually worked on his films, but I knew him very early on. … It’s like an era of cinema, which is, for me, perfectly natural for us.”

    And Swinton shares that “I have this very bemused reaction” when people ask her to categorize a film, especially a film like Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji. “Imagine making a film, and setting out from the outset, ‘we’re going to make a box, [it] is going to be this shape, the box is going to be this shape.’ That, to me, is harder to imagine. But the material and the whole experience that Cynthia was approaching needed to be formless for the length it was.”

    ‘Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji’

    Courtesy of IFFR

    The two creatives met at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986. “I went there with Derek Jarman with the first film that I made with him, [Caravaggio],” recalls Swinton. Beatt and German filmmaker Klaus Wyborny were preparing the film The Open Universe back then, in which Swinton featured. One part of the movie was set in Fiji.

    “So we went to Fiji, and I remember very distinctly, by a pool, Cynthia telling me about this project that she already [had],” Swinton explains, turning to Beatt. “I mean, for years, probably you’d already had it growing in your mind.” Continues the star: “And then she spoke to me about it, and we said, let’s do it together.” That was back in 1986, “and I don’t feel remotely mystified by the fact that it took 40 years,” Swinton says. “I really don’t. I felt it was resonant enough, burning in you, sometimes hotter than at other times, and sometimes…”

    “Sometimes I had to put it aside,” Beatt completes the thought. The two made three other films in the meantime, namely Cycling the Frame (1988), in which Swinton cycles along the Berlin Wall and explores the divided city, the short The Party: Nature Morte (1991), and The Invisible Frame (2009), in which Swinton retraces the same Berlin path and reflects on the fallen Berlin Wall.

    But the idea for the Fiji film continued to pop up. “It was always there,” Swinton shares. “Whenever we had conversations, which was thousands of times, there was always a section of the conversation about Heart of Light.”

    The journey of getting to make the film took another detour a few years ago. “I just got money, and then there were two years of COVID,” recalls Beatt.

    The writer of these lines’ love of rugby leads us to talk about scenes of Fijians playing rugby in the film, and discuss their widely appreciated rugby skills, and Beatt shares something that provides further insight into the culture of Fiji. “When they play rugby, they never call out their names to one another. They don’t say, ‘Georg, give me the ball.’ It’s ‘cousin,’ ‘uncle,’ ‘brother.’ It’s kinship. That’s why
    they play so well.”

    ‘Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji’

    Courtesy of IFFR

    With a sense of this kinship and connection to nature and each other seeping through throughout Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji, I wonder if the film can be a very timely reminder of what today’s conflict-ridden world may need more of. Swinton has something to share in this context. Being Scottish, the whole clan system of Fiji is “completely familiar” to her, she mentions. But it may be this deeper spirit of Fiji that explains “the fact that you witnessed somebody who was not brought up in Fiji … responding to Fiji in the way that I did,” she suggests.

    “There’s this scene in the film when I’m talking to the elders, and I’m asking them all sorts of questions, and then I’m apologizing to them: ‘Am I being insensitive, or am I being too curious, am I too invasive?’ And they say this very interesting thing,” Swinton highlights. “They say: ‘We like your questions. They’re good questions, but also they’re very welcome because you made your sevusevu, you made your ritual presentation, and you are in. That means you are welcome.’ The patina of foreignness is dissolved. ‘You are part of us.’ And that’s truly what it’s like.”

    And she adds: “It is extraordinary how you can go into a community like that for several weeks and be completely accepted – in the most generous way. In the most relaxed and trusting way and safe.”

    Swinton then addresses me directly: “That’s what you’re talking about, this old feeling of safety that you had as a child.” And turning to Beatt, she shares: “You might have thought, going into the film, ‘oh, well, that’s to do with childhood.’ No, it’s not just to do with childhood. And maybe that’s something you discover during the course of the film, particularly through someone like me or Simon [Fisher Turner], who’d never been there before. … We’re adults, and we experience it as well. And I think that’s really special, really particular, and something that the West in particular can learn from.”

    If one accepts that spirit as being a key element of Fijian culture, British colonization feels even more brutal. “The idea of colonialism coming into and coming onto that social structure is so painful because it’s such an abuse,” Swinton offers. “It’s not just a sort of material abuse, but it’s such societal abuse, such spiritual abuse, because the trust will have been … completely desecrated.”

    And “the terrible thing is, when all these colonial governments leave, that structure remains, but it’s not the way of the people,” emphasizes Beatt. “People still try to … function within that foreign, strange structure.”

    ‘Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji’

    In this context, Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji can be understood as Beatt’s confronting ghosts of the past and her own history. “I was a colonial child, and how do I feel about that?” Swinton explains a question Beatt is confronting with the film. “And looking at what messages she got as a colonial child, or rather, the child of colonial parents. And yet, at the same time, [there is] sometimes the confusion of feeling as a Fijian with Fijian friends, living like Fijian children.”

    Swinton lauds her friends for “just the way in which she’s been so scrupulous about examining, interrogating all of that over 40 years,” calling that “absolutely massive” and “not always comfortable.” And she tells her soul mate: “You were ready to go back with all that reflection, not looking away and taking responsibility, and also not taking responsibility. I think it’s very impressive.”

    Beatt felt vulnerable at times. “There are times where I thought I’d made a mistake, where I actually cried for like an hour, but that was years and years and years ago,” she shares. “But that was part of the learning process.”

    As Heart of Light – eleven songs for Fiji conveys, the spirit of a respectful and supportive community lives on in Fiji, which may inspire hope not only within Beatt and her co-creators but around the world. “It means that, not just for audiences who see the film, but … it is possible for us, in general, to aspire [to] and to actually, practically, make steps to change and inculcate this kind of living,” Swinton says. “It is possible. I’m endlessly hopeful.”

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    Georg Szalai

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  • Shahrbanoo Sadat, Maryna Er Gorbach Discuss Their Displacement Film Fund Shorts ‘Super Afghan Gym’ and ‘Rotation’: Rotterdam

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    Shahrbanoo Sadat, who fled Kabul, Afghanistan, to Germany in 2021 and will next month open the Berlin Film Festival with No Good Men, just world premiered her short film Super Afghan Gym at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). And Maryna Er Gorbach, the Ukrainian director of Klondike, debuted her short Rotation at Rotterdam.

    Both shorts were backed by the Displacement Film Fund, a scheme unveiled last year by Cate Blanchett and IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund to provide five displaced directors with €100,000 ($120,000) grants. The other grant recipients were Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), Syria’s Hasan Kattan (Last Men in Aleppo), and Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe (The Village Next to Paradise).

    In a conversation with THR and during a Rotterdam press conference, Er Gorbach and Sadat discussed their inspirations and hopes for their respective films.

    The 12-minute-long Rotation is about a therapeutic hypnosis ritual experienced by a young Ukrainian woman who shifted from civilian life to military service due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She needs support to adapt to the displaced reality she now lives in.

    Er Gorbach tells THR that her film came “from this creative freedom we had, because there was no expectation for us. There was so much trust, and we were free to make what we felt strongly about.”

    The starting point for Rotation was “my understanding of displacement,” explains the filmmaker. “Right now, I want to talk about the displacement of normality for people who were civilians and came into the army services. How do they adapt to that new reality?”

    In her research, she talked to people with insight and learned a lot. “I found out that there are situations when newcomers to the army cannot manage the loss, the death,” explains Er Gorbach. “And sometimes they go to this therapeutic hypnosis where it is proposed that they forgive themselves for [the fact that] they could not save their friends or just say goodbye to them.” So, Rotation is not about physical but “metaphysical and emotional displacement.”

    In the month-long casting process, Er Gorbach saw “so many women and men, because it was not only about performance, but about having the right person in the film.” She and her casting director ended up finding journalist Nadiia Karpova for the lead role. “She’s now a war reporter, but she was an actress before the war,” the director explains. “So, she’s basically living this kind of rotation, going to the frontline, shooting, and all that.”

    ‘Rotation’

    Physical displacement is not the focus of Rotation, but the director decided to shoot it on physical film, namely Svema, a Ukrainian brand of film used for Soviet movies during the era of the Soviet Union. “My team found one of the last film stocks somewhere in a shelter,” Er Gorbach recalls. “After we shot, we put it in paper boxes. We could not bring it in metal boxes because [when we traveled] we had to go through an X-ray. So it was kind of a journey for us.”

    Meanwhile, the 14-minute Super Afghan Gym is set in a gym in downtown Kabul, which features posters of muscular men on the walls, where a group of housewives come together during the one hour of the day reserved for women. “They train at lunchtime behind closed doors, talking about body norms and their daily life,” reads a synopsis.

    Sadat’s experience of displacement is more a form of “double displacement,” she explains. “My parents fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion back in the ’70s. They fled to Iran, and I was born in Iran,” where she experienced “racism against Afghan refugees and immigrants.” Actually, “I experienced a high dose of racism as a child before I understood what racism meant,” she recalls. “I was taking it personally because I was not familiar with racism.”

    Her experience also affected how she and other people thought about her identity. “In Iran, I was always called Afghan, even when I’d never been to Afghanistan, and I knew nothing about Afghanistan,” she says. “My parents never talked about it. So I was always trying my best to be Iranian. And then when I moved back to Afghanistan – my parents decided to move back – suddenly everyone called me Iranian.”

    She lived there for 20 years, “and then, four years ago, when Kabil collapsed, a lot of people, including me and my family, evacuated to Germany,” recalls Sadat. “And I had a lot of friends [for whom] it was the first time to leave and really experience how life is for refugees. But I didn’t feel that, because I never had the feeling that I belonged to a country. … I was always the other, the foreigner, the one who doesn’t belong to this place.”

    Sadat describes film as a form of therapy. “It is a therapy for finding my voice, finding myself, talking about things that matter in the way that I think they matter,” she shares. When she got the call from the Displacement Film Fund, “I just reached the conclusion that this identity of Iranian, Afghan, foreigner, the other person, the displaced person, or whatever, are just the identities that are exposed on me from outside. They’re not coming from me, because from inside, I’m the same person. It doesn’t matter what passport I’m holding. It doesn’t matter if I’m Iranian or German or Afghan. I’m a human being with the experience of living in different places. So it was a kind of liberation for me to get rid of this.”

    Super Afghan Gym also deals with questions of identity and home. “As a woman, I never really felt at home in my own body,” Sadat says. “And I think the first, the best, home of everyone is their body. This is very connected to how a woman’s body should look, or what the beauty definition is. I know that is a universal topic. So, I just decided I was going to talk about that experience.”

    Social media reactions to news of her short film were divided. “A lot of Afghan men were attacking me, saying I was fabricating this experience. ‘Women are not going into the gym in Kabul. You’re just making this up.’ At the same time, a lot of women were writing to me, saying, ‘We have been going to the gym secretly since the Taliban took over the country, because we cannot go to work, we cannot go to school.’ There are these gyms, and this is the only excitement. This is the highlight of the day for so many women now in big cities. Of course, in villages, that’s not possible.” Concluded Sadat: “It’s been four years since their lives have been stopped. Imagine a lockdown for four years. And there’s no news of how the situation is going to end.”

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    Georg Szalai

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  • ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ DOP on Working With Jim Jarmusch, “Nightmare” Shots, and Why Tilda Swinton Is More Than an Actress: Rotterdam

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    The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) honored French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux with the 2026 Robby Müller Award on Saturday, with a crowd of film fans coming out to hear the DOP discussing his career and work in a wide-ranging interview after receiving the award. Some of his bold-named frequent collaborators, such as Tilda Swinton and Jim Jarmusch, as well as the likes of Blitz director Steve McQueen sent their congratulations via video messages.

    Le Saux is known for his frequent collaborations with Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper) and François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 5×2). “His body of work includes many remarkable films with an inspirational variety of filmmakers, such as I Am Love by Luca Guadagnino, Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch, High Life by Claire Denis, and Little Women by Greta Gerwig,” the fest said about his career.

    The Robby Müller award, which has become a popular part of the Rotterdam festival and is named after the late Dutch cinematographer behind the likes of Paris, Texas who is known as the “master of light,” acknowledges “the artistry of an exceptional image maker.” It is handed out in collaboration with the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers (NSC) and Andrea Müller-Schirmer. At IFFR, Le Saux’s recent films Father Mother Sister Brother and The Wizard of the Kremlin feature in the festival’s Limelight strand.

    Asked about his collaborations with Swinton, Le Saux said that, “I was lucky to have her on screen three times,” namely in Julia, Only Lovers Left Alive, and A Bigger Splash. “What’s interesting and important with Tilda, she’s not only an actress, she’s really the energy of the film.”

    Discussing his collaboration with Jarmusch on Only Lovers Left Alive and Father Mother Sister Brother, the DOP said: “Jimmy has his own timing on the day of the shoot. In the morning, he rehearses with the actors, he changes the script, he finds the [best] word. The script is always an evolution with him. And so, it’s super interesting in the morning to come and to see him working with the actors and trying to find the fewest shots we can do to cover this scene.”

    After that, “we go to lunch, and we shoot it in the afternoon, and we have to do it in one day, because, yes, we don’t have so much time and so much budget,” Le Saux added. He concluded: “It’s crazy how he brings his charm and music inside every frame, every shot. And there’s no little shot with him. Everything is like magic in every shot.”

    But Le Saux also quipped about Venice winner Father Mother Sister Brother: “It was a nightmare, because there were like 20 pages of talking around the table.” He concluded: “So, we had to find ideas. Usually, I love to move the camera, and I love to give rhythm through the camera movement. … But here, you had a 20-minute sequence around the table with people talking.”

    In the end, the strong relationship and trust between the two creatives bore fruit. “Jim found a solution [for] how to shoot it and how to simplify it. Again, he brings his charm to every situation.”

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    Georg Szalai

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  • ‘Elements of(f) Balance’ Doc Maker Scouted Earth to Showcase Humans Working as Parts of Nature to Counter “Collective Human Narcissism”

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    Othmar Schmiderer (Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, Back to Africa) has made films for more than 40 years, so he knows a thing or two about sustainability. So it seems fitting that nature and rural life are recurring themes of his work.

    The latest documentary from the director, writer and producer, Elements of(f) Balance, which gets its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s 55th edition, where it screens in the Harbour program beginning on Feb. 1, sees Schmiderer scouting the planet for examples of people who have found ways to live in balance with the natural world.

    The film, which the director co-wrote with Stephan Settele, with Siri Klug handling cinematography and Arthur Summereder editing, takes viewers on a journey to ecosystems “hardly ever seen before,” as press notes about the movie emphasize. Looking for alternatives to exploitation, its focus is “not on dystopian visions of the future, but on a new awareness and the new, concrete opportunities that open up for humanity when interrelated ways of living and forgotten alliances form the basis of our dealings with nature,” they add.

    Filmdelights is handling international sales on the film. Ahead of its Rotterdam run, THR met up with Schmiderer to discuss Elements of(f) Balance, the state of the planet, and some of the discoveries he made on his travels around the globe.

    “The idea for Elements of(f) Balance was rooted in a deep, lifelong connection with nature,” he explains. “We have now reached such a dangerous point where our ecological footprint is jeopardizing our continued existence on the planet.”

    Schmiderer doesn’t sound too impressed by Elon Musk‘s Mars plans or other people’s visions for bringing humans to other parts of the universe. “Under the media influence of powerful tech companies, it seems perfectly normal today to present enticing scenarios for the possible colonization of distant planets as an extension of an imperial lifestyle that has gone unchecked for centuries, while the very foundations of life in the fragile atmosphere above us, on the earth beneath our feet, and in the depths of the oceans are largely ignored in a display of collective human narcissism,” says the director.

    ‘Elements of(f) Balance’

    Courtesy of IFFR

    But Schmiderer is optimistic that we can make changes and make a difference, and his film wants to inspire confidence. “It must become self-evident once again, without any false pathos, that humans understand themselves as an intricately intertwined part of what is called nature, and not as superior adversaries or conquerors,” he explains. “We must finally learn to live not like plunderers, but in symbiotic coexistence.”

    But the movie isn’t doom and gloom, even if the topic may make you expect so. “The focus isn’t on dystopian visions of the future – that would be too simplistic; there are already plenty of films about that – but rather on a new awareness and new, concrete possibilities that open up for humanity when interconnected life forms and forgotten alliances form the basis of our relationship with nature,” says Schmiderer. “Our film intends to be nothing more than a curious nod in this direction of potential realms, without fear-mongering or finger-wagging.”

    In this context, it will not surprise you that the creative calls the doc “an attempt to explore the question: what can we learn from nature?” But he also shares: “Perhaps the film’s central message lies in the fact that the urgently needed mechanisms of collaboration have always been present in nature.”

    That is mirrored by the sizable number of locations and experts showcased in Elements of(f) Balance that take audiences on a journey of discovery. “Our aim was to find a poetic, cinematic form,” the filmmaker tells THR. “Everything is connected to everything else, regardless of the dimension.” Instead of a linear narrative, the film is presented as a collection of individual ecological episodes that invites viewers to dive into locations and practices that they may not be familiar with.

    From the initial idea to its completion, the doc was a five-year process because he wanted to take a closer and broader look at different phenomena and various parts of the globe, including Eastern Europe, Bangladesh, and China. “When it comes to climate change, a global perspective is essential,” Schmiderer highlights. “I believe that when you engage with this topic, you inevitably move from the microcosm to the macrocosm in order to compare the different aspects.”

    The director found visiting China particularly fascinating. “Even though pollutant emissions in China are still extremely high, China is already a leader and will dominate the field of sustainability in the coming years,” Schmiderer says, pointing to a gigantic desert reforestation project, which has been underway since the late 1960s, and solar energy, including solar thermal power plants. “Observing the speed and scale with which sustainability is being pursued in China is truly impressive. China alone operates more sustainable solar energy facilities than the rest of the world combined.”

    How was filming in China? “It requires a long preparation time, and obtaining the necessary filming permits for specific locations is not easy,” shares the director. “And, of course, specific regulations must be followed.”

    ‘Elements of(f) Balance’

    Courtesy of IFFR

    The film presents traditional farming methods combined with ancient knowledge, such as permaculture on a mountain farm in the Austrian Alps or floating farming in Bangladesh, along with state-of-the-art methods, such as those developed in the agricultural laboratories of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which use artificial intelligence to develop cycle-oriented and bio-based processes – not only to combat climate change, but also to preserve and protect urgently needed biodiversity.

    “When it comes to presentation, aesthetics and intuition play a major role in finding appropriate perspectives, allowing the images and a cinematic language to speak for themselves,” Schmiderer tells THR, highlighting the need to find “an organic rhythm.” He adds: “It was important for me to create a certain lightness, a space of resonance where sound, image, and nature intertwine. It’s a film for the cinema. It‘s a very dense but also meditative film that still allows you time to breathe.”

    Actually, the filmmaker hopes viewers will “immerse themselves” in the spaces shown in the doc. Helping with that are the sound design by Andreas Hamza and the music, which comes courtesy of none other than guitarist Christian Fennesz, a key figure in Austrian electronic music.

    Among the memorable things shown on screen that particularly jumped out for Schmiderer while making the doc are the floating farms in Bangladesh, an academic’s explanation for how and why jellyfish’s bodies have remained largely unchanged for over 500 million years (simple, effective structure has remained highly successful in their habitat), the rise of AI in the planning, growing and protection of crops, as well as the latest fascinating findings in fungal research. As the film shows, the world of mushrooms and mycelium is emerging as a blueprint for futuristic projects in architecture and sustainable fashion.

    ‘Elements of(f) Balance’

    Elements of(f) Balance invites people interested in nature, sustainability and related topics, curious about science, or looking for a cinematic trip to seldom-visited places on Earth to explore new possibilities – and share rays of hope for the future.

    The film wants to provide insights into “the truly fascinating ‘science’ and also the ‘fiction’ that has been playing out here on our planet for millennia between human and non-human actors,” Schmiderer tells THR. “It will likely take more than just a mental shift in thinking when we’re sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.” Concludes the filmmaker: “Our experience must also change, our perception must shift – from an environment that is perceived as something external to a shared inter-species ‘we-world’.”

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    Georg Szalai

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  • ‘Hungry’ Director on Her Sci-Fi Doc About a World Without Humans That Is “a Call to Action”

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    “In a world without humans, a strange Being finds what we lost – and what we failed to see. Or did we?” The trailer for Hungry has major sci-fi thriller vibes.

    It turns out that the Being is searching for clues for mankind’s extinction. In the process, it creates the film Hungry using audio interviews made with scientists and activists before what is referred to as “extinction events.” The experts, who appear with their voices rather than in typical talking-head fashion, had warned about the threat of the destruction of the planet and humans themselves.

    Hungry may at first glance seem like a fiction feature, but it is the new documentary from U.S.-born, Austria-based filmmaker Susanne Brandstaetter (This Land Is My Land), world premiering in the Harbour program of the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Feb. 2.

    Viewers are not immediately told how near or far in the future the film takes place. And we don’t really know who or what the “creature” arriving on this planet to investigate is. Via a mix of scientific information on and insights from specialists into problematic food, environmental, business, and political trends with haunting imagery of human-less landscapes, the result is “a documentary poem of great urgency as well as overwhelming beauty,” says the IFFR’s website.

    The doc embraces complexity by highlighting connections that may not be readily apparent. “What starts off as a film focused on environmental issues expands into a scientific and political inquiry looking to highlight connections that may not be readily obvious. Among them are “the destruction of food security, the deterioration of labor markets, the hijacking of democratic governments, and the global decline of democracy itself,” as background materials for the film highlight.

    Produced, via her Susanne Brandstaetter Film Production, written and directed by Brandstaetter and edited by Lisa Zoe Geretschläger and Stephan Bechinger, Hungry features cinematography by Joerg Burger, plus additional camera work by Martin Putz and Lukas Lerperger, who helped add a subjective point of view. Peter Kutin and Rojin Sharafi handled sound design and music.

    Hungry was produced with the support of the Austrian Film Institute & ÖFI+, Film Fund Vienna, ORF Film/TV Agreement, and Lower Austria Culture. Check out a trailer for the film here.

    Brandstaetter talked to THR about her goal of making Hungry an immersive and memorable experience that points out complex connections and relationships, why she wanted to challenge the idea that extinction is inevitable, how the film’s message is much more positive than it may at first seem, and what’s next for her.

    What was the inspiration for Hungry, and when did you come up with that title?

    I started researching the film in 2016, starting with food supplements. Then I started to get interested in the whole industry behind that and how it was unregulated, and then I went to see how this whole industry was impacting our environment. So, I started to research, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. It got so huge that I made a mind map with all these different dots and looking at what was affecting what other parts – in our environment, our health and the economy. I started to look for this cause and effect. For example, many of these huge transnational companies have succeeded with their lobbying and making policymakers and the public believe that the onus is on us and that we are the ones responsible for bad health outcomes or obesity.

    So I hit upon this idea of calling it Hungry, because I wanted it to have more than one meaning. You know, “hungry” has to do with our food, but it also has this meaning from the point of view of greed. I love double meanings in my titles. You may not get it right away when you’re watching the film, but then, as the film progresses, you start to understand what it’s getting at.

    With news of politicians shutting down efforts to protect the environment and the more visible connections between politics and business, do you think key themes of Hungry will look familiar or recognizable to audiences?

    I’m hoping so, because it’s very timely. And I think it’s essential to provoke audiences to think more about this. Some of these topics have been handled in different films, but what I really set out to do was to connect the dots and show the complexity. Hungry shows how we are impacting not just the quality of our food, but also evolution, plant life, animal life, etc.

    ‘Hungry’

    Courtesy of Susanne Brandstaetter Film Production

    When did you decide to add this unusual sci-fi lens?

    As I was trying to figure out how to make all these complex links understandable and what it all means, I was looking for different ways to tell the story. And that’s when I hit upon the idea of making it a sci-fi documentary. I think one of the reasons why I got that idea was that during project development and then during the pandemic, I was in a farmhouse that was very remote in the mountains in the South of Austria. There was basically no civilization around. So that was conducive to thinking about what it would be like if there were no other people around.

    All of a sudden, this idea just popped into my head to put the film in the future, with no human beings left, and hardly any animal life, basically only insects. That’s how I chanced upon this idea. Plus, since it was during the pandemic when none of us really knew what was going to happen in the future, I was wondering how I was going to be able to make a film. And I thought interviewing people remotely made sense. And then I was [using] them as these voices from the past, which fit in with my story.

    Overall, I wanted to create a really immersive [cinematic] experience.

    How did you think about the time the film is set in and the visual mix of derelict buildings and barren landscapes we see in Hungry?

    I did play with the idea of actually saying a year, but then I abandoned that because I realized it would be better to leave that open for audiences. We have this progression in the film where some of the locations where we shot are more devastated than others. It was quite hard to find the locations that fit what we needed so that you would see a kind of progression within the film.

    We filmed in Austria and in Germany, in Spain, in the United States and in Malaysia. And it did a lot of research to find [suitable] locations. I was researching really, really extensively online for quite a long time, using Google Street View and things like that. But, of course, those images are not really recent, so I had to have people who looked to see if the locations still actually looked like that. For certain locations that I was interested in, we couldn’t get filming permission.

    So it was a lot of work. And, as always with documentaries, some of it comes down to looking around and researching once you’re on location. If you talk to the right people, they will all of a sudden say, ‘I know this place,’ or you notice this abandoned school or other places you had not planned on.

    And in post-production, we removed any remaining traces of human and animal life.

    Susanne Brandstaetter

    Courtesy of Susanne Brandstaetter

    What can you share about how you developed “the Being” coming to Earth?

    I didn’t want to define the Being too much, because that was also something that I wanted to play with, and I wanted the viewer to be able to think about that: Who is this Being? But I actually ended up defining the Being more than I originally planned on.

    In the very beginning, I thought it would be interesting not to let the viewer know at all who the Being is. But I ended up feeling that defining it a bit at the beginning of the film would be helpful and make the film really function. The whole film Hungry is actually being made by the Being. This was a whole Odyssey in the development of the film, deciding how the Being was going to move through the world, and what the Being does and feels like for the viewer.

    Tell me a bit about the choice of images in Hungry. Since we hear the experts discussing complex issues, the visuals used for illustration obviously usually can’t directly show the topics being discussed.

    Yes, sometimes it’s just very associative. I wanted to allow the viewers to also expand their ideas and what they’re thinking, not just so narrowly focus on what they are hearing.

    Do you at all worry that someone could be put off by the dystopian feel of Hungry? Or what would you tell people wondering if this is a pessimistic film?

    When you watch the whole film, I think, you understand that it is actually very positive. I’m really an optimist at heart, and the film has a positive message. There’s a dramatic twist, which I don’t want to give away, but it’s definitely not doom-mongering. I want it to be thought-provoking. I want people to be emotionally touched and think about what they’re hearing and seeing.

    Basically, the film is empowering and should be inspiring for people to know that we can still be doing something to make a difference. That is something I really deeply believe in, and I want this film to have an impact. I think films, in general, can have a tremendous impact, and I hope this film will have an impact, which is why I was fighting for so many years to develop and make it. The film is really an immersive call to action. Our future is not dismal. We could still turn things around.

    ‘Hungry’

    Courtesy of Susanne Brandstaetter Film Production

    What’s next for you after Hungry?

    I’m just finishing another film. It’s a documentary about something completely different. You wouldn’t believe it was by the same filmmaker as Hungry. It’s about youths with a migration background in Vienna [Austria]. The working title is What About Me?, but I haven’t yet decided on a title.

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    Georg Szalai

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  • ‘Yellow Cake’ Fuses Pulpy, Political Sci-Fi With Brazil Folklife, Radioactivity, and the Pending Apocalypse (Exclusive IFFR Clips)

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    Tiago Melo (Azougue Nazaré) returns to the clash between folklife and modern threats in rural Brazil, and to the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), with his second feature, Yellow Cake, which will world premiere in the Tiger Competition of the 55th edition of the Dutch fest on Feb. 2.

    Miners and researchers in Brazil’s Northeast face the apocalypse in the genre hybrid after failed experiments with uranium as an insect repellent threaten to bring about the End of Days. The insect in question is the aedes aegypti, whose unofficial English names include the Dengue Mosquito and Yellow Fever Mosquito.

    IFFR advertises Yellow Cake as a “pulpy, politically charged sci-fi fusing local myth, dark humor, working-class grit and radioactivity.” And its website adds: “Brazil’s working class faces the storm troopers of global capital. All of it is grounded in truths of the region, with the fantasy elements brought in to make these forces visible and, in a sense, easier to grasp.”

    Rejane Faria, Valmir do Côco, Spencer Callahan, and Tânia Maria star in Yellow Cake.

    Melo directed the movie from Urânio Filmes, Lucinda Produções, and Jaraguá Produções based on a screenplay that he wrote with Amanda Guimarães, Anna Carolina Francisco, Jeronimo Lemos, and Gabriel Domingues. Gustavo Pessoa and Ivo Lopes Araújo were the cinematographers, with André Sampaio serving as the editor. The producers are Melo, Carol Ferreira, Leonardo Sette, and Luiz Barbosa. Urânio Filmes is handling rights.

    THR can now exclusively premiere two clips from Yellow Cake. The first teaser takes us inside the lab – but not without those yellow protective suits, and not without driving music. Plus, the Yellow Cake of the film title gets a mention here. So, watch closely, and watch out!

    The second teaser from Yellow Cake underlines the sense that its characters can’t trust many people and that things start looking really dire. At the same time, as the end of this scene drives home, the clock is ticking. Watch the second clip from Yellow Cake here.

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    Georg Szalai

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