Igor Bezinović’s documentary Fiume o Morte! took the Tiger Award and the FIPRESCI prize at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Swedish director Jon Blåhed’s Raptures won the top award in the Big Screen Competition.
Combining documentary and dramatic reconstruction, Fiume o Morte! [PICTURED ABOVE] explores Italian army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio’s attempts to annex the city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) to Italy, following the post-First World War Paris Peace Conference, which proposed handing the city to Yugoslavia.
The jury stated: “At times of the rise of ultra-nationalism within a contemporary European context, the film playfully grapples with the past not as a closed chapter, but as a living reality.”
Also in the Tiger Competition, Special Jury Awards went to The Tree Of Authenticity (L’arbre de l’authenticité), directed by Sammy Baloji, and Im Haus Meiner Eltern from Germany’s Tim Ellrich.
The Tree Of Authenticity examines the colonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Congo Basin’s vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping the global environmental balance over a century.
Im Haus Meiner Eltern revolves around a therapist working with the sick and infirm who is forced to balance the demands of her professional life with those of her ageing parents and older brother, who has schizophrenia.
The Tiger Competition Jury consisted of Yuki Aditya, Winnie Lau, Peter Strickland and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. It initially also included Soheila Golestani (The Seed Of The Sacred Fig), however she was unable to attend and participate due to a travel ban which prevented her leaving Iran.
Raptures, which won the Big Screen Award in a separate competition, is set in 1930s northern Sweden and follows a woman who quietly fights to protect her family when her husband launches a religious cult. The film is the first to be made using the minority Meänkieli language.
The jury, which comprised Bero Beyer, Dewi Reijs, Jia Zhao, Sara Rajaei and Digna Sinke, stated: “This year’s Big Screen Award goes to a film that explores themes of morality, family, resilience and dogma, a layered film that encapsulates a very local and perhaps little-known story in a profoundly universal theme.
“Driven by a complex leading role, the film is stunningly shot, literally composing its own language. A film that asks painful questions that were relevant almost a century ago and, as it turns out, are even more relevant today.”
While the Tiger Competition focuses on emerging filmmakers, the Big Screen Competition aims to bridge the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema and support the distribution of nominated films in the Netherlands.
The NETPAC Award went to Vasha Bharath’s Bad Girl, a Tamil-language coming-of-age comedy, while the Youth Jury Award went to The Visual Feminist Manifesto, directed by Farida Baqi, which follows a young woman from birth to adulthood in an unnamed Arab city.