ROTTERDAMAGE.

Due to the combination of snagging cheap flight tix last year, the increasingly dismal state of film distribution/exhibition in Sydney, and likely some other personal factors that warrant a longer post, I'm going to be at the Rotterdam Film Festival for the next 10 days. Despite the fest's nearly-uncontested rep as the most adventurous major film festival in the world, I have my worries; namely that an onslaught of wan, opportunistic pseudo-contemplative amateur-hours will dominate the new films, that Michelle Carey'll end up snagging the good stuff for MIFF anyway, that I'll catch a cold, that I'll blow all my money on records and booze and overpriced fast food, etc etc. That's of course just the worst case scenario, to have in my head like a mantra so that I'll be pleasantly surprised.

My tentative schedule is here. The films I'm most anticipating based on pedigree/reviews are The Return (Nathaniel Dorsky), Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers), Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz), small roads (James Benning), Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo), The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev). Among those I'm most intrigued about based on the program descriptions are:

Shock Head Soul: A mixture of documentary and fiction film about Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote a famous autobiography about his psychiatric past, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903). Pummel interlaced book fragments with animation and interviews with modern psychoanalysts to produce a cinematic approximation of a psychosis.

Dernière séance: The lonely, taciturn Sylvain is a projectionist in an old local cinema. The place has to close because it doesn’t get enough customers, but the film lover Sylvain doggedly keeps screening films. At night he has a very different, macabre obsession. A cinematic thriller that plays with the conventions of the genre.

Anna: In the early 1970s, two Italian filmmakers met pregnant, 16-year-old Anna, a junky, on the Piazza Navone in Rome. One of them took her under his wing, partly out of pity, partly due to opportunism - thinking ‘there’s a great film in this’. They film her slow recovery from feral homeless person to human being, initially using a film camera and later on video - which, at the time, was a novelty. Alberto Grifi turned the 11 hours of material shot by the duo into a four-hour film and transferred the video onto 16mm film.

The Empire of Desire/Sensual Anarchy: the first Brazilian film to be designated by the loosening military censors as 'pornographic spectacle' and released in cinemas freely as such, setting an important precedent for 1980s Brazilian film culture. Originally programmed by Hubert Bals for the IFFR in the mid-1980s, the film never showed up due to various complications. Unavailable and nearly forgotten for 30 years, the festival presents Sensual Anarchy in a brand new 35mm print.

Eight Deadly Shots: The real-life story on which the film is informally based happened in 1969. In a moment of sheer hopelessness, a certain Tauno Veikko Pasanen shoots four police officers. Tauno is called Pasi here and played by scenario-writer Niskanen himself. Pasi ekes out a meagre living for himself and his family. Times grow increasingly harder. One thing slowly leads to another. In the end, there's blood. A raw, grim, uncompromising, unrelenting, unforgiving and non-consoling masterpiece which will be shown in its five-hour-plus original version. A very, very rare opportunity!

Reviews, of at least a few of them, will follow. If there's anything you're particularly keen to hear thoughts on, just ask and I'll make note of it.