26/01/2017 - Cineuropa caught up with the director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Bero Beyer, to talk about the 46th edition of the gathering (25 January-5 February)

Independent Dutch producer Bero Beyer was appointed general and artistic director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in May 2015, and the upcoming edition is the second under his auspices. He talked to Cineuropa about the novelties and the festival’s commitment to new technology. 

Cineuropa: Last year, we talked about the changes that lay ahead for the IFFR (read the interview). What would you say are the major tweaks for the 46^th edition?
Bero Beyer: There were a couple of things we were very happy about starting last year and that we will be cementing into the line-up this year. The major tweak this year concerns the way we treat our themed programmes. Today, images and filmmakers affect how we view the world. We had several themed programmes last year, but they were scattered over the four sections. So we thought, “Let’s bundle them together and put them into the Perspectives section.” Deep Focus is the most cinephile-orientated section because we look at history; we will present a full retrospective of Jan Němec, but also one of visual artist Joost Rekveld, and the element I really like is that we have a line-up of films with the latest works by Albert Serra and Ulrich Seidl, and these are very specific auteurs grouped together. We have the Tiger Competition in Bright Future, which is the main competitive element. But the Big Screen Competition in Voices also boasts a fantastic line-up, and we are continuing with the idea that we started last year, saying that these are the kinds of films you can expect in Bright Future and Voices in the future, and you can be more outspoken in those areas. I think it is true for both competitions, which are becoming more tangible and consistent in their line-ups than before.

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Are there any add-ons in other areas of the IFFR?
This year, we are able to present many more master classes and debates that put films and filmmakers into perspective. Auteurs like Olivier Assayas, Béla Tarr and Barry Jenkins will be speaking about their films as part of the social environment that we live in. We can really bring an additional context to those films, basically. I am very happy how this is shaping up because there should always be a combination: having the festival celebrate the newest and most recent filmmakers should always be paired with what people have been doing for the last ten years, and these are the careers we can all learn from.

The upcoming edition will introduce the Propellor Film Tech Hub. Why did you decide to expand the IFFR’s industry side?
We thought it was just as important to look at the challenges of the film industry as such. We can already see that the world looks very different on the tech level than it did one year ago, yet in many respects, the film industry is slow and steady, and tries to be as conservative as it can. We thought it would be a cool idea to open up the doors and explore other strategies, to look at what other industries are using – the start-up industry, the gaming industry, the design industry, the music industry, the telecom industry – and maybe we can rediscover a way of establishing healthy networks and infrastructure for the kind of independent works we want to keep celebrating. And it was no surprise that the European Film Market was thinking along the same lines: they were aware of the fact that the concept of the film market they have in Berlin should always be at the forefront of innovation. CPH:DOX is the same, as is the Cinemathon initiative, which were trying to use accelerator- and incubator-like structures to come up with new ideas for cinema. We said to ourselves that we should be thinking about this together because it is affecting all of us. We should open up the doors and collaborate more, think more out of the box to give voice to new ideas and even test them out. And this is what Propellor is – trying to innovate in the film business. 

The IFFR and VR Days formed a partnership for VR Days Europe last November. Will VR be assimilated into the IFFR programme?
Over the last two years, VR has been mostly preoccupied with getting the tech right and trying to show us on a spectacle level what it could potentially do. But we have been thinking how this would actually work in a cinematic setting. And regarding the cinematic experience for the audience, we are only at the beginning. That’s why we have reached out to VR Days and opened a call for VR projects that will be presented and pitched at CineMart to see how we can really move on beyond just the tech. So we are putting more emphasis on it, sure, but we are not being hasty just to show something. Let’s begin what could potentially be some good projects. That’s how we started working with VR Days: we are hosting a couple of projects at CineMart now, and we will take it from there.