The first film I watched this year at Rotterdam was made on a budget of six dollars. Gary P. Cohen’s Video Violence, shot on a VHS camcorder in 1987—with the tagline “When Renting Is Not Enough”—follows a new arrival in a small New Jersey town working as a video clerk. However, when customers begin returning unlabeled tapes in the drop box, he learns that the locals are also intrepid suburban auteurs . . . of snuff films!!!
As part of “Hold Video in Your Hands,” a special program devoted to the lost art of VHS renting and moviemaking at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Cohen’s delightful video nasty harks back to an era when Fangoria magazine ruled the supermarket magazine rack. Viewing it in 2025 makes it easier to place within a tradition of American video folk art that would also have to include such brazen experiments as the 2009–10 Ikea Heights Web series and George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries, 1986–2011. Video Violence’s Rotterdam screening was perfectly preceded by the world premiere of Melody Electronics, 2024, Albert Birney’s short that charmingly and convincingly imagines a primitive ’80s computer game showcasing the consumer electronics in the apartment of a sweet single middle-aged woman named Melody, who can’t wait to introduce you to them. A darling dirge for the delightful days of the pre-digital!
On the other side of the spectrum, you have film that aspires to the condition of poetry. That Yasuko, Songs of Days Past, 2025, happens to be a work about a poet—Nakahara Chuya, who died at the age of thirty in 1937 and is regarded as Japan’s Rimbaud—gets us there in the literal sense. However, it is the film’s sensual qualities—its lush lighting and painterly cinematography, which only serve to heighten the story of Chuya’s dramatic ménage à trois with an actress and literary critic, all of whom dwell on the edge of madness—that endow it with a lyricality that would provoke the envy of many cineastes.
A more subversive take on the biopic genre is Albert Oehlen’s Bad Painter, 2025, in which the great Udo Kier plays an outrageous exaggeration of the German neo-expressionist, with Kim Gordon cameoing as his inner conscience. “I don’t have a story to tell,” said Oehlen after the film’s premiere in a Q&A. “I don’t even like stories.” Instead, in following the completely erratic (and completely made-up) peregrinations of Oehlen’s fictional self through the Los Angeles art world as he struggles to complete his latest painting, what the artist arrives at is his own messy form of cinematic poetry—so bad, it’s good.
Poetry, of course, does not universally subsist on the ideal, but oftentimes takes for its subject the gritty and absurd stuff of life. In La gran historia de la filosofía occidental (The Great History of Western Philosophy), 2025, Aria Covamonas revives the art of Dada through a digitally photomontaged anti-narrative, featuring the likes of Mao Zedong and Friedrich Nietzsche spouting deliberately incorrect subtitled dialogue from pre–Cultural Revolution era Chinese films. Covamonas, who is self-taught, has a style all their own: witty, hilarious, gleefully nonsensical; you can always tell a director is way ahead of their time when half the audience walks out of a morning press screening.
One often encounters these endearing surprises at IFFR, whose programming veers on the adventurous—films that require massive cojones to program—while showcasing auteur cinema from the previous year that maybe didn’t get the chance to shine in a way that it truly deserved. What was most unexpected, however, was the avalanche of sunshine illuminating the festival, as we veterans had grown accustomed to the dark gray skies that normally accompany this time of year in the frigid swamp-like climes of the Netherlands. It made the inherent darkness of statements like Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, 2024—which takes place on a movie set on the eve of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan—all the blacker, casting intrepid cinemagoers into an emotional chiaroscuro as we made our way into and out of the city’s screening rooms. Throughout his career, Lou’s freedom to work has been constantly curtailed by Chinese authorities through various filmmaking bans, which he has obstinately circumvented, bringing us myriad classics in the process. An Unfinished Film adds to this canon, unflinchingly depicting the brutal anti-humanistic means through which the lockdowns were carried out by Xi Jinping’s government. Among those of us who were living in China when these PTSD-inducing events took place, there wasn’t a dry eye in the cinema; it was probably, for most of us, a bit too soon.
Speaking of cojones, I would be remiss to neglect mention of Albert Serra’s portrait of Peruvian toreador Andrés Roca Rey, whose family jewels are complimented by his colleagues throughout the 125-minute Tardes de soledad (Afternoons of Solitude), 2024. Like many burdened with a conscience, I wanted to hate this film for what I knew would be its glorifying stance on bullfighting—but, then again, it is Serra, an artist for whom I have immense respect, even if I’m unable to love every single one of his films. In the end, while it didn’t stanch the revulsion I hold for this cruel bloodsport, I was left with a grudging admiration for the artistry of Roca Rey, who, in addition to his own huge cojones, both figurative and literal (after all, it takes guts to build an entire career over a face-to-face confrontation with the overwhelming possibility of death), is also quite hot. I’ve no idea if Serra meant to highlight his astonishing beauty—I’m guessing not—but the film is intensely homoerotic; it left many of us longing to see the full package!
The sex-and-death drive is, of course, the overriding theme of Alain Guiraudie’s work, its depths plumbed most famously in 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. His latest, Miséricorde, 2024, has all the necessary elements: a small village, the return of a native son devoid of any real aspirations, a murder, and a gay priest. To say much else would spoil it; suffice it to say that the plot is almost unbelievable, and that it’s Guiraudie’s prowess as a storyteller that persuades us to go along with it all the way.
If this year’s edition of the festival had to be reduced to a single highlight, it would inarguably be the nearly ten-hour marathon viewing of the entirety of Wang Bing’s 2023–24 Youth trilogy. Shot between 2015 and 2019 and interwoven with episodes from the lives of young migrant workers in Zhili, a city that specializes in the manufacture of clothing for the domestic market, Wang continues his mission (begun in 2002 with Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks) of showing the real China, invisible not only to foreigners but often to the educated Chinese elites inhabiting the top-tier cities. Most of the protagonists are in their teens—some as young as fifteen—and early twenties, and all of them come from impoverished rural provinces, with next to no possibility of social advancement. The work is tedious and difficult and they live on-site in squalid dormitories. What is most surprising, however, are the moments of joy, playfulness, and love that emerge as they construct their lives out of the rough materials to which they’ve been consigned. At the same time, they’re almost constantly at battle with bosses over pay rates—the cigarette-smoke-filled negotiations in cramped, fluorescent-lit offices are often drawn out over agonizing hours, even days. In one dramatic episode encompassing a good chunk of the 227-minute second part, Youth (Hard Times), 2024, the boss of one workshop goes on the run after beating up a creditor, leaving the workers without pay and forcing them to sell off the factory equipment to regain some of their lost salaries.
Following the screening—which took up an entire afternoon and night with two twenty-minute breaks—it’s telling that the audience not only remained for the duration of the subsequent half-hour Q&A with Wang, but that it continued outside on the street after the cinema finally kicked us out, close to midnight. Moments like these make one aware of the magic and necessity of festivals like Rotterdam that give often overlooked filmmakers such as Wang the rock star welcome and accolades that they truly deserve. While I’m as allergic to superlatives as the next critic, it would also be irresponsible of me not to call Wang what he is, which is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. There’s simply nobody else making work like this today, and the Youth trilogy may well be his masterpiece.
