Founded and hosted by Torsten Neumann, with support from his Canadian screen star partner Deborah Kara Unger and a team of eager volunteers, Oldenburg is one of the last film festivals still carrying a torch for independent cinema as a punky, pulpy, slightly transgressive artform. This creates a program that is often variable in quality, but refreshingly different from more mainstream movie gatherings, where tastefully middlebrow understatement and earnest awards fodder dominate.

Vandewattyne is an Oldenburg veteran, and a good fit for the festival’s anarchic, genre-friendly agenda. His ear-bashing rock performance took place at the aftershow party to the world premiere of his latest feature, The Belgian Wave, a riotous assault on the senses that turns a rash of real-life UFO sightings into a blood-spurting, mind-bending, acid-punk roller-coaster ride. A classic cult movie, in other words. At the festival’s closing ceremony, it won the “audacity” prize, which is a very Oldenburg concept. Cinema needs more audacity.

On the surface, Oldenburg is a boutique-sized festival with a cosy village atmosphere. It has always been a local platform for emerging German screen talent, but it also has a broader international outlook, with strong work from Turkey, Brazil, Ireland, Jordan, Canada, Japan and others in the program this year, plus various multi-lateral co-productions. Indeed, the festival’s main prize went to German-Kurdish director Ayse Polat’s Im Toten Winkel (In the Blind Spot), a gripping paranoid mystery thriller set in a remote Kurdish region of Turkey.

By coincidence, first-time male film-makers tackling sensitive stories about the kidnap and assault of young women also featured prominently in Oldenburg this year. From the US, low-budget writer-director Truman Kewley’s Beautiful Friend, about an unhinged incel who abducts a young woman to be his soulmate, offered a haunting low-budget riff on this theme. Its female lead, Alexandrea Meyer, won one of the festival’s two main acting awards. Meanwhile Japanese director Takayuki Hayashi’s From Dawn Till Noon On The Sea examines the aftermath of a similar kidnap scenario on a damaged schoolgirl. Hayashi won Oldenburg’s prize for best debut.

French cinema was a strong presence in Oldenburg this year too, with some off-beat gems from Cannes and Annecy festivals screening alongside world premieres and left-field discoveries. An early highlight was French-Moroccan film-maker Mona Achache’s highly personal docu-fiction memoir Little Girl Blue, a meditation on the lives of female artists as viewed through the lens of the director’s mother Carole, who took her own life at 63, with Marion Cotillard playing Carole in flashback scenes. Alongside Michel Gondry’s quirky autobiographical comedy The Book of Solutions and Jérôme Perin’s prize-winning dystopian sci-fi animation Mars Express, Parisian actor-director Isild le Besco was in Oldenburg to present a retrospective of her films, including the premiere of her latest, the powerful lockdown-themed domestic violence drama Confinés.

It may have been awash with micro-budget indie movies shot on basic lo-fi equipment, but Oldenburg’s 30th anniversary edition also looked to the high-tech future of cinema with a sidebar event taking place in the metaverse. In collaboration with the MILC Metaverse, an interactive digital replica of the town centre was created online, with a grand theatre venue hosting trailers and other material from the festival. Users could also visit a virtual art gallery to see an exhibition of works by the late Hans Ohlms, a graphic artist with local connections. Although this technology is clearly still in its infancy, it made sense for Oldenburg to keep breaking new ground like this, pushing against the conventions of traditional film festivals. Rules, after all, are for dogs.

German Independence Award – Audacity Award
The Belgian Wave
Directed by Jérôme Vandewattyne

German Independence Award – Best Short Film
When Grass Grows
Directed by Maria Monreal

Special Mention
Our Males and Females
Directed by Ahmad Alyaseer

Seymour Cassel Acting Awards
Best Actress
Alexandrea Meyer
for Beautiful Friend

Best Actor
Jon Jacobs
for Passenger C

Hans Ohlms Prize for Best First Film
From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea
Directed by Takayuki Hayashi

Daniel (Adam Jones) is an “incel”, an involuntary celibate whose loneliness and sexual frustration has curdled into a festering,  self-pitying, all-consuming obsession. He has come to bitterly resent women for not giving him the attention he craves. “I am a good man, I am a strong man,” he assures himself in the hypnotic, chillingly calm voice-over that runs through Beautiful Friend like music. “All I want is what everybody else has.” No screen narration has sounded this soothingly sinister since HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

With a triumphant tone, Daniel announces he has finally come up with a world-shaking master plan to fix his problems with the opposite sex. Alarmingly, it involves stalking women on the street with the aim of kidnap, imprisonment and worse. After a series of failed approaches, which look like discreetly filmed documentary-style encounters with real women, he forcefully abducts Madison (Alexandrea Meyer), locking her into his specially adapted van and driving her out to a remote desert location. The self-deluding Daniel talks about his captive in terms of blossoming romance, but coercive sex is his real goal, at least initially. A jarringly bleak rape scene, shot with Meyer staring blankly out at the viewer, invites uncomfortable questions about audience complicity.

It soon transpires that Daniel once attended film school and has worked on movie sets, which has given him a kind of directorial detachment towards his crimes. Like the voyeuristic serial killer in Peeping Tom (1960), he distances himself from his abusive actions though a camera lens. He films Madison constantly, even adding her name to the screen as an acting credit. The POV pulls back to become a film within a film in places, as if Daniel is editing and shaping this entire narrative in post-production. Quick-fire single-word captions also appear on screen fleetingly, deepening the sense that we are watching one man’s fragile psyche filtered through the visual grammar of experimental art-house movies.

Besides working as a straight abduction thriller, Beautiful Friend could be read as grimly funny satire on power relations in cinema, which has been dominated by the leering, controlling male gaze for most of the last century. Director Daniel certainly needs leading lady Madison to play her pre-ordained role, not as his terrified kidnap victim but as his fantasy screen sweetheart. “She’s starting to understand,” he tells himself approvingly. “She’s going to love me.” As soon as she veers off script, he becomes an enraged, whining, narcissistic man-baby again. There are a millions of real Daniels out there, and not just in the film industry.

After leaving the desert and returning to Los Angeles, Daniel moves Madison into his house, chaining her up in the bedroom. Their relationship slowly settles into a grotesque parody of conventional suburban couples, with her dutifully perforrming her assigned girlfriend role on the surface while quietly making escape plans. The film’s weak point is its fuzzy ending, which feels like an indecisive cop-out, though it still leaves a tangibly creepy aftertaste. Impressively, Kewley also wears multiple hats as his own editor and cinematographer here, framing Beautiful Friend with a starkly geometric eye, like some kind of evil low-budget Wes Anderson.

Full disclosure here: the writer-director of Beautiful Friend is the son of a senior staff member at The Film Verdict, a connection that this reviewer only discovered after watching the film. This has not coloured the review at all, which was already short-listed for our Oldenburg festival coverage based on its stand-alone merits.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing: Truman Kewley
Cast: Adam Jones, Alexandrea Meyer
Producer: Ron Huang
Production company: Fiction Park (Germany)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Independent)
In English
80 minutes

A person in Norway was rejected for support with their utility bills and advised by the social services to avail themselves of a barbeque grill on a freecycle website to avoid needing to use electricity to cook. Aksnes takes this premise as the catalyst for her pointed critique by following the efforts of a person living on the breadline to follow that unsympathetic recommendation. The result is a film that expertly conveys the anxiety of navigating the modern world when there is no money in your bank account and takes that situation to drastic extremes.

The crux of the film rests with its lead actress, Birgitte Larsen, who plays Tara. With no money at all available to her, even travelling to collect a free grill is an ordeal – she cannot pay for the bus, so needs to sneak on through the rear doors. Larsen is brilliant at translating the unease that Tara feels throughout the whole film, flitting eyes communicating apprehension and the obvious roiling of a brain desperately trying to determine a way out of her current predicament. This becomes all the more excruciating when she arrives to collect the grill only to find that it is not, after all, free and that the current owner has ordered her a taxi in which she can transport it home. Even after she convinces the taxi driver to flee the scene while the man’s back is turned, she must still wrestle with the fact that she can’t afford the fare.

For anyone who has ever crossed their fingers hoping that a card payment will not be declined, or that a cashpoint will submit to their meagre withdrawal request, the dramatic tension of this film will feel painfully familiar. Stephen St. Peter’s cinematography often muddies the frame with body parts, creating a substantial sense of claustrophobia in the image, emphasising the sense of a cage closing in around Tara. A pirouette of plot twists in the final moments doesn’t do anything to negate the helplessness of the situation, if anything making more palpable the grotesqueness of how the richest countries treat their poorest citizens.

Director, screenplay: Jade Hærem Aksnes
Cast: Birgitte Larsen, Issaka Sawadogo, Frode Winther
Producer: Siv Aksnes, Niels Peter Hærem
Cinematography: Stephen St. Peter
Production design: Fredrik Sivertsen
Sound: Gisle Tveito, Tom Erik Lie
Production companies: Zarepta Film Production (Norway)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In Norwegian
18 minutes

It soon becomes evident that this is the only recording the boy has access to of his mother’s voice, so he re-dials her number and listens again. Understandably, the boy misses his recently deceased mother and finds the thought of letting the final vestiges of her fade away too much to bear. Liel Simon’s short takes the framework and aspects of the coming-of-age film but channels them into a piece concerned with grief and acceptance. This handsomely mounted drama is about the process of mourning and what it means to remember.

These lessons are imparted by a wanderer who is navigating his own sorrow. The boy follows his father into town with the express purpose of liberating a box of his mother’s belongings from a thrift store. While doing so, he drops her favourite hat, and it is purchased by the stranger, who watched the heist take place. The boy follows him to his outdoor dwelling in the desert, and the two strike up an unlikely rapport, seemingly informed by a loss that colours the wanderer’s own life.

The desert acts as more than merely a backdrop to their burgeoning friendship, instead becoming something of an allegorical lesson through which the man can help the boy process the impacts of his sorrow. The film channels the deep history of the South Israeli desert, and its early days submerged at the bottom of a great ocean, to reflect on the way that the past shapes the present. The grandeur of the rugged landscape is attributed to the effects of the sea, and this residual link provides a chord with which those who have come before can still be tethered to us. Through their brief association, the man gives the boy an invaluable tool to remain connected to his mother on a level far beyond clinging to a battered box of belongings.

Director, screenplay, editing: Liel Simon
Cast: Gilad Gregori Oks, Yehuda Nahari Halevi, Zeev Ariel
Producer: Tamir Gal
Cinematography: Yossi Olech
Costume & set design: Olga Podster
Music: Adam Weingrod
Sound: Keren Or Briton
Production companies: Liel Simon / Ranshlink LTD (Israel), DFFB (Germany)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In Hebrew
22 minutes

Victor Clavijo gives a persuasively haunted but fairly one-note lead performance as Eladio, a soul-weary family man recruited by wealthy land baron Don Francisco (Manuel Morón) to manage his hunting estate in the dusty hinterlands of Andalusia. Eladio’s austere life on a remote farmstead with his scowlingly miserable wife Marcia (Ruth Díaz) and ominously innocent son Floren (Moisés Ruiz) has a hard-scrabble frontier feel, underscoring the director’s neo-western intentions. But when faced with a Faustian pact to boost his wages by accommodating extra hunting parties on the land, pushing the numbers beyond safe limits, he initially refuses on ethical grounds. As it turns out, he really has no choice in the matter, so he grudgingly pockets the money in return for turning a blind eye.

Inevitably, cruel fate soon pays Eladio back for this transgression with a series of devastating family tragedies that leave him wounded, widowed and alone. After a bloody showdown with the crooked middle-man he blames for his horrific misfortunes, he becomes a boozy recluse on the ranch, assailed nightly by suicidal thoughts and feverish visions. Bit beyond all these creepy jump-scare nightmares, the land itself begins throwing up cryptic clues, apparently directing Eladio towards some shock realisation: work contracts, scraps of clothing, dead birds, a demonic-looking goat’s skull. Piecing these unholy relics together, he begins to sense sinister, possibly Satanic forces at work.

After all these teasing hints and suspenseful swerves, The Wait fails to live up to its moody, malevolent early promise. Thematically, Gutiérrez appears to be steering viewers towards the very real horrors of Catholic guilt, the sunset years of Franco’s fascist dictatorship, and the macho matador bloodlust that underscores Spain’s savage hunting culture. These are certainly the kind of broader social currents that Guillermo Del Toro might have addressed.

And yet Gutiérrez seems to lose his nerve in the closing act, trying out a range of film noir and horror tropes without settling on a single clear, confident direction. One especially bizarre interlude plays like a superfluous homage to An American Werewolf in London (1981), even though lycanthropy plays no part in the actual plot. The revelatory pay-off, when it finally comes, is an oddly flat paranormal twist that favours sensation over explanation. This is a disappointing resolution to an otherwise well-crafted and atmospheric thriller, which nevertheless remains enjoyable as a mildly gripping spine-tingler with solid technical credits. A noteworthy factor here is Miguel Ángel Mora’s sun-bronzed widescreen cinematography, transforming the parched Andalusian landscape into a kind of grubby, fly-blown, Old Testament purgatory.

Director, screenwriter, editing: F. Javier Gutiérrez
Cast: Victor Clavijo, Ruth Díaz, Moisés Ruiz, Luis Callejo, Manuel Morón
Producers: Adrián Guerra, F. Javier Gutiérrez, Antonio P. Pérez
Cinematography: Miguel Ángel Mora
Music: Zeltia Montes
Production companies: Canal Sur Televisión (Spain), Junta de Andalucía (Spain), Nostromo Pictures (Spain), Spal Films S.L. (SPain), Unfiled Films (Spain)
Sales: Film Factory Entertainment (Spain)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Independent)
In Spanish
98 minutes

Part-time rock musician Vandewattyne was last in Oldenburg to premiere his debut feature Spit’N’Split (2017), a band-on-tour mockumentary which morphs into a gonzo horror bloodbath midway through. The Belgian Wave feels bigger and more ambitious, boasting high-gloss visuals and slick production design elements that defy its reportedly modest budget of 300,000 Euros. Peppered with knowingly retro homages to the scratchy VHS look and saturated neon palette of vintage 1980s and 1990s cult cinema, this delirious Midnight Movie is plainly not pitched at fans of tastefully restrained art-house fare. Even so, it is made with more polish and wit than its pulpy surface aesthetic might suggest, and is way too inventively weird to ever become boring. Genre-friendly festivals and psychotronic movie connoisseurs should take an interest.

The stranger-than-fiction back story to The Belgian Wave is a rash of real-life UFO sightings that occurred in eastern Belgium between late 1989 and early 1990. Soon after two military F-16 jets were scrambled to investigate unexplained radar anomalies, around 140 people claimed to have witnessed a triangular alien aircraft in the skies, with hundreds more sharing similar accounts for months afterwards. A series of official reports and media investigations proved inconclusive, but mostly blamed this bizarre phenomenon on normal air traffic, extreme weather events and even mass psychosis. The emergence of hoax photos did not dampen conspiracies of a government cover-up. Vandewattyne includes real archive news footage of these events in his patchwork narrative, alongside fake media reports shot with a similar vintage video look, blurring the line between historical fact and playful fabrication.

The Belgian Wave signals its mischeivous truth-bending intentions right from the start with an opening quote from rock icon Jim Morrison about favouring fantasy over reality. The action begins on the floor of a giant techno club, where an odd couple of drug-crazed party animals, Elzo (Karim Barass) and Karen (Karen de Paduwa), meet to discuss newly released UFO footage. They agree to open the cold case of Elzo’s missing godfather Marc (Dominique Rongveaux), a TV journalist who mysteriously vanished decades ago while investigating the 1990 sightings.

Driving a pimped-up former hearse repainted in sparkly purple (possibly a winking homage to the Ghostbusters films) the duo’s wild road trip leads them to series of close encounters with a colourful cast of oddballs, clowns and creeps. Chief among these is a sinister mask-wearing cult who perform an orgiastic dance ritual that plays like a deliciously weird mash-up of Alien (1979) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Along the way the duo also uncover a haul of Marc’s previously unseen video reportage, which lends The Belgian Wave a found-footage horror dimension with vaguely David Lynch-ian undertones. They also take a random detour to Ecuador, where the mystery is partially resolved in a time-collapsing, mind-bending drug hallucination.

Confused yet? Do not worry, nothing in this WTF carnival of lysergic excess makes much logical sense on a literal level. Vandewattyne’s forte is not docu-drama realism, but he does have a flair for absurdist comedy, luridly inventive visuals, super-fast cross-cutting edits and densely detailed sound design. This means The Belgian Wave manages to remain a frequently hilarious and consistently engaging feast for the senses, despite being an incoherent and overloaded mess in places. Crucially, it is also photographed with great stylistic brio by Jean-Francois Awad, whose superbly orchestrated drone shots soar high across cityscapes, dance around techno clubs and swoop over giant dams. A throbbing analogue electro-rock score by Belgian composer Yannick Franck, aka Raum, is another pleasingly retro touch.

Director: Jérôme Vandewattyne
Screenwriters: Jérôme Vandewattyne, Jérôme Di Egidio, Kamal Massaoudi
Cast: Karen de Paduwa, Karim Barass, Dominique Rongveaux, Vincent Tavier
Cinematography: Jean-Francois Awad
Editing: Ayrton Heymans
Producers: Rose Quenon, Gregory Zalcman
Music: Yannick Franck
Production company: Take Five (Belgium)
World sales: Reel Suspects (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Midnite Xpress)
In French
90 minutes

In the cramped, grimy bedroom of a family home, nine-year-old Jean (Jean Costa) has been allotted the top bunk of a bed, while his ailing grandfather Firmino (Bendito Alves) sees out his last days below. The old man is at a stage of physical breakdown where his bodily fluids are hard to contain, his mobility is severely limited by the large oxygen canister he has to lug around, and any zest for existence he once had has dissipated. Jean’s parents Irene (Maeve Jinkings) and Jairo (Romulo Braga) struggle to keep the family afloat, but times are tough, and the money they earn producing charcoal from the furnace of a small factory is scarcely enough.

Submitting to God’s will is the only guidance the Church can offer. The family rejects it in favour of taking fate into their own hands, when Juracy (Aline Marta), a new nurse, proposes a shady deal. If they agree to euthanise Firmino, then his freed-up spot in the bedroom can be usurped by an Argentinian drug-lord, Miguel (Cesar Bordon), who has paid to have his own death staged and needs a place to hide out while the attention dies down. A fake bullet-hole is painted on the kingpin’s forehead and a bloody swimming-pool crime scene photographed, in a scene of surreal absurdity that exemplifies the cynicism and gallows humour of this satire. The film hits on just the right shade of bizarre, and deftly shy of bad taste, to bring a wicked sense of fun and an impudent defiance to suffering, where there would otherwise be bleakness.

Reluctantly locked away in the room, but increasingly angsty as the drug stash he’s squirreled away to feed his cocaine habit runs low, Miguel is a wildcard that shifts the power dynamics between all the members of the household in unexpected ways. Jairo, the self-declared head of the home, feels threatened by this new macho, overbearing presence, but he’s not contented to stay inside the four walls anyway, nipping out to the bar to get liquored up, or for trysts with fellow local and family friend Sergio, with whom he’s having an ongoing homosexual affair. Starved for attention by her flaky partner, and yearning for any thrill beyond the daily drudgery of holding the family together, Irene, a one-time pageant winner, eyes the new dweller through a rosy tint of romantic possibility, and heads to the salon to get her hair coloured. Jinkings, a familiar face from Brazilian arthouse festival big-hitters such as Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds (2013) and Aquarius (2016), anchors the film with her strong presence, playing Irene as world-weary but resourceful, and not ready to give up on the spark of more fulfilling times to come. A wily observer beyond his years, Jean sees more of a role model in charismatic tough guy Miguel, who has no qualms about priming the kid for a future criminal life.

In this small town, where it’s hard to keep any secret for long, or newfound financial solvency under wraps from prying neighbours, the days of the family’s outlandish scheme are numbered. D.O.P Pepe Mendes balances a colour palate between dingy browns and strong splashes of colour, which works well for a film of both grubby realities and baroque, pipe-dream ventures.

Director, Writer: Carolina Markowicz
Editor: Lautaro Colache
Cinematography: Pepe Mendes
Cast:  Maeve Jinkings, Cesar Bordon, Jean Costa, Romulo Braga, Camila Mardila, Pedro Wagner, Aline Marta
Producers: Zita Carvalhosa, Karen Castanho, Alejandro Israel
Production Designers: Marines Mencio, Natalia Krieger
Sound: Diego Martinez, Filipe Derado
Original Score: Alejandro Kauderer
Production companies: Superfilmes (Brazil), Bionica Filmes (Brazil), Ajimolido Films (Argentina)
Sales: Urban Sales
Venue: Oldenburg
In Portuguese, Spanish
107 minutes

Ahmad Alyaseer’s film tells the story of a young transgender woman over whose body her two confused parents grieve. Unable to accept the gender reassignment that she was undergoing while living abroad, they find themselves unable to clean her body and that neither male nor female washers are willing to aid them. It’s a moment of perfect dramatic tension, that makes it ideal for a succinct short film that is limited in scale, but far more significant in scope of its emotional resonance.

The quandary they face is evident straightway as the father (Kamel El Basha) and mother (Shafeqa Al-Tal) keep referring to their “son” and “him.” It’s unclear whether they were completely unaware of the struggle their transgender daughter had been through – she was living abroad – or just found it unconscionable, but they certainly can’t accept it now. As they try to prepare her body for cleansing and shrouding before burial, they are incapable of even looking at her. They try first to bring a male cleanser in, but he decries them – the subsequent female washer shrieks that they have brought shame on their country.

The heart of the tension lies less in who will clean the body and more in when and if either of the parents will come to any form of acceptance and tolerance towards what they are struggling to comprehend. As it becomes clear that both father and mother do come to a form decision – but in polar opposite directions – Alyaseer lands a perfect crescendo of affecting drama that is at once an ecstatic release and brutally shocking. Our Males and Females clearly functions as a challenge to conservative perspectives, particularly in the Arab region, but it is also a work of resounding emotion that reverberates well beyond the confines of its own microcosmic scenario.

Director: Ahmad Alyaseer
Cast: Kamel El Basha, Shafeqa Al-Tal, Moataz Allabadi, Sana Saleh
Screenplay: Ahmad Alyaseer, Rana Alyaseer
Producers: Mais Salman, Ahmad Alyaseer
Cinematography: Samer Nimri
Editing: Abdallah Sada
Music: Philip Hashweh
Sound: Israel Banuelos
Production companies: Alyaseer Productions, Where To Film (Jordan)
Distribution: Ouat Media
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In Arabic
11 minutes

Following the fortunes of three young people in a coastal town in Japan, it is a quite earnest example of the familiar genre of high-school dramas at which the country’s filmmakers excel. Adapted from an episode in Shun Umezawa’s manga anthology One and Ninety-Nine, Hayashi’s film is an exploration of detachment, using the kidnapping of a schoolgirl as a nexus around which different forms of dislocation and isolation coalesce. Receiving its world premiere at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival, it is a patient film that rewards the same characteristic in its viewers.

This is perhaps evident from the outset, when – having opened with a biblical reference to lost sheep – its first scene is a single static take that watches Mai (Hanon) walk into a dark underpass at an excruciatingly slow pace for almost three minutes. Given the audience’s familiarity with the premise, it is not a sequence lacking in dramatic tension, but it also foreshadows both the wide framing that will come to characterise Hiroshi Yasuoka’s lensing and the deliberate cadence with which it conveys its story.

That story is about Mai’s incarceration for 49 days by an unknown abductor in his 20s – as a radio broadcast informs us – and her return to school, where she is mostly shunned by classmates after her experience. The only fellow student who deigns to speak to her upon her arrival is the misfit Ujie (Yu Uemura), who treats her as coarsely as he treats everyone else – a young man having a difficult time who is both bullied and lashes out in equal measure. Flashbacks to Mai’s time in captivity, where she remains in the cramped rooms of her unnamed imprisoner (Kaito Yoshimura). In both of these narratives, Mai plays an unusual role – almost like some kind of hollowed revenant that draws their attention to their painful solipsism and self-destruction. “You think you’re Mother Teresa?” Ujie rages at her after an unexpected act of kindness and intimacy, but it’s not that, she replies. Mai seems to be suffering from her own deeply felt remoteness, and these two strange relationships are perhaps attempts to shake herself and them out of their dissatisfaction.

It means that Hanon perhaps doesn’t have much to do in the lead role, as a character that is often fairly inert. “Wherever I am, it’s the same,” she tells her captor, “so I couldn’t care less.” He had tried to release her after just three days, but she chose to stay. He begins the film waxing lyrical about the horrible state of existence, but upon being confronted with Mai’s ennui, he begins to chide her doleful naivety and advocates a long life, well lived. She has a similar effect on Ujie. As a result, Hanon’s performance lives mostly in her physicality – often depicted in wide shots, insulated from those around her and defined by a slightly awkward rigidity.

She also comes alive in the odd furtive glance, that gives away a little of the interior life she otherwise tries to hide, and her reactions to two failed attempts at sexual intercourse are muted but telling about her desperation for some connection. One of these is with Ujie, who is far more animated in his portrayal by Uemura, but no less forthcoming. The exact nature of the “rough” times he’s having isn’t completely divulged – though he’s beaten up badly at one point and threatened with the same at another – but his response to them is far more openly hostile. He is charismatic, but with a manic edge that is tinged by the traditions of Japanese theatrical acting. It makes a stark counterpoint to Hanon, but they are well-balanced against one another.

Balance feels like a recurring motif – or at least the action of opposing forces against one another. Whether that’s a surprised Ujie being stopped from exploding in anger by a hug from Mai, or a perhaps debatable ethical point made by Mai about saving a life cancelling out the taking of one. Despite the darkness of its premise and the weightiness of its themes, From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea finds a great deal of warmth and wisdom in its tides of despair and undercurrents of hope.

Director, screenplay: Takayuki Hayashi
Cast: Hanon, Yu Uemura Kaito Yoshimura
Producers: Fumikazu Matsubara, Takeshi Daimon, Takahiko Kajima
Cinematography: Hiroshi Yasuoka
Editing: Koshiko Nakamura
Music: Mutsumi Hamano
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival 
In Japanese
77 minutes

An immersive first-person portrait of urban loneliness, hunger for love and spirited resilience, writer-director Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen’s feature debut was made on a micro-budget, a poverty of resources which is sometimes all too evident. Even so, this slender contemporary drama punches above its weight in emotional impact, largely thanks to a gripping, nerve-jangling, intense central performance by Swedish novice actor Tuva Alfredsson, who is on screen for virtually every second. Frames of Alicia world premieres this week in Oldenburg, underscoring the German festival’s reputation for launching raw indie talent.

Alfredsson stars as the eponymous heroine, an aspiring R&B singer from Sweden who has just relocated to the Danish capital to try and kickstart her career. After dyeing her Nordic blonde hair a more exotic chemical red, and renting a room in a cheap shared apartment, she begins to hustle herself around town, but meets mostly indifference and rejection. A minor studio producer compliments her woozy voice, “like you just popped a Xanax or something”, while a shy young photographer helps her out with a promotional shoot. But music-making ultimately appears secondary to Alicia, who seems to be desperately seeking human connection more than career opportunity, wandering Copenhagen’s parks in a boozy haze looking for company, or flirting awkwardly with casual acquaintances.

This walking-wounded aura inevitably makes Alicia vulnerable, especially to lowlife predators masquerading as well-connected music industry players. An extended scene in which a smooth-talking, Andrew Tate-level slimeball pressures her into giving him oral sex feels like a tired plot cliché, but also painfully authentic, building from uneasy hints to a grimly intense battle of wills in what feels like real time. The aftermath of this ugly incident also has gritty bite, with Alicia galvanised into vengeful action, only to face violent threats and angry gaslighting from her attacker. A final revelatory scene gestures towards some kind of psychological “explanation” for all this high-risk behaviour, which is not entirely persuasive but certainly adds extra emotional heft.

Originally planned as a short, Frames of Alicia was shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Copenhagen by a two-man crew, director included, in 17 days scattered across four months. The story was unscripted, the dialogue improvised, and the final narrative shape only decided in the editing room. Alfredsson did her own styling and make-up, while Mikkelsen and cinematographer Danijel Bogdanic handled most of the other DIY production roles.

This kind of ultra-minimal, almost Dogme-like docu-realist austerity is fraught with risk, requiring strict formal discipline to avoid unravelling into stilted melodrama and windy self-indulgence. Fortunately Mikkelsen and his tiny team mostly avoid these pitfalls thanks to their keen eye for visual poetry and tight focus on Alfredsson’s committed performance. Bogdanic shoots in high-resolution, hand-held zoom shots that transform the star’s expressive face into an extraordinary living landscape, every pore and blemish and mascara smear amplified to billboard size, often sharply defined against a fuzzy backdrop.

Frames of Alicia never quite escapes the disjointed, inconclusive, work-in-progress feel implied by its title. The sense of a short film being stretched to breaking point is sometimes palpable. But this is an impressive debut all the same, a solid stand-alone work but also a teasing taste of the great things these budding talents may achieve in future with a bigger budget and a more substantial narrative.

Director, screenwriter, editing: Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen
Cast: Tuva Alfredsson, Ali Bayate, Balthazar Rademacher
Cinematography: Danijel Bogdanic
Producers: Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen, Danijel Bogdanic
Production company: Alienworld
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Independent)
In Danish, Swedish
71 minutes

When Lee died of a cerebral oedema in 1973, aged just 32, he was on the cusp of global superstar fame, a virtual one-man film industry who had elevated kung fu movies from local phenomenon to global brand. His sudden demise left a huge gap in the market, which unscrupulous bosses at grindcore film studios in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea rushed to fill with cash-in “Brucesploitation” movies. Martial arts-trained performers from across Southeast Asia were rapidly recruited, then brazenly re-styled and renamed in Lee’s image.

The best known were Bruce Li from Taiwan (Ho Chung-tao), the Burma-born Bruce Le (Lu Xiaolóng), Korean actor Dragon Lee (Moon Kyung-seok), Bruce Lai (Chang Yi-tao ) from Hong King and Bruce Lo (Yasuaki Kurata) from Japan. In some cases, these actors had their credited screen names changed by studio chiefs and foreign distributors without their knowledge, especially in Europe, a subplot to Gregory’s film that touches lightly on the casual racism of the period. Alongside these more famous clones, many of Lee’s tenuous associates and former co-stars also found themselves part of this prolific mini-boom, passed off as the next best thing in cheap chopsocky productions.

Experts and industry veterans interviewed by Gregory number the “official” canon of “Brucesploitation” films at around 80, though the unofficial total is closer to 200. Most are shameless rip-offs and barely coherent pseudo-sequels to Lee’s handful of hits: The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), The Way of the Dragon (1972) and Enter The Dragon (1973). Others are heavily fictionalised Lee biopics and macabre Frankenstein patchworks incorporating real footage of the star’s corpse filmed at his public funeral. A few transcend naked opportunism to muster their own genuinely bizarre cult-movie energy, like The Dragon Lives Again (1977), which stars “Bruce Liang” as an afterlife Lee battling against clownishly bad approximations of James Bond, Popeye, Dracula, Laurel and Hardy, Satan and more. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas any more.

Painstakingly assembled over seven years, Enter the Clones of Bruce features a treasure trove of obscure archive footage and an impressive range of contemporary interviews, notably all the main surviving Bruce clones. Of these, Ho Chung-tao was the hardest to secure, but he shares the most revealing and rueful insights, both celebrating and lamenting how his life has been shaped by his Bruce Lee associations. A few of the lesser interview clips here look scrappy and raw, notably an ad hoc chat with Hong Kong action-film icon Sammo Hung, one of the new-generation stars whose fame signalled the end of the Brucesploitation era in the early 1980s.

The rise of Jackie Chan, of course, was also a crucial factor, moving martial arts movies into a major new action-comedy phase that conquered Hollywood and beyond. Chan’s absence from the guest commentators here is hardly a fatal flaw, but a few words from him could have given this story a stronger sense of closure. Other slightly disappointing no-shows include Quentin Tarantino, whose films are peppered with homages to Lee, or any surviving members of Lee’s family, who declined Gregory’s invitations to participate.

Enter the Clones of Bruce is clearly made with affection for its subject matter, and a wistful nostalgia for the lost golden age of martial arts cinema. Even the most shoddy straight-to-video productions covered here have some kind of goofy appeal, from their resourceful use of minimal budgets to their delirious comic energy. It comes as no surprise that Gregory’s company has now licensed many of these films, with plans to kickstart a mini Brucesploitation revival of their own. Ironically, this documentary is made with far more slick professionalism than most of the movies it covers. Meticulously crafted and visually appealing, it features vivid vintage graphics, artfully enhanced archive stills and an authentically retro funk-rock score, all knowing flashbacks to an era when everybody was kung fu fighting. Send in the clones.

Director: David Gregory
Cast: Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Bruce Liang, Dragon Lee, Angela Mao, Sammo Hung, David Chiang, Phillip Ko, Andre Morgan, Mars, Yasuaki Kurata, Ron Van Clief
Cinematography: Jim Kunz
Editing: Douglas Buck. Music: Mark Raskin
Producers: Andrew Furtado, Michael Worth, Jeremy Kai Ping Cheung, Vivian Sau Man Wong, Frank Djeng
Production company: Severin Films
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival (Midnight Xpress)
In Cantonese, English, Japanese
94 minutes

His evenings are spent channel-surfing in his pokey New York apartment until one day he sees a television advert for a robotic buddy. What ensues begins as a freewheeling but deeply felt meditation on the nature of relationships. Based on Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name, Berger’s dialogue-free animated feature is an exceptionally nuanced comedy-drama that premiered in Cannes before going on to understandably win the Contrechamp Grand Prix for Best Film at Annecy. Come for the appealing animation, stay for a love letter to falling hard for someone and all of the joys and disasters that entails.

When the film joins him, Dog’s life is one of microwave mac’n’cheese while sat in the glow of the TV, flicking through soulless comedies and infomercials. In the apartment block across the street, Dog hears and then sees a couple cuddled on the sofa, giggling and joking, enjoying companionship. Although Robot Dreams eschews spoken dialogue – much like the graphic novel it is based on – the loneliness of its protagonist pooch is palpable. Suddenly, an advertisement explodes onto the TV in front of him offering a cure for loneliness in the form of the Amica 2000, a new metallic mate. Their friendship flourishes immediately and they race around the city having a whale of a time. One day, however, after they fall asleep on the beach, Robot finds that he can’t move, and Dog doesn’t have the strength to carry him home. He promises to return the next morning with help, but when he arrives the beach has been closed for the season and Robot is stuck there until the following summer.

The early passages of Robot Dreams are incredibly charming and fun, but it is at this moment that the film begins to blossom into something far more complicated and profound. Dog’s decision to abandon Robot for the night is heart-wrenching, but his subsequent inability to return to his pal sees the drama morph into something entirely different. While Dog makes a couple of ill-fated attempts to gain access to the beach – through the proper channels of city hall (denied!) and with a pair of wire cutters (arrested) – he soon comes to the realisation that he will have to wait the closure out. In the meantime, he goes on living his life while Robot lies paralysed in the sand, rust forming on his metallic frame, then ice covering his body.

In this enforced relationship interval, a variety of different miniature narratives about potential friendships emerge. In diverging ways, they each look at the notion of connection with others from alternative angles. For Dog this involves being rebuffed by those that look down on him when he makes himself vulnerable but also a short-term, perhaps romantic, dalliance with Duck. For Robot, there are a trio of rowing rabbits who spring a leak and steal his leg to plug the hole, but there is also a mother bird who uses his body as shelter for her nest and the fledgling flights of her brood of three chicks. On each occasion, the film wrestles with the changeable nature of relationships and the imbalances of give and take that make them up. These are all presented as comedic, sometimes silly asides, but their cumulative effect is not lost.

The interaction between the simplistic and more nuanced is rife throughout the film and it is easy to see how it will be enjoyed by audiences of all ages. Dog and Robot are cute cartoon creations, captured in clean 2D animation, and often beaming from ear to ear – anyone whose heart doesn’t skip a beat when Dog’s tail starts to wag furiously at the approach of the delivery man, doesn’t have one. Still, around them is an 80s New York City that is notably rough around its edges. From the chain-smoking punks that give Robot the finger, to the bear collecting empty plastic bottles from the bin on the subway, there is a real world unraveling in the frame around them, perhaps hinting at the direction in which the story will ultimately go.

At the same time, what makes Robot Dreams so exquisite in its pitch, is that it doesn’t feel like a film with one layer for child audience members and one for adults. Sure, there are little details sprinkled throughout that will go over younger heads, but, actually, the narrative is both simplistic and complicated enough to serve all viewers at the same time on the same level. In that respect, it feels a lot like the more precisely attuned efforts of Pixar, though with its own uniquely characterful visual style. The maturity of its ultimate revelations of friendship are breathtakingly touching, without ever being moribund, or wallowing in despair. In being about what it means to be a friend, acknowledging the mistakes we make, being about how can we move on, and letting go without forgetting, it’s beautifully life-affirming.

Director, screenplay: Pablo Berger
Producers: Ibon Cormenzana, Angel Durandez, Ignasi Estape, Pablo Berger
Editing: Fernando Franco
Music: Alfonso de Vlallonga, Yuko Harami
Sound: Steven Ghouti, Fabiola Ordoyo
Art direction: Jose Luis Agreda
Production: Arcadia Motion Pictures (Spain), Les Films du Worso, Noodles Production (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
No dialogue
102 minutes

Science fiction is a genre famed for its ability to hold up a mirror to humanity in a way that recontextualises private and social conundrums through high-concept drama. In this instance, notions of simulation and virtual reality meld with questions of memory and subjectivity to create a quietly challenging film about the potential role of technology in recording personal history. For the unnamed man at the centre of Darouei and Kiaei’s short (played by Rez Robatiazi), a deep-seated personal trauma can be slowly massaged from his mind through the use of VR memory that can be customised and uploaded back into his head.

The unnerving potential of such a narrative might seem a million miles from the early scenes of Dream Maker, which are laden with the golden hour sunshine and saccharine aesthetics of nostalgia. But this is exactly what those images are – they are the memories of a father, thinking about his young daughter. Now, he lives in what can only be described as a bunker, his only connection to the outside world coming through time spent in a headset, reliving happier times. It transpires that the man was – accidentally – responsible for a terrible accident that saw his daughter killed. His VR sessions are the dreamier moments of her final day but now he can upload new additions, like a fluffy cuddly toy, to embellish the memory and round off its razor-sharp edges.

The two visual styles of the film – representing the almost-sepia memories and the dark, neon-lit present – don’t just provide clear delineation but seem to ooze with the dependency that the man feels for the light offered by this increasingly re-imagined past. There is a kernel of truth to the idea that we narrativise our actions and our memories; as humans, we keenly omit or reshape actions that don’t comply with our internal sense of self. In this case, the man takes it further using external tech to re-write history and replace his true memories, allowing an unreal past to spill into his future. The premise of Darouei and Kiaei’s film might be fantastical, but the human desires at its centre are anything but. It makes for a film that intentionally wallows in sentiment, while also questioning our demands and capabilities to make such dreams a reality.

Directors: Mohsen Mehri Darouei, Milad Kiaei
Cast: Reza Robatjazi, Hananeh Karami
Producers: Mohsen Kiaei, Abbas Abbasi
Screenplay: Mohsen Mehri Darouei
Cinematography: Hosein Jalili
Editing: Amin Salmani
Set decoration: Shiva Asgharan
Costume design: Parsa Khanloghi
Production: Noir Karen Film (Iran)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In English
14 minutes

As well as offering a positive take on female ambition, Maestra disabuses the audience of any illusions that classical music’s perceived elitism and high concert prices mean composers invariably live lavishly. As with work in other creative industries in today’s economy, it is a struggle for those starting out. Zoe, from Athens, is a freelancer who is often on the road for freelance gigs, earning to support her children at home. The challenges of balancing the demands of conducting and motherhood are manifold. She recounts how she started Greece’s first Youth Orchestra, but was removed from the post after becoming pregnant. She’s one of two candidates we follow who are parents, and share tips with Atlanta-based contestant Tamara, who is keen to start a family with her partner but worried how it will affect her career prospects. 

Maestra also offers a fascinating snapshot for the uninitiated of what being a conductor entails in the auditorium, as candidates bring their own styles to the need to communicate to the orchestra so that they work as a single unit. A fair chunk of the film is dedicated to sequences of the women in action, guiding orchestras through Mozart, Louise Farrenc, Maurice Ravel, and Clara Schumann. The importance of presenting one’s authentic self is noted by the judges (established male and female composers), but as some participants pass the rounds and others fall out, caveats to that are raised. One participant, admired by her peers for her bold movements, unexpectedly doesn’t make the cut. Female composers must be dynamic, but moving too energetically can be associated with sexual power, and perceived as a threat. Another is told she should smile more. Women must not only execute their work precisely, but endure scrutiny to look and act a certain way while doing so — judgment their male counterparts are largely spared. Polish participant Anna suffers from psoriasis, which she attributes to the high stress levels of conducting, even as she obviously relishes the process.

As the competition reaches its final stages, performances are intercut with footage of Melisse, a French contestant who trained in Paris but relocated to Iowa, as she revisits her former conservatory and home. It’s gradually revealed she was abused by one of her teachers there, and is still struggling with the trauma, and with reconnecting to any sense of home. It’s an ending that powerfully conveys that, amid the fulfilling highs that can come from conducting, merit and hard work are not the only deciding factors in finding one’s way in an industry that is structurally compromised and able to totally derail lives. An end-title informs us the film was made with an 80% female crew, positioning the production almost as a manifesto or model for more balanced, inclusive modes of creative collaboration.

Director: Maggie Contreras
Writers: Maggie Contreras, Neil Berkeley
Editors: Elisa Bonora, Finola Couling, Rupert Hall
Cinematography: Neil Berkeley, Olympia Mytilinaiou, Isabelle Razavet, Patrick Bolton
Cast: Melisse Brunet, Tamara Dworetz, Zoe Zeniodi, Ustina Dubitsky, Anna Sulkowska-Migon, Marin Alsop, Deborah Borda
Music: Anne Chmelewsky
Producers: Maggie Contreras, Neil Berkeley, Emma West, Melanie Miller, Lauren Lexton
Production companies: Worldwide Pants (US), BRKLY (US), Burns Park Media (US), Foothill Productions (US), Fishbowl Films (US)
Sales: UTA (US)
Venue: Oldenburg
In English
98 minutes

The film, which screens at Oldenburg International Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes, is a highly personal, frank and emotionally vulnerable departure from her comedies The Hedgehog (2009) and Les Gazelles (2014), with prospects for international interest heightened by an intense, gripping performance from star Marion Cotillard, signed on to embody the director’s late mother in re-enacted conversations.

The tragedy of a suicide in a family colours and reshapes everything that went before. Little Girl Blue shows the director, appearing as herself and addressing us and the departed in voiceover, in a Parisian apartment. She sifts through stacks of old photos of her relatives and letters in crates, fixing some to the wall. These traces are recast as evidence, as remembering takes on the form of an existential investigation. Recorded conversations with “surviving witnesses” of her mother’s childhood are exhumed and played back, considered as clues to the seeds of her final act. Mona’s father had implored her not to waste her energies on something intrinsically incomprehensible and direct them instead to the living. But for the women in the family, who wrote about their mothers and reproduced their ambiguities and psychological struggles across generations, the mystery of who their predecessors really were has been all-consuming and defining. Trauma as well as talent are their legacies.

The film consciously examines what it is to retell a story and mythologise it. Existing in a family in which numerous dramatic, clandestine tales were floating around warped one’s sense of self, what it meant to be interesting, and one’s conception of purpose. Among the swirl of tales, in which the generations blur, is one about a gang rape in Pamplona during a bullfight. A sense of gendered violence as an inevitability was planted in the women of the family, who considered themselves cursed.

Central to these reflections is the figure of famed avant-garde writer and one-time vagabond Jean Genet, who was a close friend of Monique Lange, Mona’s grandmother and an editor at the publishing house Gallimard as well as a writer in her own right. That closeness extended to Carole, with her mother’s complicity, and when she was only eleven, she would skip class to visit him. Genet, always controversial, does not come off well in the film. He’s characterised as a perverse influence who hated the “banal” above all else, and would break people by pushing them as far as he could into their own contradictions, simply for a kick (his tightrope-walker lover Abdallah also died by suicide). As a child encouraged to participate with adults in the literary milieu of ‘60s Paris and Morocco, in which power abuses were normalised, Carole was inevitably plunged into boundary transgressions and sexual confusion. Years later, in an era more conducive to the reevaluation of exploitative relationships, the director tries to psychologically untangle the harm done by men of art-world stature, who could seem to be both “swines” and captivating people, simultaneously.

Carole embraced the mood of rebellion of ‘68, drifting between anarchist groups before heading to New York. She became a sex worker and a photographer, and started, in 2008, to write about the family’s secrets. Despair over later rejection by the literary establishment is portrayed as a contributing factor in her demise. While ample photographs bring time into textured focus, it is Cotillard who brings emotionally devastating immediacy. In an inspired scene of metamorphosis, she enters as herself, undresses and puts on Carole’s clothes, complete with wig and spritz of perfume. Her performance is an act of embodiment that, if not bringing forth the dead, can provide a conduit for insight and communion. Simply relating a long story from the past to the camera in half-light, she holds us fixated. An intelligent and inventive play on biography and literature, raw with emotion but devoid of false sentiment, Little Girl Blue reveals how the hold of stories can decimate and confine a person, even as they seek expression or liberation through them.

Director, screenwriter: Mona Achache
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Mona Achache, Marie Bunel, Marie-Christine Adam, Pierre Aussedat, Jacques Boudet, Didier Flamand
Production Design: Helena Cisterne, Daniel WeimerEditor: Valerie Loiseleux
Cinematography: Noe Bach
Costume Design: Caroline Spieth
Music: Valentin Co
Production companies: Les Films du Poisson (France), Wrong Men (Belgium), France 2 Cinema (France)
Sales: Charades (France)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In French
95 minutes

It was made as part of the Actor as Creator initiative, run as a collaboration between Screen Ireland and the Bow Street Academy, that is intended to allow actors to produce a short film that expresses their creative vision. In this instance, Lesley Conroy wrote Cleaner, and while handsomely directed, it bears the hallmarks of a work intended to showcase its on-screen talent. The story follows Angela (played by Conroy), who builds up an unexpected rapport with the woman whose home she is paid to maintain. Told as much through gesture and body language as through dialogue, the film crafts an impressively naturalistic camaraderie while remaining cognisant of the unspoken boundaries being crossed.

The plot is deftly charted through the changing way that Mairead (Carolyn Bracken) addresses Angela on the envelope she leaves on the countertop with her wages in. In the film’s opening sequence, it merely says ‘Cleaner’ demarcating the transactional nature of their relationship. However, when Angela steps in to look after Mairead’s children in an emergency, the professional line between them becomes blurred and a friendship emerges – before long the envelope goes from saying ‘Angela’ to being adorned with embellishments like a smiley face or a kiss. Despite this, as the two women grow closer, the audience becomes painfully aware of the potential reality check that looms on the horizon.

Conroy’s script, and the two women’s performances, do a great job of conveying this tension. As they interact with increasing ease and intimacy, the lopsidedness of their relationship is never entirely erased and beats littered throughout allow for moments of reflection or minor hesitation. Evan Barry’s compositions often frame them in close-up, allowing for maximum impact from minor gestures. The film uses a short sequence of recurring cleaning scenes – scrubbing the toilet bowl, doing the ironing – to remind the audience of Angela’s daily drudgery and the ultimate position she occupies. There seems to be a persistent danger of some about-face that would drive home the precarity of her position. It’s a precarity that feels like it flits, almost imperceptibly, on Conroy’s face throughout – and comes crashing unbidden into the narrative to devastating effect.

Director: Edwin Mullane
Cast: Lesley Conroy, Carolyn Bracken
Producer, screenplay: Lesley Conroy
Cinematography: Evan Barry
Editing: Adam O’Keeffe
Sound: Rob O’Sullivan
Production: A&E Creative (Ireland)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In English
14 minutes

Before the Venice Film Festival began, The Film Verdict had a unique opportunity to have a quick chat with two men, who at the outset couldn’t seem more different, but yet share the same passion and vision: Hendrik Hay, founder and CEO of MILC (Welt der Wunder) and Torsten Neumann, head of the Oldenburg Film Festival.

TFV: Torsten, you head up one of the most independent film festivals dealing with edgy and new filmmakers, as well as established filmmakers from around the world, and Hendrik, you are a born, at heart entrepreneur, who owned and ran televisions stations and now focuses on a vision that includes using micro-licensing utility tokens that allows content owners to have their work be accessible to a global market. The question is, how is that the two of you are sitting down together with TFV for an interview?

Torsten: It seems like we do have a lot in common, and I would say it is mainly our love and passion for the things we’re doing that brings us together. Because it is not that common to find people who share the same ethics in their work, it feels very good to share a common goal with Hendrik, as he is a passionate man who keeps pursuing his dreams and fighting for ideas. I share those ideas. And how do we find the same idea of putting new media and edgy indie filmmaking together? Well, Hendrik’s vision is not designed to marginalize the old media, but only to introduce something that can put things back in balance – with regard to the field of interest I am dealing with, this seems to be the most important issue: the art of cinema is threatened by the ongoing development. Artistic variety has always been the most important detail to keep art and culture alive; what happens in the film industry is actually the opposite. It feels good to have people like Hendrik out there ready to stand strong.

TFV: Hendrik, you are in many ways a visionary. Last year you produced the first Short Film Festival, ALPHA on the Metaverse, in collaboration with The Film Verdict Inc. What was the feedback and how do you measure “success” on such a new platform?

Hendrik: Thank you! The Alpha Film Festival was one of the first festivals in the Metaverse. It was designed to show other festivals the possibilities of a virtual world. We were very impressed with the communication around the event. With around 450 million article impressions, we can assume that this first attempt did not go unnoticed. We were approached not only by other film festivals, such as the Oldenburg Film Festival, but also by other events. The fashion and music industries in particular are working with us on really interesting concepts.

TFV: But Torsten, by and large, you are a “film guy,” how quickly did you embrace the idea of running Metaverse, a parallel festival universe, at the same time as the Oldenburg Film Festival? And how do you think your audience and sponsors will think of it?

Torsten: Of course, every new step into an unknown territory should be considered with care. The Metaverse seems to oppose our goals to keep cinema as a real life experience where people share the same experiences at the same time. But if you look closer, this common experience loaded with emotions rather than algorithms is actually what Hendrik is working on – in a world that will go further into a digital existence, he is bringing real people and real emotions into this other world. His visions go even beyond, because this allows us to think of a new marketplace that is not ruled by only a few corporations, and that marketplace will definitely open up for everything we are standing for: independent cinema, alternative ways of financing and recapitalizing and keeping up a variety of artistic expressions. For the audience, we create an exciting glimpse into the huge possibilities of the new world – even if we put it right beside the real life Festival, we can show the ways of benefitting from one another instead of the opposite. I expect the sponsors to appreciate our collaboration for the same reasons. We are known for taking risks, exploring new ground and surprising our audiences, so strengthening our profile should hopefully also find the support of our partners and sponsors.
Hendrik: The Oldenburg Film Festival presents itself as an innovator. It will attract a new target group and gain importance as a brand in the metaverse scene. We have rebuilt parts of the old town of Oldenburg, as well as the old opera house where the film festival takes place.
In this digital object there are a lot of interactive elements integrated on several levels that the user can click on. There is a lot of exciting content behind this. The user can also watch live events in the main hall, which are produced in Oldenburg and then streamed into the MILC Metaverse

TFV: Hendrik, is this model that is being developed adaptable for other film festivals? Is it a possible turn-key platform for other festivals to consider? What is the advantage for film festivals to consider developing a Metaverse based festival?

Hendrik: The metaverse is nothing more than the transformation of the real world into a 3-dimensional interactive virtual world. Yes, it is a young industry, but there is no doubt that in the future every real event will have a digital twin in the metaverse. Real events today are limited to their physical visitors; their digital twins can invite anyone in the world and expand their audience massively.

Film festivals in particular have the opportunity to move from local to global. It no longer matters where you are, only that you offer great content and interactive experiences to your audience. Yes, the metaverse is still technically a bit limited, but this will change very fast as development moves on. Those who innovate today and start to climb the learning curve will steal today’s relevance from all those who are still waiting.

TFV: Torsten, Some skeptics and critics may ask, “what’s the point or need for a Metaverse film festival” that parallels the actual film festival? In essence, why are you collaborating with Hendrik?

Torsten: If there is one man who can prove that all the concerns of those critics are pointless, I think it is Hendrik. As soon as you learn about the love for detail and the love for including the support of Independence in general that Hendrik and his team bring into their vision of the metaverse, you might agree and decide to take that step to find out yourself. I see huge potential in our collaboration because I see the will to understand each other’s point of view and the will to bring these places together in the best way.

TFV: Hendrik, how can people access or find the “entry” into the Oldenburg Film Festival? And does it cost anything to enter the Oldenburg Metaverse? Also, will the ALPHA Short Film Festival take place again? When?

Hendrik: Just enter www.milc.global and visit our MILC Metaverse. As soon as the Oldenburg-Film Festival starts, you’ll find your way to the event. No, it doesn’t cost anything. The Alpha Film Festival will also return in March 2024, but there will be other film festivals as well.

As a metaverse platform for media and entertainment, we are happy to help anyone who is interested in entering this new, exciting world. Our real vision is to combine everything into one collaborative, fantastic, super-studio, where something happens every day and our audience can be part of everything in our industry. Whoever has something to contribute to this metaverse – media – theme park, is cordially invited.

TFV: Torsten, we’ll give you the last word. What do you hope is the outcome of launching the Metaverse Oldenburg Film Festival?

Torsten: I hope that we can raise awareness for our topics and that we can open up the path of new business ideas. Also, for the film industry we are aiming to challenge the huge grey area of digital screenings with regard to the premiere status of films that are presented – a virtual cinema with a limited amount of seats and a limited time for a screening should be considered in the same way a festival screening is considered anywhere on the planet. It can only be addressed towards its very own territory, even if people from 20 other countries/territories are attending the screening. This is of significant importance for the film industry and has not at all been addressed until now. Hendrik and I want to engage the industry towards rethinking, because if we take it with their own rules: the Metaverse is its own new territory that wouldn’t even harm the status of a World Premiere for films. As soon as you look into the rules of fundings and also the rules suggested by the FIAPF for films and their premiere status, you will see that this topic is by far not only a vanity topic. This is connected in many ways sometimes to a bit of a suppressive system that keeps certain films under the radar and others not. It is time to reconsider this!

Note: The Film Verdict Inc,. the corporate entity which owns The Film Verdict llc. is a partner with MILC to develop metaverse platforms that serve the international film industry and a strategic partner with The Oldenburg Film Festival with regard to the Metaverse.

Watch the highlights from the first Alpha Film Festival.

Allmen and the Secret of the Koi
GER
Director: Sinje Köhler
Cast: Heino Ferch, Andrea Osvárt, Samuel Finzi, Uwe Kockisch

Beautiful Friend
USA Director: Truman Kewley
Cast: Adam Jones, Alexandrea Meyer

Behind the Haystacks
GRE Director: Asimina Proedru
Cast: Stathis Stamoulakatos, Lena Ouzounidou, Evgenia Lavda

Charcoal
BRA Director: Carolina Markowics
Cast: César Bordón, Rômulo Braga, Jean de Almeida Costa

Confines
FRA Director: Isild Le Besco
Cast: Astrid Blacquière, Isild Le Besco, Malcom Conrath, Yuri Milyayev

Das Wunderkind
Director: Thomas Stiller
Cast: Udo Wachtveitel , Miroslav Nemec, Ferdinand Hofer

Enter the Clones of Bruce
USA
Director: David Gregory
Cast: Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Dragon Lee

Frames of Alicia
Director: Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen
Cast: Tuva Alfredson, Ali Bayate, Balthazar Rademacher

From Dawn Till Noon On The Sea
Director: Takayuki Hayashi
Cast: Hanon, Kaito Yoshima, Yu Uemura

Geisterfahrt
Director: Christine Hartmann
Cast: Maria Furtwängler, Florence Kasumba, Jonas Minthe

Grill
NOR
Director: Jade Aksnes
Cast: Brigitte Larsen, Issaka Sawadogo, Frode Winter

Heavier Is The Sky
BRA
Director: Petrus Cairiry
Cast: Danny Barbosa, Silvia Buarque, Magno Carvalho

Im Toten Winkel
Director: Ayse Polat
Cast: Katja Bürkle, Ahmet Varli, Ça?la Yurga

In The Form Of Love
IRN
Director: Siavash Asadi
Cast: Amin Hayaei, Pantea Panahiha, Zahleh Sameti

Insects in the City
Director: Mark Polish
Cast: Meagan Holder, Isabel Arraiz, David Del Rio

Invincible
CAN
Director: Vincent René-Lortie
Cast: Léokim Beaumier-Lépine, Èlia St-Pierre, Isabelle Blais

Little Girl Blue
Director: Mona Achache
Cast: Marion Cottilard, Carole Achache, Jean Achache

Maestra
Director: Maggie Contreras
Cast: Zoe Zeniodi, Tamara Dworetz, Ustina Dubitsky

Mars Express
Director: Jérémie Périn
Cast: Léa Drucker, Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Neo Lobé

Passenger C
Director: Cassian Elwes
Cast: Jon Jacobs, Eric Bruneau, Mary Bonner-Baker, Cheri Moon

Robot Dreams
ESP
Director: Pablo Berger

Roque
ESP
Director: Banni Leclerc
Cast: Fernando Valdivielso, Luisa Gavasa, Miguel Insua

Seaweed
Director: Liel Simon
Cast: Gilad Gregori Oks, Yehuda Nahari Halevi

Shura: Sisters of the Rope
Director: Tohjiro
Cast: Shiomi Aya, Hana Kano, Ginzi Sagawa

The Belgian Wave
BEL
Director: Jérôme Vandewattyne
Cast: Karen de Paduwa, Karim Barras, Dominique Rongvaux

The Book Of Solutions
Director: Michel Gondry
Cast: Pierre Niney, Blanche Gardin, Frankie Wallach

The King of Algiers
Director: Elias Belkeddar
Cast: Reda Kateb, Benoît Magimel, Meriem Amiar

The Nothingness Club
PRT
Director: Edgar Pêra
Cast: Miguel Borges, Victoria Guerra

The Wait
ESP
Director: F. Javier Guiterrez
Cast: Victor Clavijo, Ruth Díaz, Moisés Ruiz

Uppercut
Director: Torsten Ruether
Cast: Luise Grossmann, Ving Rhames

When Grass Grows
ESP
Director: María Monreal Ortano
Cast: Arene Salaverri, Ane Ibarra

Whenever I’m Alone With You
Director: Guillaume Campanacci
Cast: Guillaume Campanacci, Vesper Egon

Willie and Me
Director: Eva Hassmann
Cast: Eva Hassmann, Willie Nelson, Peter Bogdanovich, Blaine Grey

SHORTS

Cleaner
IRL
Director: Edwin Mullane
Cast: Lesley Conroy, Carolyn Bracken

Dream Maker
IRN
Director: Mohsen Mehri Darouei ,Milad Kiaei
Cast: Reza Robatjazi, Hananeh Karami

Grill
NOR
Director: Jade Aksnes
Cast: Brigitte Larsen, Issaka Sawadogo, Frode Winter

Insects in the City
Director: Mark Polish
Cast: Meagan Holder, Isabel Arraiz, David Del Rio

Invincible
CAN
Director: Vincent René-Lortie
Cast: Léokim Beaumier-Lépine, Èlia St-Pierre, Isabelle Blais

Our Males and Females
JOR
Director: Ahmad Alyaseer
Cast: Kamal El Basha, Shafiqa Al Tal

Purgy’s
Director: Robbie Bryan
Cast: Arnold Chun, Brooke Lewis Bellas, Luciana Elisa Quinonez

Roque
ESP
Director: Banni Leclerc
Cast: Fernando Valdivielso, Luisa Gavasa, Miguel Insua

Seaweed
Director: Liel Simon
Cast: Gilad Gregori Oks, Yehuda Nahari Halevi

When Grass Grows
ESP
Director: María Monreal Ortano
Cast: Arene Salaverri, Ane Ibarra

Withdrawal
IRL
Director: Tiernan Williams
Cast: Lewis Brophy, Joy Whelan, Nathan Batt, Tyler Goldy

TRIBUTE FILMS:

Bas-Fonds
2010

Charly
2007

Chelsea on the Rocks
2008

Demi-tarif
2004

Dixieland
2015

For Ellen
2012

Jack and Diane
2011

Kiss of the Damned
2022

La Belle Occasion
2017