15/12/2023 - Running from 28-31 January at next year’s festival, the co-production market will present 16 feature-film projects alongside four immersive ones

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has unveiled its selection for the 41st edition of CineMart, its co-production market running from 28-31 January. Sixteen of these are feature films, and four are immersive, with “all corners of the globe represented” among the number and several familiar names from the festival circuit among them. Additionally, six projects (of which four are features and two immersive) make up the Darkroom works in progress, which potential co-production, sales and distribution partners will be able to assess. The festival's IFFR Pro strand, which CineMart forms a key part of, will itself run from 26-31 January; its prizes will be given out on 30 January, including the recently established Eurimages New Lab Awards, for which the winners will be interviewed on Cineuropa.

Three filmmakers who successfully launched projects at the Berlinale are featured in the CineMart slate. Following up on Azor [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andreas Fontana
film profile], which was granted wide distribution and acclaim following its premiere in Encounters at the 2021 edition, Andreas Fontana is pitching Les Diplomates, another period thriller, where two diplomatic colleagues from Austria and Switzerland negotiate a “petty personal grudge” as the Eastern Bloc falls. Natalia Meta’s The Intruder was another elevated genre title that turned heads in competition at the 2020 festival; in The Spirit of Law, a congresswoman “at the peak of her career” faces an accusation from another parliamentary employee. The 2019 Tiger Award winner and Berlinale Forum selectee Shengze Zu is presenting her first fiction feature, A Distant House Smokes on the Horizon; also a Hubert Bals Fund development awardee, its title, intentionally or not, evokes a lyric from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

CineMart is also featuring directors who showed their work at previous editions of the festival as well. These include Illum Jacobi, presenting Another Journey without Women, about “six chain-smoking know-it-alls” on a polar expedition in Greenland in 1918; and Other People’s Dreams by Daniel Hui, who is also showing the “slow-burning psychodrama” Small Hours of the Night at this year’s edition. Artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson has shown short works in the Directors’ Fortnight as well as winning the Tiger Short Competition twice; her first proper feature sounds intriguing, with its synopsis describing a woman who, following an abortion, “wanders the streets, embarking on a series of quiet encounters under a neon glow”.

The full selection of CineMart projects is as follows:

Alumbre - Alejandro Taras (Spain)
Producer: Zeitun Films

Another Journey without Women - Illum Jacobi (Denmark)
Producer: Adomeit Film

Bad Gays - Loïc Hobi (Switzerland)
Producer: Cloud Fog Haze Pictures

Cherub - Barbara Rupik (Poland)
Producer: Madants

Cloud of the Unknown - Yuan Gao (Hong Kong/France)
Producers: Chinese Shadows, Shasta & Co Production

Les Diplomates - Andreas Fontana (Switzerland/UK)
Producer: Alina Film

A Distant House Smokes on the Horizon - Shengze Zhu (China/USA)
Producer: Burn The Film

La gruta del viento - Eduardo Crespo (Argentina)
Producer: Pensar con las manos

Hold Time for Me - Fradique (Angola/Germany/Spain)
Producers: SEERA Films, Mika Films, Migranta Films

Lucia - Aisling Walsh (Ireland/Luxembourg)
Producers: EZ Films, JKML, Calach Films

La Nuit - Beatrice Gibson (UK/France)
Producers: Somesuch, Norte Productions

Other People’s Dreams - Daniel Hui (Singapore)
Producers: Momo Film Co, 13 Little Pictures

The Possessed - Ena Sendijarević (Netherlands)
Producer: Aventura

Skarpnabba - Sawanci Groskind (Finland)
Producer: Kenno Filmi Osk

The Spirit of Law - Natalia Meta (Argentina)
Producers: Picnic Producciones, Rei Cine

The Sunflowers of the Moon - ismaël (Tunisia)
Producer: Utopia Films

Immersive projects

Fathoming - Sara Tirelli (Italy)
Producer: dispàrte

The Great Escape (of three geraniums) - Joren Vandenbroucke (Belgium)
Producer: Animal Tank

The March - Frieda Gustavs, Leo Erken (Netherlands/Ukraine)
Producer: NL12

The World Came Flooding In - Isobel Knowles/Van Somerwine (Australia)
Producer: Film Camp