04/02/2008

British director Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology has won the best project prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival’s co-production market, CineMart. The prize, awarded by Arte France Cinema, is worth €10,000. The Kassander Film Company produces the project.

The film marks the second time Fiennes and Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek have collaborated. The pair made the iconoclastic The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in 2006. In that film, Žižek delved into the psyche of several classic films, including the works of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, and attempted to unravel their mysteries in his humorous, yet, knowledgeable style.

Fiennes shot on actual locations and recreated sets, creating the impression that Žižek actually inhabited the films under discussion. Žižek said about the film, "My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema".

It is expected that the new project will do to ideology what the 2006 film did to cinema. The award marked the official conclusion of a hectic five days at CineMart where 39 projects were seeking funding.

In other Rotterdam news, award-winning Scottish director Gilles MacKinnon’s project Rhapsody was chosen for the Rotterdam-Berlinale Express. MacKinnon won Rotterdam’s Tiger Award in 1996 for Small Faces, which also picked up the Best New British Feature award at Edinburgh. He has also won the Golden Seashell at San Sebastian for Trojan Eddie (1996) and the Manfred Salzgeber award at Berlinale 2003 for Pure, among several other awards.