Gelatin silver community

Amidst the influx of hundreds of premieres, galas, talks and drinks organised within the 55th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam, film archives stand the furthest from the spotlight. Given that a festival and an archive gaze into opposite directions, reconciling the past with the future might at first glance come off as incongruous. The multitude of emails for events aimed at industry people revolve around terms describing community struggles and challenges, in hopes of connecting professionals with non-Western cultures and revitalising a communal network. In practice, though, all these attempts at establishing a mutual, cross-cultural experience only highlight the gap between me and Western experiences.

With a persisting alienating feeling, I had turned to films and archives as a means of finding community. Squeezed between world premieres lies IFFR’s recurrent Cinema Regained programme, an amalgamate of selected works loosely tied together by their relation to film heritage, implying its regional, cultural and stylistic diversity. A community’s future trajectory is inherently tied to preserving its past, but archiving the history of heterogeneous and disparate groupings, like the queer community, poses some challenges. Archives usually operate within either geographical or aesthetic coordinates, which in turn raises the issue of cataloguing queer films, spread across all types of archives. IFFR’s selection covers this issue somewhat obliquely.

Following the last year hit that was Raw! Uncut! Video! (Alex Clausen, Ryan A. White, 2025), comes this edition’s adult video themed double bill, further expanding the exploration of the 80s gay bustling scene in the Castro District of San Francisco. The first of the pair, Mickey & Richard (Ryan A. White, A. P. Pickle, 2026), focuses on the dichotomy between Richard Bernstein, a renowned gay porn actor during the full swing of the 80s, who had retired, and his stage personality, Mickey Squires. A rather peculiar mix, focusing on materiality by containing early video footage of Squire’s work in the porn industry, accompanied by scans of his magazine cover photos. Additionally, the filmmakers had partly filmed scenes set in the present using a 16mm Bolex camera, appropriating archival footage, but serving no real purpose other than that of a technical artifice.

The second film of this double bill, The Brig (Norman Yonemoto, 1982), is an almost plotless adult video that exemplifies the apparent earnestness of gay porn culture of the 80s, yet there’s no real indicator of why this film in particular was chosen to represent the scene. Queer archives are still a gathering of personally collected footage and oral histories, still trickling through the institutional framework from which conventional historical archives established in developed countries sometimes benefit. Even if Mickey & Richard is an average documentary quality-wise, it still stands as an essential piece of the quilt that queer stories are sewn onto.

Another approach is that of filmmaker, historian and celluloid connoisseur Bruce Posner, who steps in with his comparison between Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished ¡Que viva México! and Kenneth Anger’s gay occult classic Scorpio Rising (1963). Though similar in theme to Mark Rappaport’s humorous, first-person video essay Sergei/Sir Gay (2017). If Rappaport compares Battleship Potemkin (1925) with Anger’s Fireworks (1947) through the recurrent homoerotic theme of sailors, Posner’s theory links the other two films at a molecular level, analysing micro-gestures. Posner’s much more sombre film forces this comparison at times, but it makes a good point regarding interpreting archival footage. This 10-minute short reminded me of Dagmar Brunow’s essay ‘Queering the archive’, in which she calls for reinterpreting small gestures in a different lens, but instead of making a point of cataloguing home movies, as does Brunow, Posner steps boldly into positing this early auteur film as a work in the queer canon.

Even though this constituted this year’s explicitly queer-inclined dwellings into the community’s history, a couple of noteworthy shorts cover other angles of approaching and reinterpreting archival footage. Para hacer una película solo hace falta un arma (Santiago Sein, 2026) and Habibi Hussein (Alex Bakri, 2025) are the only two films that succeeded in making me tear up before they even started. The title of Sein’s film appropriates Jean Luc-Godard’s attributed famous saying, “All you need to make a movie is a gun”, but its newly intended meaning strives far from the filmmaker’s original intention. Taking a revolutionary turn, the documentary details both the students who were tortured by the last military junta in Argentina and the materials of their films from the 60s and 70s, salvaged from the trash right before they were about to be confiscated. Using primarily this newly found footage, its possibilities are maximised by over-scanning the celluloid, a technique used in film preservation that digitally scans not only the frame itself, but also the edges of the film stock. Filmmaker and archivist Santiago Sein, also the head of the Students Film Archive in the University of Córdoba, is aware that the films’ story extends beyond the frame itself, its edges revealing clues to the life that these films have lived up until they are projected onto the screen. At one point, the audio commentary mentions finding a film inside a film: embedded inside the film stock of a relatively innocent fiction piece was a political work that had been spliced into it. Given the cylindrical configuration of the film stock, which must be unwound in order to be viewed, this explosive matryoshka-like film was difficult to detect.

Bakri’s Habibi Hussein recounts the demise of one of Jenin’s cinemas – its tumultuous existence closely tied to that of its sole projectionist for forty years, Hussein Darbi. Simultaneously, the film is both a tender portrait of Hussein and a poignant picture of Palestinian cinema, where he spent most of his days behind carbon arc-based projectors. Habibi Hussain also stands as a response to the German self-glorifying documentary, Cinema Jenin: The Story of a Dream (Marcus Vetter, 2011), telling the story of an NGO initiative to rebuild the cinema, which ultimately reads as a project of cultural colonisation, by bringing Western experts to run the cinema projectors. Though often overlooked, local people and their localised knowledge – intuitively driven rather than academic, thus non-Westernised – might be the most fragile historical accounts, impossible to preserve fully.

Bringing together the viewing context – an international film festival set in a country that respects cinema, but understands little of the struggles projected onto the screen – with the films’ content – personal collections as the only reliable archival sources, searching for history through trash, cinemas falling apart before your eyes – I began to understand why I kept tearing up for no apparent reason before the films had even started. I soon realised that I am closer to those people on the screen than to the people around me, with whom I share little common struggles. The word ‘archive’ refers to both arkheion, a house, and archons, figures with significant political power. Even when well-meaning, the archons must become aware of the distance between themselves and their working material, treating it as such.

 

Briefwisseling: International Film Festival Rotterdam

Fantômas ontvangt en stuurt briefpost vanuit de filmzaal en wandelgangen. Ditmaal een bericht van op IFFR over de afstand tussen individu en collectief, in een bioscoopstoel en daarbuiten.

De spoken van Rotterdam

Een festival is een werk van liefde, maar het onderscheid maken tussen liefde en werk is moeilijk. Festivalprogrammator en -directeur María Palacios Cruz reflecteert over wat festivals (kunnen) zijn.

 

 

Of actors and activists

Fantômas continues to consider the future of festivals, this time by exploring IFFR’s retrospective programme ‘Through Cinema We Shall Rise!’. Can festivals provide more than just a pseudo-neutral platform for commodified resistance?

The elephant in the tiny house

What to do when film festivals do not meet our expectations? Film critic Öykü Sofuoğlu questions to what extent film professionals can expect festivals like Berlinale to show political engagement through direct, concrete decisions and actions.

 

 

Briefwisseling: IFFR

Fantômas ontvangt en stuurt briefpost vanuit de filmzaal en wandelgangen. Ditmaal een bericht van op IFFR.

Wat is er te zien?

In het drukke cultuur- en filmaanbod zoekt ook MOOOV Filmfestival een plekje. Hoe verhouden hun marketingslogans zich tegenover de films die ze promoten?

 

 

Par hasard, Balthazar?

Op IFFR wordt de zandbank voor filmcritici dit jaar een beetje groter. Critics’ Choice, het programma waar journalisten Dana Linssen en Jan Pieter Ekker filmkritiek creatief op haar kop – en soms in haar hemd – zetten, heeft als centraal thema ‘Play’. Voor deze negende editie neemt het duo ook het Young Film Critics-programma onder de vleugel voor de publicatie van (The Return of) the Daily Tiger. Hier lees je Michaël Van Remoorteres bijdrage aan de collectieve, caleidoscopische blik op Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO.