From Sight and Sound (March 1992). –- J.R.

There was a discernible change of emphasis this year’s Rotterdam

Festival under its new director, Emile Fallaux. Certainly, there were

fewer intellectual and scholarly interests than in the reign of Marco

Müller, who has moved on to Locarno,although the creation of a new

organization called ‘The Limits of Liberty’ to promote free expression

for filmmakers (somewhat after the model of PEN) signaled a new

activist impulse. With selections now made by a team of Dutch

programmers rather than a single individual, Rotterdam has arguably

become more of a Dutch event than it was under the extended rule of

the late Hubert Bals, who tended to shun native product. But one welcome

constant is a passionate defense of the marginal and surreptitious, and

an overall sense of equality that puts studio tyros and independents on

the same footing.

One of the most striking films this year was Zhang Yuan’s Mama, an

independently Made, banned work from mainland China about

mentally handicapped children. Alternating between an emotionally

subdued fictional story in black and white about a mother and her

retarded son and highly emotional documentary interviews in color

video with the real-life counterparts, the film sets up a neo-Brechtian

strategy with complex dividends.