THE LATEST
VIDEOHEAVEN
Alex Ross Perry’s VIDEOHEAVEN premieres at International Film Festival Rotterdam
For some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture – and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years in the making, retraces this history using footage from a vast array of films, ranging from huge Hollywood productions to non-professional no-budget affairs, sold solely at their neighbourhood video shop.
Inspired by Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store (2014), Perry renders the video shops a mirror for a wider social history of various developments in media, community structures and the flow of capital – how, for example, the early video shops with their bespoke, responsive curation, were pushed aside by chains with commercial, centralised selections, and how a culture of secret knowledge generously shared was turned into an institution for the manufacturing of consensus. IFFR is proud to present the world premiere of this masterpiece!
– Olaf Möller
JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE
Sedat Pakay’s JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE and OUTTAKES
In JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE, Turkish artist Sedat Pakay designs an intimate, luminous sketch of James Baldwin during a stay in Istanbul. From leisurely moving about his room to the activity of the city and its curious denizens, the author/activist comfortably expounds on his sense of privacy, sexuality and expat tendencies. New facets of this encounter are revealed in the recently compiled and restored OUTTAKES FROM SEDAT PAKAY’S “JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE”. (Brittany Gravely)
Can be booked as part of the program, JAMES BALDWIN ABROAD.
Preserved by the Yale Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“It’s a small miracle, a jewel of a documentary…”
—John Talbird, Film International
THIS WORLD IS NOT MY OWN
OpenDox’s THIS WORLD IS NOT MY OWN wins Best Documentary Award Special Mention at Palm Springs, is picked up by Juno Films for a 2024 theatrical release
Over four acts, This World is Not My Own traces the lifespan of an artist who struggles to dedicate her life to art while exploring the personal and political events that shaped her singular body of work. The film mixes traditional documentary techniques with animations and scripted scenes shot in intricately detailed sets to bring her dynamic story to life.
Opendox created film sets that reimagine Nellie’s “Playhouse,” and partnered with Kaktus Film to design and animate 3D characters in Nellie’s and her gallerist’s likenesses. Actresses, Uzo Aduba and Amy Warren, perform scripted scenes based on Nellie Mae Rowe quotes. Their recorded voices and movements make the animated Nellie and Judith come to life.
HAVE A NICE LIFE
Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s HAVE A NICE LIFE
Shot mostly in Kamalakanthan’s native North Carolina, “Have a Nice Life” is a surreal stoner comedy and road movie, tracing the unlikely friendship between Jyothi, a lonely Indian housewife (played by the director’s mother, Jagathi Kamalakanthan), and Sophie, an unemployed stoner musician (Lucy Kaminsky). After hitting dead ends in life, the pair meet by chance at a pawn shop and soon find themselves on the run from the law, together on a wild American road trip from Durham, North Carolina to Montreal, Canada.