“This is the best time of Rotterdam”, Jaap, a Dutch friend of mine, who is working as a volunteer for the 35^th International Film Festival Rotterdam said so, with a big hang over after an all night long party in the Grand Hotel Central.

I was not as lucky as him having a chance to work for the festival, but I guess like everybody living in Rotterdam, I was trying to be involved as much as possible in this big event of the city. What I did was to simply enjoy the movies! In order to economically enjoy a lot of films within twelve days, I first spent ten euros to get a tiger pass so that I could save three euros on each movie. Then I picked up twelve films, one film one day on average. It was not easy at all to choose only twelve movies out of hundreds of films, but I did try to get tickets of all the Chinese films participating in the festival; although I went to the ticket office the next day after the film festival opening, tickets of some films had been already sold out, Chinese ones included, for example the “Grain in Ear”, a prize winner in Cannes, a story about a poor Chinese-Korean mother whose husband is in jail, making friends with a cop and having an affair with a married man.

Finally I bought tickets of five Chinese films, including “Walking on the Wild Side” by Han Jie and “Taking Father Home” by Ying Liang, both of which were in this year’s competition of VPRO Tiger Awards. And so pleased to hear yesterday that one of the tigers went to Han Jie, congratulations, although I didn’t really like it in a way. It’s a movie full of energy, the energy of Chinese young generation in contemporary China, a society full of contradictions. But to me, the director put too much in one single story. As what I asked to Han Jie in the Q&A at the end of the screening, it was like skimming a Chinese newspaper when I saw the film: somebody was robbed and killed in this city, while the mine of that province collapsed. However, he put all these sad stories into this 89-minute long movie. China is a huge country, what’s the point to reflect all the social problems in only one movie story?

Regarding to this, I prefer “Taking Father Home” which in my opinion was more rough and authentic, or maybe also because it was shoot in Sichuan Province where I came from and I felt so close hearing my dialect in the movie. Besides “Taking Father Home”, there was actually another Chinese film called “Dam Street” about a story also in Sichuan, but I saw it before the film festival, by a one-euro Chinese fake DVD I bought in Beijing last November. However I can imagine if I had seen it in the film festival, it could be totally different to me from watching it on my laptop at home, because after seeing so many non-commercial films from all over the world within such a short period of time, just like having had an intensive workshop, everyone can become more sensitive and critical to films.