The International Film Festival Rotterdam has announced today that its 41st edition will open on January 25 with the world premiere of Lucas Belvaux's seventh film, 38 témoins (38 Witnesses). The synopsis: "Louise (Sophie Quinton) returns home to discover that while she was away on business in China her street was the scene of a crime. There were no witnesses. Apparently everybody was asleep. Pierre, Louise's husband (Yvan Attal) was at work. Apparently."
The festival will close on February 4 with Daniel Nettheim's sophomore feature, The Hunter, which "tells the story of Martin (Willem Dafoe), a mercenary sent from Europe by a mysterious bio-tech company to the Tasmanian wilderness on a hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger." The Hunter, based on the novel by Julia Leigh (Sleeping Beauty), also features Frances O'Connor and Sam Neill. When The Hunter premiered in Toronto, Megan Lehmann wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that it "taps into questions of solitude and loneliness, obsession and repression of emotion, all tied up with an eco-conscious bow…. Like the magnificent old-growth forests of its Tasmanian wilderness setting, Nettheim's deliberately paced film is atmospheric and full of mystery, giving up its secrets reluctantly."
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