Rotterdam Film Festival

The Rotterdam Film Festival is quite an event. I just returned from a whirlwind trip there, where VIVA was having its official WORLD PREMIERE. Six of us went, and it's a trip no one will ever forget.
When we arrived a car took us straight to the Doelen, the festival center. It's this giant building with escalators with three main floors, and a full bar on each floor and a cafe on the bottom floor. It also contains three large theaters. On all three main floors at all times of the day and night people are snacking, drinking, smoking, and talking about film. It's very chic, very stylish and very international. I was told by the press desk on arrival that I had many requests for interviews the next day. We went to our hotel briefly to check in, then back to the Doelen for "director's drinks," a little dinner, and an industry party.
The party took place in another building, "Engels," which was very 60's space age, and looked like something out of VIVA. Endless white rooms with colored lights and little tables, bars in every room, white cube couches, mod decorations. Hundreds of people, room after room of mod hip industry people and film directors. Wall to wall style, wall to wall alcohol and Euro music. A giant dance floor with a band playing techno, samba, etc.
I had good attention from press there. I appeared on both festival talk shows, was the film tip of the day, and was on the cover of the festival newspaper, The Daily Tiger. People seemed inspired by my character in the movie, and wanted to photograph me that way. It was so Euro-sexy! They kept posing me with whiskey and cognac and cigarettes. For the cover shoot they took me to a seedy bar and out me in a slip. For the late night talk show, they asked me about pubic hair, played my naughtiest film clips, and had me sing a jazz song. The talk show organizers had come up to me that day in the Doelen, and asked, "Do you want to sing a song?" So I thought, "Why not?" I sang Lullaby of Birdland, and the crowd seemed to love it. Very silly, as it had nothing to do with the film, but I guess they wanted to create whatever fun they could on their talk show. That would never happen at a fim festival in the U.S.!


There was a photo shoot for a Russian magazine on a platform with colored lights, where hundreds of people poured out of a theater while we were shooting, and they all took out their cameras and started snapping. And an "art" shoot with a Belgian photographer for his book, where I was posed in twisted positions smoking a cigarette, told to look vacant, and invited to pose nude for future shoots.


Needless to say, there was no time to watch films, which was quite a shame. The one day I hopped over to Amsterdam I was immediately bombarded with more interview requests, and had to furiously write down answers on the train back and type them during my last screening, barely making it for the Q and A.
My premiere was screened late at night and the crowd was laughing uproariously for about an hour. Then the vibe got very strange, as they realized it was not just comedy and it got too weird for them. They staggered out from the theater like, as my boyfriend Robert puts it, "mice that have been hit over the head." The second two screenings went very well, with a cult-type response. From those screenings we got some invitations to festivals, Melbourne most significantly, and some invitations to send screeners. And we met some very exciting people.
The closing party was like the other party, room after room of people, hundreds upon hundreds, having a great time. They really know how to have a good time in the Netherlands! The interactions seemed honest and real, the energy was high, and the focus was always on culture, its shifts, changes, trends. It was never about industry really, never about money, but always about film, even when sales agents were involved. What a refreshing festival.