The Rotterdam film festival has announced jury members jury and competition selections for the VPRO Tiger Awards.

Three winners will be chosen from fifteen features by a jury that comprises: the artist Marlene Dumas; the Turkish film maker Yesim Ustaoglu; the Hungarian film maker Kornel Mundruczo; and Park Ki-Yong, filmmaker and director of the Film Academy in Seoul.

In the short-film competition, the jury comprises Malaysian film maker Tan Chui Mui; Maria Pallier, buyer and a programme maker for the Spanish broadcasting company TVE; and British journalist, curator and artist George Clark.

New in Competition

Among the films selected for the 2009 VPRO Tiger Awards Competition are:

  • Dogging: A Love Story by Simon Ellis (United Kingdom), in which a boy from Newcastle becomes acquainted with the world of car-park sex;
  • Be Calm And Count To Seven by Ramtin Lavafipour (Iran), a feature made with a contribution from the Hubert Bals Fund about smugglers on an Iranian island;
  • Dark Harbour by Japan's Naito Takatsugu, about life in a small Japanese fishing village;
  • Breathless by South Korea's Yang Ik-June about the relationship between a merciless gangster and a cheeky schoolgirl; and
  • No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti by Tawain's Leon Dai, about a father who is in danger of losing his daughter because of his life as a vagrant.

The complete competition will be announced in early January.

World premières

World premieres at Rotterdam include:

  • Film Ist. A Girl & A Gun a new musical of archive film images put together by Austrian Gustav Deutsch
  • Armenian director Harutyan Khachatryan's Border which shows everyday village against the background of Armenian-Azerbaijani border conflicts; and
  • the documentary Fixer:The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi by Us director Ian Olds which shows revealing images about the work and tragic fate of a 'fixer' hired by journalists in Afghanistan.