Expat Cinema Rotterdam

🚨⏰ Heads up! This film will start at 18:50, not our usual start time of 19:00

► ABOUT THE FILM
Before he became one of world cinema’s most decorated and shape-shifting directors, Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) was already quietly redefining what intimate, domestic storytelling could look like.

In 1994, he made Eat Drink Man Woman, a warm and exquisitely crafted portrait of a widowed master chef in Taipei and his three very different daughters. Set around elaborate Sunday dinners — each dish prepared with almost spiritual precision — the film turns food into a language for everything the characters struggle to say: love, disappointment, generational change, and longing. Beneath its gentle humour lies a subtle examination of tradition colliding with modernity, and of family bonds that both nourish and constrain us.

With its sensual attention to ritual and its emotional restraint, Eat Drink Man Woman revealed Lee’s extraordinary sensitivity to interior lives — a gift that would soon propel him to major international success.

► ABOUT THE FILM
April 1945. On the remote German Wadden island of Amrum, everything is in short supply during the final weeks of the war. Twelve-year-old Nanning, forced to be the “man of the house,” must do whatever it takes to provide food for his heavily pregnant mother, his younger brother and sister, and his aunt. Despite the hardships, life on the beautiful, windswept island feels almost like paradise. But when peace finally arrives, Nanning finds himself struggling with his parents’ Nazi beliefs and with those on the island who oppose them.

Amrum is a poignant coming-of-age drama by German director Fatih Akin, known for Gegen die Wand and Aus dem Nichts. He reunites here with Diane Kruger, who plays a young farmer resisting the Nazis. The film is inspired by the childhood memories of Akin’s friend and mentor Hark Bohm, who wrote the novel of the same name. Young German actor Jasper Billerbeck delivers a compelling debut performance as Nanning. The film had its world premiere in the prestigious Cannes Premieres section at the Cannes Film Festival. In Germany, Amrum became a major success and one of Akin’s most widely attended films.