Dead & Beautiful, by Dutch director David Verbeek, is a production between the Netherlands (Lemming Film), Taiwan (House on Fire International), Croatia (Nukleus Film) and China (Woods of Light). 

According to the IFFR’s website, this is one of David Verbeek’s most ambitious projects, while the film is the director’s second collaboration with Croatian production house Nukleus Film (and Jaako dobra produkcija), following their work on Full Contact, which screened in the Minority Co-production programme of the 63rd Pula Film Festival in 2016. Full Contact was shot on a series of locations around Croatia, under the Croatian Audiovisual Centre’s incentives programme Filming in Croatia. In addition, Nukleus Film also participated in the production of Verbeek’s An Impossibly Small Object (2018), which involved the participation of about ten Croatian members of the film crew, including costume designer Zorana Meić, makeup artist Silvia Bradica and actress Klara Mučibabić.   

Dead & Beautiful is a story of spoiled rich teenagers who realize they have turned into vampires after a strange night out. Bewildered at first, they begin to question whether they can still trust each other.   

David Verbeek’s latest title will have its world premiere on Friday, 5th Feb, while the online screening will be available to Dutch audiences via the festival VoD platform until 8th Feb. More details about the film are available here. 

In addition to Dead & Beautiful, the Limelight section will also screen Bosnia & Herzegovina Oscar nomination candidate Quo vadis, Aida? directed by Jasmila Žbanić. More information about all the titles in the section is available here. 

This year’s edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam is divided into two segments: the first segment is taking place right now, 1st–7th February, while the second segment is scheduled to run 2nd–6th June. In addition to online film screenings, the first portion of IFFR offers offline content in the form of an interactive exhibition currently on show across Rotterdam, as well as an exhibition at the Amsterdam EYE Film Museum. For more details about the schedule of the 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam, visit the official website.

In 2019, Croatian-born Vanja Kaluđerčić became the new director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Apart from Rotterdam, production house Nukleus Film will also appear in the TV Drama Vision programme which is part of the Göteborg Film Festival’s industry platform, with the Croatian TV series in development, The Abyss. Last year, the crime drama project was presented at CineLink Drama, the Sarajevo Film Festival’s industry programme, where it won the TV Drama Vision Pitch Award that earned it the participation in the programme at the Göteborg Film Festival. The show’s creator and writer is Marjan Alčevski, with Mladen Dizdar as director, and Siniša Juričić (Nukleus Film) as producer.

Cover photographs: scene from Dead & Beautiful