Room 2017

It’s every director’s nightmare: to return home without your material. This is exactly what happened to director Rob Smits. At the beginning of Room 2017 we find him in a hotel room in Taipei. He has just returned from a trip to the Yanomami Indians in the deep green of Venezuela. Few men with a camera had spent time with this fierce tribe before him. But money talks, even in the wildest jungle, and on the day of his departure all but one of Smits’ tapes were confiscated. Drifting through Taipei, capturing cityscapes that express his disorientation in a way that reminds us of Wenders’ documentary Tokyo-Ga, Smits has to ask himself the desperate question: ‘How to make a film with no footage?