Rotterdam Film Festival Directors Talk Diversity, Politics and IFFR’s Bold Future

Rotterdam Film Festival Directors Talk Diversity, Politics and IFFR’s Bold Future

As the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival opens its doors to audiences on Thursday — the 54th edition of the IFFR runs Jan. 30-Feb. 9 — festival director Vanja Kaludjercic and managing director Clare Stewart gave The Hollywood Reporter an insider’s look into this year’s program and the challenges faced by the festival and the independent film industry at large.

Dark comedy Fabula, by Dutch director Michiel ten Horn, about a provincial criminal grappling with personal and professional failures, will open the festival, the first Dutch movie to do so since 2018. IFFR closes with This City Is A Battlefield by Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya, a Dutch-Indonesia co-production set during the country’s fight for independence from the Dutch in 1946. The Netherlands and its former colony signed a co-production agreement in December, opening access to Dutch subsidies for Indonesian productions, including a potential 35 percent cash rebate through the Netherlands Film Production Incentive.

Cultural funding in the Netherlands has come under attack after the country’s new right-wing government coalition announced plans to slash support for several cultural institutions. Last summer, the city of Utrecht also withdrew its subsidies for the Netherlands film festival. Rotterdam, so far, has avoided similar cuts. The festival’s overall budget is actually up slightly this year to $9.8 million (€9.4 million) from $9.5 million (€9.1 million) last year.

Despite the challenges, fiscal and political, Kaludjercic and Stewart say they are determined to stay true to the IFFR’s core mission of supporting independent cinema from areas of the world often ignored or overlooked. Rotterdam “was and is focused on the representation of cinematic voices, languages, and cinemas from countries that often do not get sufficient exposure, and on the types of films that often would never find themselves in the competition of a major festival if it wasn’t for IFFR.”

What do you see as Rotterdam’s USP?

Vanja Kaludjercic: If I look at the five and a half decades that Rotterdam has been around, at the reason it was started and where we are now, I’d say the heart of Rotterdam has always been and remains discovery. This is a critical place for discovery and the nurturing of talent, of storytellers, filmmakers, and artists.

And also for the discovery within the industry, so these first-time filmmakers who come to Rotterdam can use it as this launchpad into the film industry, as a place to find the right partners and the right collaborators for their work. That discovery was and is focused on the representation of cinematic voices, languages, and cinemas from countries that often do not get sufficient exposure, and on the types of films that often would never find themselves in the competition of a major festival if it wasn’t for IFFR.

Clare Stewart The festival played a very formative role in my early development as a programmer and curator. Rotterdam was the first festival I came to outside of Australia, 25 years ago, also very much for that USP. At that time, it was already indeed the first international film festival that was working in the space of artists and filmmakers who were moving into more installation and immersive-based work, it was really ground-breaking.

How does this year’s selection reflect that Rotterdam spirit?

Vanja Kaludjercic Our closing film is an excellent example. It’s Mouly Surya’s film. She’s an Indonesian filmmaker who has a very successful and prolific career. The film, called This City is a Battlefield, is our closing film, which is also a multi-country co-production, but at the center, it’s an Indonesian and Dutch co-production. This project also was supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), and through that found a Dutch co-producer. It’s particularly significant because just this past December, the Netherlands and Indonesia signed a co-production treaty.

Clare Stewart From a business point of view, one of the strong threads running through this year’s program, is the Dutch-Indonesian connection. There are Dutch and Indonesian films throughout the overall program, including the opening and closing night films, but in all the competitive sections as well. The IFFR has always been a space for debate and reflections on geopolitics as well and this focus allows the festival to reflect on these post-colonial discussions around the Dutch relationship to Indonesia and vice versa, which is a good set of discussions to have at the same time as there’s promotion of the co-production treaty.

How political do you see your roles, given the current right-wing government in the Netherlands and the rise of far-right politics across Europe?

Vanja Kaludjercic The IFFR has always taken the view that when making our whole program, the key thing is that we have to reflect the world we live in. That inevitably will also mean that we are going to have films that reflect the political conditions around us. I also think to understand the present we have to understand our past, so that’s also something that’s reflected in the program. A good example of that is a special program we have this year dedicated to the Ukrainian filmmaker Serhiy Masloboishchykov. He’s had a 30-year-long career, he participated in IFFR Tiger competition back in 1995 with his first film and now we are bringing him back after seeing how long and rich his career has been. His last feature film, which will have its international premiere at IFFR, is called Yaza, where we really look at the critical events in Maidan Square and understand where we are today in Ukraine.

Clare Stewart From a business angle as well, the challenge of cultural institutions like the festival and its supporters is how to preserve having these open dialogs around the current political climate while having this relationship with [government] funding bodies. We feel we are in a very good place, the festival has got its next four editions secured from a funding point of view, with the [culture] ministry and the municipality [of Rotterdam]. But we see that the cultural landscape in the Netherlands is shifting, and there’s a lot more pressure, because of political shifts, on the philanthropic foundations that have traditionally supported the festival.

One thing Rotterdam is also closely associated with its international co-productions, it was a pioneer in having a co-production market and many of the co-production models we see today came out of IFFR. What role do you see Rotterdam playing in serving the financial needs of the independent film industry at the moment?

Vanja Kaludjercic: That’s a very good question because we are asking ourselves the same thing. When you look at the number of co-productions out there, the Dutch are one of the most prolific co-producers in Europe, next to France, Germany, and a few other countries. And we think the co-production market can really reflect the idea we have in our official program as well, the idea of supporting the diversity of stories, of cinematic languages that we can we can support.

You see that in the co-production market but also in our Dark Room selection, which are works-in-progress screenings. There we have a focus on Georgia, because a number of Georgian filmmakers in the past few years, have been unable to get any support from the state because of the political director of the government. So here we can at least offer space, support, and exposure for those filmmakers.

Clare Stewart And this is a year-round thing, in different ways we support these filmmakers, help them develop and broaden their connections and networks. Strategically we are trying to focus on filmmakers who don’t have easy routes to soft money, or who are in a climate where, politically, it’s difficult to tell their stories. We are trying to find ways to better activate our alumni, the incredible alumni of the HBF and the CineMart to support that too.

What’s the one film or event you are most excited about this year?

Vanja Kaludjercic There is one film that is quite incredible in our Big Screen competition. It’s from José Filipe Costa: Our Father, the Last Days of Dictator. It’s about the last days of the [Portuguese dictator] Salazar. By the time he had a stroke, late in his life, he’d already lost power but in his final days, he believed that he was still president of Portugal, and his whole staff and his doctors maintained the pretense, that he was still the dictator.

Clare Stewart I’m very excited to be hosting our talk between Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin. We will have a special screening of Rumours in the festival. For me, it really connects to what we were talking about regarding Rotterdam’s USP because it was an IFFR that I first came across Guy in person. He’s an exemplary IFFR filmmaker in so many ways because the IFFR has such a strong emphasis on short films and his shorts are so key to his work. The festival did a retrospective on him in 2003 just as he was doing his early forays into installation work. And Cate, as someone who has always maintained an interest in both short films and artists’ moving image work and installations, makes her a great fit. I love that their collaboration on this crazy, wacky film, Rumours gives us an opening to talk about their commitment to this kind of work, which is very much part of what IFFR stands for.