30/01/2025 - IFFR’s head discusses the upcoming edition and the festival’s vision, blending the finest of arthouse, festival hits, and the best of Dutch cinema

(© Anne Reitsma)

Two days ahead of the start of the 54th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (30 January-9 February), we sat down with festival director Vanja Kaludjercic, who has been in charge of the Dutch gathering since 2020. During our conversation, we discussed this year’s rich programme, its star-studded Talks line-up, and the large contingent of productions with Dutch involvement, among other topics.

Cineuropa: The 2025 festival season has just kicked off, and IFFR is one of the first key events on our calendar. What should the audience expect in terms of programming? Are you still pursuing the formula of combining “avant-garde, experimental filmmaking” with “mainstream” and festival hits?
Vanja Kaludjercic: Absolutely, as one of the biggest film events in the Netherlands, we strive for that diversity and balance in the programme. Rotterdam is such a diverse city, perhaps one of the most diverse in Europe, and we do want to reflect that [diversity] by being its biggest cultural event. We’ve been cultivating this audience for over five and a half decades by now, and we do have an adventurous audience ready to embrace very different formats and types of cinema at the same time. Therefore, when we are making our programme, we aim to strike that balance. The freedom we have here, and the ability to put this programme together, is something that we cherish with pride, but also with great responsibility. For example, I think of the Spirit of Bandung conference, which commemorates its 70th anniversary, and the programme of which, 'Focus: Through Cinema We Shall Rise!', is really the first of its kind. And one of those serendipitous moments that happened this year is that we have two filmmakers world-premiering films about VHS culture at IFFR – one is Videotheek Marco by Rotterdam-based filmmaker Gyz La Rivière, and the other is Videoheaven by Alex Ross Perry, an important name in the US indie scene. We couldn’t miss the opportunity to create a dedicated programme to interrogate ourselves about the meaning and legacy of VHS culture worldwide.

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The Tiger Competition, consisting of 14 world premieres, “explores personal stories and profound connections to history, identity, and place.” Programming is always an adventure, and like wine, every year the crop differs. What about the 2025 crop? Have you noticed any specific patterns?
First of all, I’d highlight the presence of three filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia in the Tiger Competition. I’m astonished to see how idiosyncratic all three of these voices are. The first is Ivan Salatić’s Wondrous Is the Silence of My Master [+see also:
film review
interview: Ivan Salatić
film profile], which is loosely based on Petar II Petrović Njegoš, quite a huge figure in the former Yugoslavia, but not so well-known internationally. He was a bishop, a poet, and a leader in Montenegro, which was occupied by the Turks. It explores his time in exile, while also suffering from tuberculosis. With Wind, Talk to Me [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], Stefan Djordjević (Serbia) made the most intimate, beautiful film about how we are reconciling with the loss of a parent, about mourning. And then there’s Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o morte! [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], a Croatian hybrid documentary about one of the most peculiar moments in history [ed. the occupation of Fiume led by Gabriele D’Annunzio], in which he involved the local community. But our films also explore our recent political past. For example, this is beautifully done by Alexandra Makarova in Perla [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexandra Makarová
film profile]. The Slovakian, Vienna-based director very much relies on the stories that she has been told by her grandmother and her mother. The movie speaks of the time when one had to flee Czechoslovakia, back in the 1980s, and touches on mental illness, just like Tim Ellrich’s In My Parents' House [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tim Ellrich
film profile], a graduation film from Germany. Mental illness and caregiving are things that all of us at one time in our lives will have to deal with to a greater or smaller extent. And then colonial histories are also explored. We have this insane animated film titled La gran historia de la filosofía occidental by Aria Covamonas, who uses Creative Commons licensed and public domain material assembled in a collage-like fashion, resulting in something hard to categorise. Another really excellent example is The Tree of Authenticity [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Sammy Baloji, which delves into the Belgian colonisation of Congo.

Was there a specific vision you aimed to reflect in the Big Screen competition, particularly with its emphasis on “genre-blurring stories of rebellion, tradition, and expression”?
We always go after stories and cinematic expressions that don’t necessarily fit into "classical" cinema. And that happens with first-time filmmakers such as Lorenzo Pullega, director of The Rhine Gold [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. The premise of the film sees a group of Japanese Wagner fans mistakenly coming to Rome because they mistook Italy’s "little cousin" for the much more well-known German river. And there are some Fellini-esque elements to it! Then we’ve got filmmakers already known for their fantastic work. One of them is Šarūnas Bartas, who crafts a very unflinching portrait of a rural Lithuanian family in Back to the Family [+see also:
film review
film profile]. Pirjo Honkasalo returns to fiction with Orenda [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pirjo Honkasalo
film profile], in which she explores the theme of grief. Then again, politics takes centre stage, zooming in on a very specific moment in Portuguese history. In José Filipe Costa’s Our Father - The Last Days of a Dictator [+see also:
film review
interview: José Filipe Costa
film profile], we see Salazar losing his power after a stroke but still experiencing brief moments of lucidity, believing he’s still in charge. Finally, I’d like to point out the presence of two painters-turned-directors. Wilhelm Sasnal is returning to IFFR with The Assistant [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Wilhelm Sasnal
film profile], co-directed with Anka Sasnal, an amazing examination of capitalism and capitalist society, but done in a sort of anachronistic way. And it’s fun! Then another very well-known figure in the contemporary art world is Albert Oehlen, who is venturing into filmmaking more and more often. Bad Painter [+see also:
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interview: Albert Oehlen
film profile] is the first film he's made solo, and quite a hilarious one. Oehlen is played by Udo Kier, but his inner voice is that of Kim Gordon, who also stars in another role.

What role will Dutch cinema play this year across the different sidebars?
After quite a few years, we can open IFFR with Michiel ten Horn’s Fabula, a Dutch film that really is not your ordinary Dutch film, I’d say. For that matter, it’s a film that is very unorthodox in how it uses genre tropes. In Big Screen, there’s Idyllic [+see also:
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trailer
film profile] by Aaron Rookus, who is returning with his second film to IFFR. He examines a few generations of one family in a slightly ironic, but also satirically bittersweet fashion, how each of the family members is dealing with what is an existential crisis. But all across the board, there are 70 productions with Dutch involvement across immersive media works, shorts, and features.

The IFFR Talks line-up is particularly star-studded this year. How do you see the role of such conversations in complementing the festival’s programme?
The Talks are indeed an added value in terms of complementing the festival experience, but also give these unique moments in which you can learn first-hand about not only the crafts of filmmaking but the political side of things and the practices of approaching certain types of cinema, not only as a filmmaker but also as an archivist or as a cinematographer, which will be the case with the talk held by Oscar-nominated Lol Crawley, who is receiving this year’s Robby Müller Award. And, of course, we’ve got high-profile guests such as Cate Blanchett and Guy Maddin, who will discuss not only their collaboration on Rumours [+see also:
film review
film profile], but also their commitment to supporting short filmmaking talent. But then, as I say, the conversations span a wide range of topics. Totalitarianism in contemporary filmmaking and its political repercussions will be the main topic of a talk seeing the participation of Mohammad Rasoulof and queer trailblazer Albertina Carri, among others. Next, Costa-Gavras will be engaging in a conversation with Korean Film Archive curator Sungji Oh about archives. He will be showing his latest film, Last Breath, [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Costa-Gavras
film profile] but he’ll join the talk owing to his role as president of the Cinémathèque française. It’s in our DNA to give exposure to stuff that otherwise might remain unseen, unheard of, or at the margins, trying to bring it as much as possible to the forefront so that after IFFR –hopefully– it can get more exposure elsewhere.