The International Film Festival Rotterdam is marking its fortieth year with a look back and forward, and in particular at the current state of affairs and the future. Under the motto 'XL', the festival’s anniversary programme will embrace home port Rotterdam by making use of forty locations, including the new LantarenVenster cinema.
In addition, Frank Scheffer is making the documentary Tiger Eyes to mark forty years of IFFR; the festival is issuing an anniversary DVD boxed set and the festival website will be focusing on forty moments from the festival’s history. Future festival-goers will be welcome at Not Kidding, a playful programme for budding film buffs aged four up. The 40th IFFR opens on 26 January 2011.
Forty years of IFFR
Following an initiative by the Rotterdamse Kunststichting [Rotterdam Foundation for the Arts], Huub Bals organised the very first Film International – later renamed IFFR – in 1972. Bals' knowledge of and passion for cinema made the festival a regular attraction for film-lovers and filmmakers. Bals and those who followed in his footsteps to make the festival what it is today strove to create a bond between filmmakers and their audiences. Over the intervening forty years, the festival has become one of the biggest, most popular and most well-known cultural events in the Netherlands. The festival also receives a great deal of international appreciation for its clearly artistic profile and active support of filmmakers.
Festival director Rutger Wolfson on how IFFR will be celebrating this anniversary: "IFFR has always been dynamic, progressive and faithful to its origins. The festival still reflects, from a wide range of film art perspectives, what is going on in the world. Visitors and international guests flock to Rotterdam because of the festival’s focus on new developments, new films and the new insights revealed by these. For many years, IFFR has been living proof that a large-scale event can be combined with a high-quality, progressive artistic policy and an outward-looking philosophy. Now we are celebrating forty years of IFFR, I want to mark the occasion with an ‘extra large’ celebration in the city that has always embraced the festival in its bosom."