Rotterdam Film Fest Sets Feminist Focus Program Celebrating 60th Anniversary of NOW

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Thursday unveiled a feminist Focus program titled “The Future Is NOW” that will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with organizers calling that “a major moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement as well as Second Wave Feminism.”

The program, set for the upcoming 55th edition of the festival, which is taking place Jan. 29-Feb. 8, will “explore women’s cinema from different periods” via a combination of classics and world premieres, organizers said. “The selections will spotlight authors, countries and practices which have historically been underexplored, with a special emphasis on animation. Subjects including education, communities and histories will be covered as part of the offering, alongside sex, religion and cinema itself.”

The Focus lineup will be anchored by the premieres of Three Ways of Returning, an omnibus project by auteurs Xiaolu Guo, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Mania Akbari, which “offers three autobiographical essays in alienation and the search for belonging” and Josephine Ahnelt’s Wellen Wende, described as “a conversational documentary comparing several women’s postpartum experiences, alongside discussions on similar subjects already had in classics like Kathleen Shannon, Irene Angelico and Anne Henderson’s short…and They Lived Happily Ever After (1975).”

Additionally, the lineup will feature Caroline Leaf and Veronika Soul’s Interview (1979) and Ulrike Putzer and Matthias van Baaren’s Casting Tapes (2020), which Rotterdam organizers described as “two of several essays on what it means to be a woman in a filmmaking environment defined by men.”

The latest IFFR selections follow recently revealed additions to the fest’s Harbour and Bright Future strands. 

“The Future Is NOW features artistic approaches outside the mainstream with a particular focus on animation as a rich source of creative output for women from the 1960s to the present,” said Jennifer Lynde Barker, a co-curator of the feminist focus lineup. “The program highlights important insights and stories about what it means to be a woman and a human being in the complex and transformative landscapes of the past six decades. From feminist interventions to beautifully crafted evocations of female pleasure, and from inspired animated visions to exuberant collaborative work, the program traces the legacies of women’s unique melding of private and public spheres.”

Additionally, the fest on Thursday unveiled its first selections for Cinema Regained, which will once again present recent restorations and works that “offer new perspectives on cinema’s past.”

Celebrating their world premiere at IFFR 2026 will be Hungarian avant-garde master Péter Lichter’s The Thing in the Coffin, an appropriated footage version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Ryan A. White and A.P. Pickle’s Mickey & Richard, “a loving portrait of ’80s gay porn icon Mickey Squires.”

Among the restorations featured will be Liao Hsiang-hsiung’s Tracing to Expo ’70, a mix of musical, travelogue and mystery, which looks at the first world exposition held in Asia, and Gerald Potterton’s Tiki Tiki (1971), described as “a crazy meta-movie featuring animated monkeys making a live-action Soviet-style fantasy epic.” Additional restorations will come from Brazil, Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the fest.

“The Future Is NOW and Cinema Regained reflect the way IFFR approaches cinema: by returning to works and histories that deserve a more attentive place in the conversation,” said Vanja Kaludjercic, festival director at IFFR. “With The Future Is NOW, we revisit a formative moment in the history of feminist movements and follow strands of women’s filmmaking — both historical and contemporary — that have often remained at the margins, across different eras, geographies and forms. Cinema Regained continues to open up new ways of reading the past, presenting restorations, archival discoveries and experiments that shift how we understand film history.”