Rotterdam Industry Head Marten Rabarts Talks First Year At Helm

The Rotterdam Film Festival’s IFFR Pro industry program kicks off Friday under the fresh direction of new head Marten Rabarts.

The New Zealand-born film festival and labs circuit stalwart returns to the Netherlands – where he was previously artistic director of the Binger Filmlab and head of promotional body SeeNL – after five years away.

In between, he took the reins of the Whanau Marama – New Zealand International Film Festival for two years and then worked as a script mentor on Jane Campion’s A Wave In The Ocean Lab, with his other myriad roles including Head of Development and Training at India’s National Film Development Corporation.

Rabarts now brings this international experience and local knowledge to bear in the industry program, spanning the 42-year-old CineMart coproduction market and producer-focused Rotterdam Lab, as well as newer initiatives such as the Darkroom works-in-progress showcase.

“Our feeling is that we need to get back to the DNA and core of what Rotterdam does, namely finding filmmakers from parts of the world who don’t necessarily have the red carpet rolled out to them, with challenging stories and projects that push boundaries of the language of cinema itself,” he says.

Another priority is rekindling IFFR Pro’s trademark conviviality that took a hit during the pandemic and was curtailed again in 2024 due to renovations to its main venue of the Doelen concert hall complex.

“It’s not just about the selection but also all those informal networking events that Rotterdam is known for…  there will be the lunches, the drinks and the famous industry party,” says Rabarts.

CineMart will present 20 feature film projects and four immersive works from February 2 to 5, while another 12 works-in-progress will be showcased in the Darkroom strand.  (See full lists below)

Rabarts reveals that involvement in the Floodlight Summit in Colombia, spearheaded by Alesia Weston and Philippa Kowarsky, helped inform the selection process.

The Cartagena-set event – which invites top investigative journalists to present their reporting to producers, screenwriters and filmmakers for potential adaptations – showed him the industry’s appetite for stories touching on burning issues of the day, he says.

“As these intense, powerful stories were being told… the feedback from industry was, ‘This is what we’ve been looking for’,” recounts Rabarts. “We live in a world that’s on fire. People need to feel they’re getting out of bed and turning their talents to something that matters.

“We kept this very much in mind and it became a key parameter for our decision-making, resulting in a wonderful lineup of projects that all have real meaning in terms of the challenges that we face globally and in different parts of our societies, and that for me feels like going back the DNA of Rotterdam.”

Examples of this, he says, are Enkop (The Soil) by Kenyan filmmaker Angela Wanjiku, a female-driven, neo-western set in Kenya’s volatile ranch land territory, and South African directors Babalwa Baartman and Jenna Cato Bass’s noir Eziko, about a young academic who journeys into the rural Eastern Cape in search of her long-lost sister. 

“They’re two films by women directors in Africa, which is already unusual in itself. These are stories we need to understand the continent… and what filmmakers and artists are needing to speak to in their societies in Africa,” he said.

The Ukraine war also looms large with Something Strange Happened to Me, in which a mother turns to alternative therapies to terms with the trauma of losing her son defending their village from the Russian invasion.

It’s the second feature by Ukrainian auteur Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, whose first film Pamfir made waves in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

A more subtle global political undercurrent running through the submissions and selection is a sense of anxiety within the LGBTQ community, says Rabarts.

“It was manifesting in terms of stories that were being presented that dealt with dystopian near futures. It wasn’t just one, it was a handful of these. You see a whole community anxious about what may be in their future,” he says.

“Cheryl Dunye’s Black Is Blue as example of this. It’s a trans-android near future. All you have to do, is look at what’s been happening in U.S. politics with the swing to the right and I think that is a direct manifestation of anxiety about the future.”

Quizzed on whether there will be audience appetite for issue-led stories at a time when many spectators may be looking for a way to take their minds off reality, Rabarts stresses that none of the projects is didactic.

“They’re not writing an essay for us to understand the world is on fire. They’re not dark and gloomy. You mentioned the Ukrainian film. It has the potential to be one of the most deeply moving examinations of grief and traumatic stress disorder based on a war, in a way that is very delicate and beautifully handled. It reels you into a space of such intimacy and sensitivity,” he says.

Works-in-Progress

 The Darkroom – presenting ten feature and two immersive works-in-progress – is equally tapped into the zeitgeist with a special focus on Georgia, where filmmakers are pondering their future under the rule of the populist, pro-Russia Georgian Dream GD party.

“It’s part of our policy to support entire industries that are in some sort of crisis whether it be financial or political,” says Rabarts. “Georgian filmmakers are under great pressure right now because of the changes of government and then not knowing what’s going on in terms of what will be culturally supported or not.”

These projects span Uta Beria’s Tear Gas, a love story set against the backdrop of anti-GD protests; Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, in which a man goes in search of his photographer daughter who goes missing while working on a project about village soccer teams, and Rati Oneli’s revenge thriller Wild Dogs Don’t Bite.

Other projects in the selection include Chilean director Thomas Woodroffe’s Bloques Erráticos about the director of a 1925 film on Patagonia, who awakes in the Tierra de Fuego to find a new technocratic society and the vestiges of an indigenous past, and comedy romance Sorella di Clausura by Serbian filmmaker Ivana Mladenovic (Ivana the Terrible).

As ever, the work of Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), headed byTamara Tatishvili, is also woven into the project selections.

In CineMart, four projects have received HBF support: Enkop, Kamila Andini’s Four Seasons in Java (her second film after Berlinale breakout Before, Now & Then), Una Gunjak’s How Melissa Blew A Fuse and Ana Elena Tejera’s Corte Culebra.

The Darkroom features three HBF grantees: Indian director Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Bayaan and the Georgian projects Tear Gas and Wild Dogs Don’t Bite.

The fund enjoyed a high-profile year in 2024 thanks to the festival successes of past grantee films including Payal Kapadia’s Cannes breakout All We Imagine As Light, Laila Abbas’s Thank You For Banking With Us! and Neo Sora’s Happyend.

“Hubert Bals fund and our CineMart selection this year were in lockstep together. We had wonderful, wonderful projects that happened to have been supported by Hubert Bals Fund. and it delighted us to able to program them,” says Rabarts.

“The fund is another source of understanding of what’s going on in different parts of the world, like Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It’s almost like an informal scout for us. We’re very much tuned into the fact that the fund is clearly supporting CineMart type festival type projects,” he continues. “It’s an alliance we want to build on.”

Closer to home, IFFR Pro will also host its first Dutch Day this year to support local professionals. It kicks of with a conversation with director Ena Sendijarević and Renée Soutendijk, who collaborated on the film Sweet Dreams, moderated Giona Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival which premiered the title in 2022.

The day will also explore the Netherlands prowess as a co-production partner with a panel featuring . Stienette Bosklopper (Baby), Erik Glijnis (Sebastian), Denis Vaslin (Youth: Trilogy), and Ineke Smits (Holy Electricity).

Rising Producers

Beyond the project and work-in-progress line-ups, the other big IFFR Pro draw is the five-day Rotterdam Lab, a networking, mentoring and incubator event focused on producers at the beginning their careers, which is marking its 25th edition this year.

Alumni include the Philippines’ Bianca Balbuena, who is at the festival this year with closing film This City is a Battlefield; Erik Hemmendorff (Triangle of Silence), Jonas Dornbach (Maria), Bettina Brokemper (Daughters) and Mia Bays who is currently director of the BFI Filmmaking Fund.

This year’s 71 participants include the UK’s Hollie Bryan (The Ceremony), Saudi Arabia’s Jawaher Alamri (The Girls who Burned the Night), Germany’s Sandra Müller (4 Könige) as well as Zola Elgart Glassman (High Heat) and Eli Raskin (Blue Sun Palace).

Rabarts has tweaked the schedule slightly this year, splitting the European and non-European attendees for an initial session aimed at getting both groups up to speed on the other’s different funding and producing environments.

“They’ll both be levelled up with each other, so that as they continue through the lab, they’ll be speaking much the same language,” he explains.

Rabarts is plotting a new Writers and Directors Lab to run alongside the Producers Lab from 2026: “It will use the same format of bringing high level expertise, veterans from the industry, who share their knowledge and give back.”

IFFR Pro runs from January 30 to February 9.

Full Selections

CineMart 2025

CineMart Immersive selection 2025

Darkroom