08/08/2011

A new film festival in the Dutch capital, the Amsterdam Film Week, is being planned for November, organisers have announced.

The Netherlands have several major film festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January, which focuses on young filmmakers and experimental works, the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht in September, a showcase for local films, and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in November, one of the world’s largest non-fiction film festivals.

But the Dutch capital lacks a large fiction-feature festival, and the Amsterdam Film Week is intended to fill that gap.

The first edition will be held from October 4-9, and will be less arthouse-oriented than the Rotterdam festival. “It should be an audience festival,” spokeswoman Maria Lam told Dutch film monthly Filmkrant. “That’s why we will provide a 'best-of' programme that brings together films that have been awarded over the course of the season. The audience will select the winner of the Adam, the award for best film of the year.”

The programme will comprise around 35 features. “We want to show some new and smaller films,” Lam explained, “but most of the films will have already been released commercially.” Some titles that have already been confirmed include The King’s Speech [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tom Hooper
film profile], The Ghost Writer [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The Tree of Life.

The aim of the festival is to give busy city-dwellers an opportunity to catch up, in a festival setting, with quality titles that they may have missed.

The festival does not rely on any state or city subsidies. Instead, it hopes to close its budget by relying on private-sector sponsors and crowd-funding.