An arts foundation, a Utrecht cinema man and a June opening, 1972.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam, now known by its initials IFFR, began in 1972 under another name. The festival’s own short history says it was an initiative of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation, and that Film International, as it was first called, showcased films that had been bought for distribution to the newly established circuit of art-house cinemas in the Netherlands. English Wikipedia’s page on the festival says the first edition took place in June 1972 under its founder, Hubert “Huub” Bals, and that the early programme championed alternative, non-commercial films, with particular attention to the Far East and to developing countries.

Wikipedia’s biography of Bals describes a career in cinemas in his home city of Utrecht before Rotterdam, where he organised special film weeks and, from 1966, the Cinemanifestatie festival for the Wolff cinema group. It says Adriaan van Staay, managing director of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation, asked him to create Film International on the model of the foundation’s Poetry International, joining a festival to a distribution company, and that the first edition opened on 28 June 1972 at the Calypso cinema. The same page says the festival was first held in June and later moved to the winter; today it runs at the end of January into early February, and the festival dates its 55th edition to 29 January–8 February 2026.

The festival names the city in its title and uses it in its imagery. Wikipedia lists screening venues that include the Pathé cinema on the Schouwburgplein, the concert hall De Doelen, Cinerama, WORM, the Oude Luxor Theater, the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, KINO and LantarenVenster.

A founder’s name on a fund and a run of directors.

Bals led the festival until 1988. The Flemish-Dutch cultural review Ons Erfdeel, in an article by Gerdin Linthorst on the twentieth festival, held from 24 January to 3 February 1991, described him as the festival’s initiator, director and driving force, who had died suddenly in 1988. The festival’s own history calls him a “famous figurehead and inspirational director” who gave it a reputation for active support of independent cinema and as a meeting place for filmmakers, audiences, professionals and critics.

His name lives on in the Hubert Bals Fund, which supports filmmakers from Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. Wikipedia, citing the festival and Variety, says the fund was initiated after his death in 1988 and named after him, and the festival dates it to that year. Ons Erfdeel, writing in 1991, said the fund had been set up the previous year in his memory and called it small but active. Wikipedia also records a co-production market, CineMart, which grew out of a regular film market the festival set up in the 1980s.

The festival lists its directors after Bals as Anne Head in 1989, Marco Müller from 1990 to 1991, Emile Fallaux, Simon Field, Sandra den Hamer, Rutger Wolfson from 2008 to 2015, Bero Beyer from 2015 to 2020 and Vanja Kaludjercic since 2020. Ons Erfdeel described Müller, who had previously run the Pesaro festival, as travelling the world for Rotterdam in search of unknown work by promising young talent, in the line Bals had set.

A tiger that stares straight at the viewer.

Many film festivals let an object stand in for a logo. The prize handed to winners is often drawn from something tied to the place, such as a plant, an animal, a shell or a local craft material, and once it has been photographed in enough winners’ hands it becomes the shape people recognise. That puts the designer in an unusual position: the mark has to work as a flat outline on a ticket or a lanyard and as a solid thing made of metal, glass or crystal that can be held up on a stage. When the outline is redrawn, the physical trophy usually follows more slowly, because new pieces have to be made, and for a time old and new versions can appear side by side.

The festival also speaks before every screening. A short sting or trailer, often only a few seconds long, plays ahead of each film and is seen many times by the same audience over a week, so it tends to be simple, quick to read and easy to sit through again. Some festivals commission a new one each year from a studio, a school or a guest artist; others keep the same sequence for decades until regulars greet it by reflex. The yearly poster works on a different timescale. It is announced months ahead, printed in many sizes, hung in shop windows and on hoardings around the town, and later collected and archived, which gives each edition its own picture while the name, the prize and the sting carry over from year to year.

From a Max Kisman logo to a 75B tiger and woven campaigns.

The festival’s main prize is the Tiger Award. The current form of the mark was announced in a festival press release dated 30 October 2008. It said the new logo combined a tiger’s head with the festival’s name in capitals, both in black and white, and that it would gradually replace the logo designed by Max Kisman that had been in use since 1996. The release said the tiger “makes eye contact, stares straight at you and evokes a reaction”, and that this gaze would sometimes recall the festival posters made in the 1980s and 1990s by the Rotterdam design collective Hard Werken. It described the name beneath the head as set in capitals with slightly rounded corners, of the kind often used in film and video subtitling.

The release credited the design to the Rotterdam agency 75B, which had made the 2008 campaign image and had first worked with the festival in 2003 on a publication for the fifteenth anniversary of the Hubert Bals Fund. It said black and white would be the basic colours for the logo and the 2009 campaign, a deliberate alternative in an era of full-colour graphics. ASEF culture360, reporting on 29 April 2009 after the 38th edition, said the new tiger appeared on the cover of all official publications and at all festival venues, and that it was part of a wider overhaul under Rutger Wolfson, who split the programme into three sections.

The partnership has lasted. A festival release of 30 October 2025 describes the 2026 campaign as a parade of tigers woven from thread, materials and patterns, set into photographs of Rotterdam locations including Centraal Station, the Hef bridge, the Maastunnel, Katendrecht and Cinerama. It credits Rens Muis of 75B, which it calls a collaborator since 2009, working with Kaludjercic, and quotes her saying the tigers are made of various threads “just like the festival itself”.

For a design guide, IFFR shows how a festival can keep one animal and change its material each year while holding to a stark black-and-white base. Compare the Locarno Film Festival, which Marco Müller directed after Rotterdam, and the Berlinale, another festival held in the winter months. For this guide we use tiger black, tiger orange and screen white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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