U.S. indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s long-awaited work Videoheaven, celebrating video stores in Hollywood cinema, will world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
The film, which has been more than a decade in the making, comes hot on the heels of Pavements, which debuted at Venice this year, and follows festival hits such as Listen Up Philip and Her Smell.
The Videoheaven world premiere was announced by Rotterdam as part of one of four Focus strands in its 54th edition, running from January 30 to February 9, 2025.
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The film will be unveiled in a Focus strand entitled “Hold Video in Your Hand”, celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture.
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Other works in the selection include Rotterdam filmmaker Gyz’s Videotheek Marco, an investigation into local video store history and connected audiovisual activities like community television.
The program also includes Indian documentary Videokaaran (2011) and David Cronenberg’s latest work The Shrouds (2024), as well as interactive projects inviting Rotterdam citizens to share their personal home video stories, creating a communal cinematic experience.
Two other Focus strands are retrospectives devoted to the work of Croatian-German documentarian Katja Raganelli and Ukrainian auteur Sergii Masloboishchykov respectively.
There will also be a thematic Focus taking its cue from the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, which marked the first large-scale Asian-African conference and united 29 countries, many of which had only recently gained independence.
“With these four programmes, IFFR 2025 offers a distinctive platform where cinematic artistry meets socio-political discourse and cultural reflection,” said IFFR Director Vanja Kaludjercic.
The focus on Croatian-born German documentary filmmaker Raganelli will put the spotlight on her extensive body of work on public television exploring the history of women in filmmaking, but often aired only once.
The retrospective will screen her portraits of female filmmakers including Margery Wilson, Valie Export, Delpine Seyrig, Agnès Varda, Márta Mészáros as well as pioneers such as Alice Guy-Blaché and Lotte Reiniger, alongside complementary titles from those filmmakers themselves.
The Masloboishchykov retrospective will feature the international premiere of his latest work, Yasa (2023). The director’s films, spanning fiction and documentary formats, capture Ukraine’s evolution, with subjects ranging from the Maidan protests to chronicling the ongoing Russian invasion
The retrospective will see the director return to IFFR three decades after he attended with his debut fiction feature, Josephine, the Singer and the Mice People (1994), which will be screened as part of the program alongside titles including Own Voice (2016).
The Bandung Conference themed strand will screen a selection of films that played in the short-lived Afro-Asian Film Festival – held three times in Tashkent (1958), Cairo (1960) and Jakarta (1964) – which grew out of the meeting in Indonesia.
IFFR said the thematic exploration reinforced it commitment “to unearthing the stories of the colonized and dispossessed while celebrating Indonesia’s cultural contributions, a nation closely tied to Rotterdam’s diverse heritage.”