Talent Development at IFFR 2025
IFFR Pro’s Talent Development schemes welcome a dynamic group of participants to Rotterdam, where they will refine their skills, expand their professional networks, and immerse themselves in the vibrant atmosphere of an international festival and its co-production market.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Rotterdam Lab returns alongside the Creative Producer Indaba and much more. Explore the exciting opportunities we’ve prepared for them.
IFFR Pro’s Talent Development schemes welcome a dynamic group of participants to Rotterdam, where they will refine their skills, expand their professional networks, and immerse themselves in the vibrant atmosphere of an international festival and its co-production market. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Rotterdam Lab returns alongside the Creative Producer Indaba and much more. Explore the exciting opportunities we’ve prepared for them.
Rotterdam Lab
Every year, IFFR Pro’s worldwide partners and collaborators nominate outstanding emerging film producers to participate in the Rotterdam Lab. Now celebrating its 25th edition, this five-day ride of panel sessions, roundtables, and networking events provides a golden opportunity for participants to refine their (co)producing craft and expand their international network.
On top of welcoming 66 producers from over 40 countries, selected through 46 partner organisations, this year for the second time – thanks to the support of Creative Europe MEDIA – we opened a call to expand further the plurality of voices, backgrounds and experience within the cohort. Selected through an open submission process that saw more than 180 applications, we are delighted to welcome: Aigerim Satybaldy (Kazakhstan), Adriana Răcășan (Romania), Emir Melek (Turkey), Frederico Mesquita (Portugal) and Valentina Arango (Chile/Colombia).
The Rotterdam Lab’s success over the past 25 years would not have been possible without the support and crucial committment of our partners. This year, we’re proud to continue collaborations with our many long-term partners and welcome new ones, including Ffilm Cymru Wales CBC, Lithuania Film Centre and New Producers Academy.
During the five days of the programme, in addition to a wide-range of networking opportunities, we’ll trace the journey that an independent international co-production goes through from the birth of the project to getting it funded and produced, up to the moment it’s shared with the world on the big screen and beyond.
One of the programme’s highlights is the annual Rotterdam Lab Co-production Case Study. There’s no better way to understand the journey of an independent film, than to explore a real-life example. One of last year’s sensations, the France, India, Netherlands and Luxembourg co-production All We Imagine as Light (IFFR 2025) was supported by the Hubert Bals Fund and selected for CineMart before it won the Grand Prix at Cannes. In this closed session we’ll be joined by the film’s writer and director Payal Kapadia, and by French producers Julien Graff and Thomas Hakim (petit chaos) and Dutch co-producer Frank Hoeve (Baldr Film).
25 Years of Rotterdam Lab
As Rotterdam Lab enters its 25th edition, it’s heartening to see just how many graduates of the workshop have gone on to take up significant careers as producers of globally-celebrated work. Nowhere else is this as obvious than in the IFFR 2025 lineup.
Two prominent Dutch titles in the programme have Rotterdam Lab connections. The Limburg-set crime-comedy Fabula by Michiel ten Horn opens IFFR 2025 and was co-produced by New Amsterdam’s Sander Verdonk (RL 2009). Aaron Rookus’s life-affirming drama De Idylle in the Big Screen Competition, and was produced by Maarten van der Ven of Studio Ruba (RL 2011). Also in the Big Screen Competition is Pirjo Honkasalo’s masterful drama Orenda, produced by 2012 graduate Mark Lwoff.
CineMart 2025 adviser and 2013 Rotterdam Lab graduate Bianca Balbuena is the Filipino co-producer on Mouly Surya’s IFFR 2025 closing film This City Is a Battlefield – a sumptuous Jakarta-set historical thriller. Elsewhere in the Limelight programme is Mercedes Stalenhoef’s beautiful cinematic take on the multifaceted experience of blindness Ik zal zien, produced by 2018 graduate Rogier Kramer. Also in the the programme is Adam Elliot’s masterful stop motion animation Memoir of a Snail, co-produced by 2012 graduate Liz Kearney.

As the party quietens in Dwayne LeBlanc’s Tiger Short Competition title Now, Hear Me Good, the silence is filled with music – produced by 2023 graduate Michael Graf. In the Short & Mid-length programme, Diogo Salgado’s Vultosos cumes is a painterly impression of a young Portuguese migrant worker’s first days in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, produced by 2023 graduate Romain Bent.
More Rotterdam Lab graduates feature across the CineMart project teams: Adiós, amor (prod. Gema Arquero), Eziko (pro. Khosie Dali), Faust (prod. Sophie Ahrens), Marseille (Rogier Kramer), Meat (prod. Deirdre Levins), Sentinel (prod. Geo Lomuntad), How Melissa Blew a Fuse (co-prod. Siniša Juričić) and Corte Culebra (co-prod. Elisa Sepúlveda Ruddoff).

The Darkroom work-in-progress platform presentes three titles with Lab producers, Bloques erráticos (prod. Rodrigo Diaz), Kaktarua (co-prod. Ivy Yu-Hua Shen) and Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes (prod. Carlos Pardo Ros).

In the spirit of this milestone anniversary, we’ve gathered 25 lessons shared by past participants, reflecting on the collaboration and shared learning that defines the Lab.
Creative Producer Indaba
Developing or seeking to collaborate with African film projects, the 15 participants include not only producers but also other film professionals aiming to enhance their entrepreneurial and leadership skills, foster their creativity, and establish valuable international networks.
The group met back in December at the Atlas Workshops during the Marrakech International Film Festival and will reunite in Rotterdam for a week of group work sessions, seminars and one-to-one meetings. As well as mingling with other emerging filmmakers and expanding their network, they’ll receive mentoring from group leaders Mehret Mandefro and Diana Elbaum, alongside the Head of Studies and Executive Director of the Realness Institute Elias Ribeiro.
The Creative Producer Indaba is a professional development programme offered by the Realness Institute, in partnership with EAVE, International Film Festival Rotterdam’s IFFR Pro and the Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops.
In celebration of the fourth edition of the Indaba, a partnership with Realness Institute, EAVE and the Atlas Workshops, IFFR takes on a mission to paint an authentic portrait of the realities, power and diversity of independent African cinema in the series Indaba In Focus.
Script Circle at IFFR Pro
A new collaboration with the Netherlands Film Fund for the upcoming festival features a special workshop with renowned script consultants Franz Rodenkirchen and Françoise von Roy from Berlin-based development studio Solace 23. They will be offering their acclaimed Script Circle process during the IFFR Pro Days, in the framework of Pulling Focus: NL 2025.
The Script Circle workshop will bring together four teams of Dutch writers/directors and producers for an in-depth discussion of their projects. Led by Franz and Françoise, the participants will take a deep dive into their projects and receive valuable guided peer-to-peer feedback.
In addition to project-specific feedback, they will also discuss broader aspects of writing visual narratives, including topics such as genre, character development and engaging audiences in innovative ways beyond traditional screenwriting techniques.
The selected projects are:
Baba
Director: Mustafa Duygulu
Writers: Mustafa Duygulu, Kevin Meul
Production Company: New Ams Film Company
Happy Days
Director: Floor van der Meulen
Writers: Floor van der Meulen, Bastiaan Kroeger
Production Company: Keplerfilm
Jelly Bean
Director: Margot Schaap
Writers: Margot Schaap, Medi Broekman
Production Company: OAK Motion Pictures
Oxytocin
Director: Joris van den Berg
Writer: Bastiaan Tichler
Production Company: PPRL
Launchpad
Stemming from a partnership between Locarno Film Festival, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and IFFR, the main purpose of the Launchpad is to facilitate access to this network of festivals to a group of emerging film professionals, while propelling their career further and wider.
Each festival, industry platform, or market has selected a group of participants who will be granted automatic access to all these events for the 12 months following their selection. They will receive free industry accreditation that will enable them to join different professional programmes and in-person networking events.
This year’s selected participants include professionals working in film funds, film festivals and events, and film curation.