Festival

Roze Filmdagen is the largest, longest running, most broadly programmed and most successful LGBTQ+ film festival in the Netherlands. Pink Film Days has a wide range of arthouse films and documentaries with an LGTBQ+ context. The festival will be organized for the 26^th time in 2023.

Roze Filmdagen is, after Pride Amsterdam, the largest LGBTQ+ related event in the Netherlands. The festival may have originated years ago as a very small-scale underground festival, but in recent years it has grown into a professional, iconic film festival with both a permanent crowd and a growing number of new visitors from the Netherlands and abroad with each edition.

Queer cinema has developed tremendously in recent years and fortunately this development continues unabated. We see more and more rich, layered characters and stories (both gender fluid and genre fluid), but the range that can be seen in cinemas or film theaters still lags behind the large number of quality films that are produced. The few films that now make it into the regular programming can certainly be called progress, but unfortunately the focus quickly shifts to 'guaranteed blockbusters', almost always playing in Western countries. Or the films are invisible, because the distributor chooses not to promote the LGBTQ+ theme.

This means we see an important social and artistic task for us: we fill a gap by programming many films that would otherwise unjustifiably not make it to the silver screen in the Netherlands. We show artistically high-quality stories from a multitude of countries and cultures with which the target group can identify, in which the entire LGBTQ+ community is visible, in which role models can be found, in which sexual and gender diversity are celebrated, but in which also a critical look at issues within our communties is welcomed.

Also for the coming edition, little has changed in that respect in the original objective of the festival: films from all over the world with which LGBTQ+ people can identify, are shown in a pleasant environment where people feel at home and safe.

(Arthouse) film buffs are also very welcome in this respect, to get acquainted with the rich selection of (LGBTQ+) films that are being made all over the world, yet are mostly not screened enough in the Netherlands.