DAY 2

On the second day of the festival, the reporters split up to cover more ground:

As I enter @droog, the venue for the Saturday evening block “Four Turns Right, One Turn Left”, the contrast is immediate. Moving from the oldest movie theatre in Amsterdam to a sleek, minimalist gallery space gives me a bit of whiplash, but ginger beer is on the menu all the same, a welcome boon on such a hot day.

Some of the faces remain unchanged as well. Organizers are still hard at work, and even filmmakers who have already screened their work on opening night are now in the audience, able to enjoy the works of their peers without the stress of being on the stage. Some are wearing nametags – remnants from the networking event that had just ended. As we pile into the screening room, I think back to De Uitkijk’s classic single red theatre chairs, here replaced by seating on a staircase covered in cushions. The spirit of cinema is not missing, though, as thick, red, Lynchian curtains surround the entire room, now full of filmmakers, their friends, parents, younger siblings, and other student film enthusiasts of all ages.

This block, described as twisting, tweaking and reversing the world, is about challenging reality.  Films: Nur Geträumt, V’s Secret, Hou je Nog Steeds van Mij? / Do You Still Love Me?, Super Duper Mega Fan, Straight Forward, Firby Nurbs, Apple Shot / Apfelschuss, Niksnut.

Shortly after the screening, the filmmakers themselves take the stage for a Q&A session hosted by Marco Borkent.

Eva Vollebregt & Elena Vlaminck (Firby Nurbs), Lucas Tepper (Straight Forward), Fynn Blommaert (Hou je Nog Steeds van Mij? / Do You Still Love Me?), Sando Heijnen (Nur Geträumt), and Len ter Laak, DoP of Hou Je Nog Steeds van Mij?

Most of the films screened deal with dark and heavy topics – abusive family dynamics, homophobia, or the very question of free will – but as the host of the discussion points out, all do so in a colorful, witty, and even humorous way. How did the creators find the final voice for their films?

Eva Vollebregt and Elena Vlaminck, two of three creators of Firby Nurbs, a multilayered essay film exploring the role of religion and science in our world, laugh at the question and reveal that the film was created as an essay film for a Minor (Creative Strategies for Society and Change) at Leiden University, emerging from a mountain of spontaneous footage and ideas: “There’s no real voice here, I think.” Meanwhile, director Fynn Blommaert explains that the team behind Hou je Nog Steeds van Mij? / Do You Still Love Me? got randomly assigned a box with a genre and a style: musical and expressionism.

The constraints of assigned projects, however, gave the artists something to push against. Firby Nurbs features extended sequences of footage from The Sims,  providing, as Vollebregt and Vlaminck put it, a perfect meta-commentary on human autonomy: “You’re playing God when you’re playing Sims… We want to be free, but simultaneously, we play the Sims to pass the time.” In a similar vein, a Gen Z meme sits at the core of Hou je Nog Steeds van Mij? / Do You Still Love Me? – “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” – turned into a Kafkaesque scenario with visuals inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

What inspiration some find in 1920s silent films, others get from car crash compilations. Sando Heijnen tells us his stylized, fast-paced and fourth-wall-breaking Nur Geträumt started with a dashcam: “First, I thought maybe I can make a cool movie with the dashcam, that would be fun.” The final film combines this raw visual realism with a tragic emotional undercurrent. “Watching the compilation, [I realized] that’s actually probably kind of sad,” Heijnen reflects. “But you can’t see that because then it’s already the next crash. So I thought maybe I can construct a little story around that.”

Although reflecting that his films don’t focus on big normative questions, Heijnen still sees the value in humor as a tool of critique. “Maybe you can say more if you’re funny or quirky.”  Lucas Tepper, the mind behind Straight Forward, an animated short tackling the ridiculousness of homophobia, shares this sentiment: “Animation is the perfect medium to exaggerate something, to take something with a grain of salt. That’s why the film is also that colourful, I purposely use every colour of the rainbow. There’s already so much hate, so I thought laughter is the best medicine.”

With the Q&A reaching its end, questions shift focus to specific special effects, giving the directors a chance to reveal the resourcefulness that went into their films. “The worms in the film are all real,” Blommaert reveals to gasps from the audience. “We put them in a green screen box.” The role of green screen was even more present in Firby Nurbs. “It’s a green screen in a green screen in a green screen at a certain point.” For a climax involving a car crashing into a tree, Heijnen went against the grain and used practical effects. “Working with a car is scary because you actually drive and then do all these things. We drove into a tree, drove back really quickly, and then reversed it.” The creative process also has its sacrifices. “I did demolish my [car] roof. But yeah, it’s still driving.” The audience, merciless, gets the last word: “You just mentioned that’s your car, with all the flames on the side. That’s all your taste?”

As I leave the theatre, a search for “green screens near me” open on my phone, I catch Emma Byvanck, the festival director. Halfway through the event she and her team have been preparing for since last October, she tells me that things are going well. “Even though we’re doing a lot and we’re getting tired, we’re just getting all this energy from the filmmakers and from the audiences. Everyone’s loving the program, and the filmmakers are so happy, so it’s been fun.”

With each screening block its own microcosm, playing by its own rules and attracting different audiences, Byvanck considers this one the funniest. “It feels like a community. Sometimes people laugh, and it’s contagious, and we’re all just laughing together.” I think back to the films and can’t help but agree, especially after the roaring laughter filling the room during V’s Secret, an Egyptian dark comedy by Basma Farah Nancy. The director was unable to attend the festival due to visa-related issues, but luckily, the organizers found an alternate route for fan reactions. By the door, a stand with papers and pens is set up where attendees can write letters to “filmmaker pen pals.” I sign my name under a heartfelt message and walk out onto an evening street filled with crowds of students, artists and fans. The distinctions are blurry, but the excitement of the community created here is clear.

On Sunday, the festival’s last block before the grand finale leads me into Het Documentaire Paviljoen at the heart of Vondel park, a cultural hub owned by IDFA. Beautiful stone stairs lead me into an air conditioned theatre, lights already dimming. The crowd is slightly thinner on a closing afternoon, though no less varied in age or enthusiasm. 

“Shedding Soft Teeth,” a block centered on place-making and marked by a “myriad of searches for ways of being in the world, being together, and being with oneself,” offers the following films: A Nonsensical Work (of art), Common Language, Garden Shed, SNOTKIP, The Cereal Bag, The Complaint Hotline, The Boys’ Room and JAZZRATS.

As is to be expected by now, the films sit at a fuzzy line separating the tragic from the hilarious, and often switch in quick succession. After the opening Garden Shed, tackling mental health and wrapped in beautiful cinematography, we’re unsure whether we can start laughing at The Complaint Hotline, or whether it will also take a dark turn. The colorful, retro, comedy about friendship and growing apart stays upbeat though. Yasmin Le Comte, one of the writers and co-stars later reveals that this was intention: “We really wanted to make a film about the friendship and the complexity of it, but we didn’t want to make it into a drama,” she says and adds that having a background in theatre, the two actresses wanted to add comedy to their showreel. “We really wanted to make a lighthearted and humoristic and absurdist movie. That’s the point where we started from.”

The Boys’ Room, in which Director Dijk Booy deconstructs boyhood and masculinity with a humorous touch and a creative set design, emerges as another crowd favourite. Wondering how to represent the performance of masculine behaviour, the film shows us that we’re on a set with the actors leaving through doors with no walls around them.”I wanted to show the construct of masculinity by showing that the world is fake,” he says. The setting itself came from personal experience. “I was thinking about when you get confronted with the heavy masculine behavior of men. Then I had to think about all the times where I was at a school camp or anything like that, where you get placed into the boys’ room without being asked if you want to be in the boys’ room necessarily.”

Another stand out comes from the first and only non-fiction film of the block, Common Language. An ethnographic portrait of life in Europe’ largest residential squat, Prosfygika, the film was born out of random chance. Eszter Kálmán, one of three directors, stumbled upon the community through a woodworking workshop while attending a summer school in Athens. She and Anna Lehmann are on stage for the Q & A, but instead of Hara Garramone, the third director, they’re joined by an internationalist solidarian from Athens, Febe. Together, they describe the fascinating collaborative process behind the film, which continues even beyond the premiere.

When I ask Febe about how well she feels the short, focused on a bakery and a few community members, captures the community, she’s honest. “Capturing the community is impossible. They did a great job especially with this angle of common language but it’s impossible because it’s such a big organism, so much is going on and also it’s always changing. There are members of the community who’ve lived in the community for 10 years and they will tell you and always reiterate to you that they’re still understanding the community.” Explaining the community is a in a critical moment of being threatened with eviction, she says the film can function as part of a broader strategy of self-defense “The idea of the community is not that all of the world should move to Prosfygika, but rather that there should be people who are part of the community and creating the idea of this community, but of course in touch with their needs, everywhere. One of the slogans that the community has is ‘For a world of ten, a hundred, a thousand squats, we’re gonna fight power everywhere we are.’”

Walking down the sunny stairs, amazed by the range of cinema the festival has managed to cover, I run into The Complaint Hotline’s Yasmin Le Comte. Answering my curious question about the challenges of going from theatre to film, she says, “We learned a lot, and it made us more self-confident, because before we thought: Can we do this? Are we good enough writers to write a film that’s actually going to resonate? Of course there are things that could be better, but it just gives you creative energy to continue.” I ask about style trends, as their film wasn’t the only one going for the retro aesthetic this weekend, with many more adding the feeling of texture with paint, textiles, or mixed-media sequences. “I think our generation is craving something. We’re romanticizing the past, or retro, because now with digitalization, I think nothing feels very unique anymore. The world is completely turned beige, if you look at people’s interior, clothing, everything, everything needs to be super minimalistic. I think that’s very boring, and especially in film.”

The creative energy she describes would carry through to the final night: The Best of Program at FC Hyena. AmsFF gathered for one last time this year on the water, tucked away in Noord. The sun was beginning to set and FC Hyena seemed the perfect fit for a closing night.

The Best of Program did a wonderful job of covering the wide scope of the festival.  It was special to see the mythical Grandpa’s Fur, which I had been hearing whispers of since the festival’s opening night. Directed by Teodor Stoilov and Nellie Rajala, the film tells the intimate, vivid story of losing a family member to an illness through the generationally passed down Bulgarian tradition of kukeri. I immediately understood the film’s praise: Stoilov and Rajala produced a transcendental ode to the cultural, familial rituals that shape childhood into a deep abstract nostalgia washed in a cinematographic haunting violet and glowing yellow light. Later during the Q&A moderated by Laura Gommans, Rajala revealed that the film’s costume and setting was owed to a Bulgarian family who let the film crew borrow their traditional kukeri furs and headpiece.

Far from the Bulgarian village in Grandpa’s Fur, Jonas Ganzeveld and Yara Urey Helgenberger’s SNOTKIP projected a whimsical, comedic summer on the screen. Softly reminiscent of silent film’s slapstick, SNOTKIP combined a cartoonish style with maximalist costuming to narrate a dramatic camping trip in the Dutch countryside. In my ensuing conversations with festival-goers, it was confirmed that “it’s a SNOTKIP summer.”

I spoke with returning AmsFF spectator Emile, whose band recently produced a music video with SNOTKIP’s directors, who helped me understand the festival’s impressive growth since 2025. “I was at the film festival last year, also at FC Hyena, but that was just the one screening” he explained, “so this year it’s like, woah, so many screenings, so many locations. The change is so incredible to watch. I’m just really happy for them, people are so happy about it. You can tell.” Looking around, you could tell. In these final moments of AmsFF 2026, directors, actors, film fanatics, and festival organizers were intermingled in conversation. I recalled head of marketing Carme Ferrando Soriano’s words to me on opening night: “Conversation, exactly, and people, like, getting together and enjoying art together. I think this is what it’s all about.”

Though we weren’t able to attend in person AmsFF’s program at Lab111 deserves a mention as part of this year’s expanded festival footprint. Its inclusion is a testament to just how much the festival has grown, filling out venues across the city over the course of the weekend.

Closing night was truly a celebration of all the work that went into the festival’s making:

Whether that be the programming team’s job of putting together a curated block schedule from an estimated “180 submissions from every continent”, as programming outreach Kaavya shared, “It was the most submissions we’ve gotten so far, really months of work. We were really on our home viewing grind and then we had some meetings that lasted nine hours in a row. It was devious”, or the marketing team’s beautiful job with stickers, t-shirts, zines, social media outreach: “there’s been a lot of pre-production that had to be done to get this to run” marketing member Anya Ivanitskaya expressed, “and it’s really awesome to see it, you know, in action and flowing.”

Amsterdam Student Film Festival 2026 was a collective operation that The Amsterdammer was honored to intimately follow in action over the course of three days.