AFFR 2025: 25 YEARS OF FILM, CITY, AND ARCHITECTURE
From October 8 to 12, the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam celebrates its anniversary with more than 80 films, debates, a new immersive program, and a 25-hour marathon that turns the city into an open screen.
The Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR) turns 25 this year, celebrating by looking at the city through the lens of cinema. Since its creation, the festival has become a meeting point for architects, filmmakers, and audiences curious about the forms urban life can take. In this anniversary edition, AFFR combines retrospection and experimentation through a program featuring more than 80 titles—documentaries, fiction, shorts, and classics—accompanied by talks, masterclasses, and debates.
The festival unfolds across the city: from Theater Rotterdam, to the LantarenVenster cinemas, the main venue for screenings, and the Nieuwe Instituut, which will host the new immersive program Realitiesⁿ.
-
Festival images Sander van Wettum. Courtesy AFFR
On October 8, the opening night at Theater Rotterdam will feature The Great Arch (2025) by French director Stéphane Demoustier, a film that tells the story behind the design of the Grande Arche de La Défense in Paris. It marks the beginning of five days of screenings and conversations about how cinema imagines, inhabits, or challenges the built environment.
Three Curatorial Lines
The 2025 program is structured around three thematic strands—called Stages—that group films according to different ways of reflecting on contemporary architecture. “Villain Strategies” explores how space can become an instrument of power: territories where architecture imposes, displaces, or controls. “Playing with Ruins” delves into ruins—both material and symbolic—and the ways in which we inhabit loss. “Hidden Costs” focuses on what infrastructure often conceals: the environmental, social, and human impacts that sustain the illusion of progress.
-
Festival images Sander van Wettum. Courtesy AFFR
More than simple categories, these three clusters act as conceptual threads running through screenings and debates, offering a critical reading of the urban present through cinema.
New Formats
One of the main additions this year is Realitiesⁿ, the festival’s first immersive media program, launching on October 9 at the Nieuwe Instituut. This platform invites audiences to experience architecture through technologies like augmented and virtual reality, expanding the ways in which we perceive space and urban narratives.
-
Festival images Sander van Wettum. Courtesy AFFR
AFFR also introduces its first-ever Awards Ceremony, where the winners of the jury-selected King Kong Award and the audience-voted Audience Award will be announced. The ceremony will take place on Sunday, before the closing film.
A Continuous Celebration
To mark its anniversary, the festival presents “25 Years! 25 Hours!”, a nonstop celebration running from Saturday night into Sunday. For twenty-five hours, cinema turns into a party: marathons of classics, late-night screenings, early-morning shows, and music to close the event on a relaxed note.
In this edition, celebration goes beyond the films themselves. It extends to the spirit of those who have followed the festival from its earliest days—viewers, architects, urbanists, and film lovers who find in AFFR a space to reflect on how the city is filmed—and lived.
*Cover image: Sander van Wettum. Courtesy of AFFR.
