Leiden International Film Festival - Leids Film Festival

6 days, 150 productions, 7 venues and, in 2011, almost 25.000 visitors. Every October, the beautiful city of Leiden warmly welcomes visitors that attended the young and energetic film festival.

Our Panorama programme includes a wide variety of films from all over the world, ten of which will compete for the award of the LFF – the Iron Herring. A professional jury will hand out a prize of € 10.000,-, that will benefit the distribution of the winning feature in the Netherlands. With this competition, the LFF hopes to provide an incentive so that more films will be able to have their deserved theatrical release. The second Iron Herring award is reserved for new Dutch talent, that will be chosen from our ‘Hollandse Nieuwe’ shorts competition. Furthermore, the LFF programme has a strong emphasis on Russian and, in collaboration with the Japan Foundation and the Sieboldhuis, Japanese cinema. Outside the traditional movie theatres our visitors can experience film in a different way, with lectures, concerts and workshops - all film related.

The LFF began as a ‘grass-roots’ organisation: four friends, unhappy about the current film climate, started their own film event ‘to make things right’. Four years later, the core of the organisation has been professionalised and the festival faces continuity. The foundation and partnership behind the festival strive to expand both their cultural and commercial enterprises in order to create a steady framework of knowledge and finance around the festival.