Louis Hothothot is the multimedia artist behind this year’s festival campaign

Among a couple of dapper-looking people, clad in long coats and equipped with elegant umbrellas, flies a friendly-looking dragon-butterfly creature, spreading flowers. The scene is a personification of IDFA bringing light and color to the dreary, drab streets of Amsterdam in November – seen through the eyes of Louis Hothothot. Inspired by Joris Ivens’ Regen, one of the founding voices of Dutch avant-garde documentary and a poetic exploration of the rain’s interaction with the city, Hothothot wanted to symbolize the ways IDFA and the filmmaker community touch and transform Amsterdam.

His love for Dutch documentary films didn’t come out of nowhere. He first encountered it when he was studying graphic design in Beijing through a fellow Dutch student. “It was a true revelation being introduced to the art, particularly since it presented such a stark contrast to the propaganda films I saw on Chinese tv,” he explains. He couldn’t shake the impression, and after graduation in Beijing, he went to Dutch Art institute to study video art, followed by a second master at the Dutch Film Academy in documentary. It was during this time that he noticed the fluidity and ease with which his peers shifted between different mediums, something he attributes to the open culture he experienced in the Netherlands. Lots of experimentation followed, and a signature started to develop – one hard to pigeonhole, as it combined the digital with the analogue, mysticism with bleakness, the personal with the universal. An approach that clearly transpires through this year’s campaign.

“I am drawn to collage art,” he explains, “and particularly to how it allows for playing around with juxtapositions: dark and serious tones can be infused with playful elements, non-fiction can become fiction. By collecting different elements, such as my own drawings and archival footage, and then rearranging them to create a new narrative, it’s like I’m digesting inspiration. For me, the process then becomes more exciting than the outcome. Furthermore, it gives me an insight into where my humor comes from.” In the campaign, this can be seen in the umbrellas the men are carrying for example – which by the touch of the butterfly, are opening like blooming flowers.

Hothothot points out how the butterfly’s wings stand for beauty and fragility, whereas its body, monster-like yet earnest looking, has a more ambiguous quality to it – it is difficult to tell whether he is mean or kind. “It is a little bit how I see my ideal film subject,” he says. “People are two-sided and contradictory, and it is up to me to find ways to show how and where different sides join. There is no way to communicate that better than through humor.” It is a role he not only sees for himself, but also for the filmmaker community around him. “Amsterdam is a small city, but an international one. Filmmakers can bring different perspectives to light - we shouldn’t underestimate that power.”

Director: Louis Hothothot
Producer: Pieter van Huystee
Animatie: Christian Borstlap
Muziek: Harry de Wit
Sound mixer: Jannes Noorman
Design assistenten: Youngjin Park, Michelle Mildenberg, Weng Jiachen
Line producer: Rudolf Kats
Archief-researcher: Frederiek Jansen
Postproductie: Jan Jaap / Amator