Eliane Esther Bots on the IDFA 2023 festival campaign

For the second year in a row, IDFA has invited a filmmaker to reflect on our festival to design our IDFA 2023 festival campaign. Following Louis Hothothot’s butterfly campaign last year, this edition kicks off the initial festival warm up with the emotive visuals by artist Eliane Esther Bots—inviting audiences to experience joy, love, rage, conflict and more. The campaign for the 36th edition of IDFA and has been launched in an evocative posters and festival trailers shown in cinemas across Amsterdam.

Eliane Esther Bots is no stranger to IDFA. In 2020, her interactive work The Channel was selected for the DocLab Competition, followed closely by the Dutch premiere of her impressive documentary film In Flow of Words show at IDFA 2021. After she graduated cum laude from the Dutch Film Academy’s masters program, her work has been shown at internationally renowned film festivals in Locarno, Berlin, and Paris. 

For the IDFA 2023 campaign, Eliane Esther Bots used animations, archival footage, and voice recordings to underline the power of film and diversity of human encounters during IDFA. 

“My films all arise from my interest in how people tell stories,” says Eliane Esther Bots about the campaign. “Stories that help you cope with life. The stories exist already, as do the voices. My role as a filmmaker is to provide the context, from which people can tell their stories.” 

Bots believes that encounters—between the audience and the film characters, between filmmakers, their subjects, and the festival’s visitors—form the core of what makes IDFA so special. “For me, IDFA is all about different voices coming together.” This formed the spark for Bots’s campaign, which brings twelve different encounters together as animation, each revolving around its own emotion—including conflict, pause, or surprise. 

With her background in visual arts, Bots places great emphasis on the visual aesthetics of her work. She uses a mix of archive material for the campaign. “I wanted to use a lot of images from different contexts,” she explains. According to Bots, the different forms of voice use in the trailer—such as humming, whispering, laughing, crying, singing, and shouting—also underline the scope and diversity of cinema and the festival. 

The process of creating IDFA's campaign was both educational and inspiring for Bots: “My creative process is through experiment. I have done exactly that extensively here, especially for the trailer. They are experiments with montage, from abstraction to figuration, from found footage to animation. I can also use these experiments for my future films.”