Koen de Rooij

Koen de Rooij is a film programmer and curator based in Rotterdam, specialised in East and Southeast Asian cinema. He has been a part of the IFFR Short Film Selection committee since 2017 and the IFFR Feature Selection Committee since 2022. In his spare time, he loves to read, hike, cook, and discover new music.

Koen de Rooij participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Koen de Rooij’s submission:

Movie Original Title Director Country Year Duration
Dimensions of Dialogue Možnosti dialogu Jan Švankmajer Czechoslovakia 1983 12’
Regen Rain Joris Ivens , Manus Franken The Netherlands 1929 16’
Tale of Tales Сказка сказок Yuri Norstein Soviet Union 1979 29’
Meshes of the Afternoon Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren USA 1946 14’
Ballet mécanique Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy France 1929 19’
Engram of Returning Daïchi Saïto Canada 2015 19’
La Jetée Chris Marker France 1962 28’
Cat Soup Nekojiru-so Tatsuo Sato Japan 2001 33’
The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast Forugh Farrokzhad Iran 1963 22’
Spacy Takashi Ito Japan 1981 10’