On the night of Wednesday, 28 June 1927, seventeen spectators attended the opening of the new film festival “Film International Rotterdam.” The sight of an all but empty theatre prompted the Councilor of Arts, De Vos, to depart without performing the official opening ceremony for the film week that had been described as “super experimental.” This label was the consequence of the outspoken – and controversial – taste preferences of the founder of the festival, Huub Bals, who was also the co-founder of the Féderation Internationale des Festivals Indépendents that included the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Cannes) and the Forum des Jungen Films (Berlin). Although the festival's consistent focus ever since its foundation has been on art cinema, experimental works, and southern developing film countries, the popularity of the festival has increased dramatically.

Today, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) attracts one of the largest audiences of any film festival in the world, with an attendance of 367,000 during the 2007 festival. This number also positions the IFFR as the largest event for paying visitors within the Netherlands. The IFFR pleases its visitors by offering a first feature competition program, the best films of the festivals of the preceding year before their release in the theatres, national and international premières that have not (yet) found distribution, thematic programs, and highly popular Q&A sessions with filmmakers, after the screening of their films.

But we must also remain a bit wary of the attendance figure of 367,000 because, as IFFR's CineMart director Ido Abram un-euphemistically puts it, “the number is a lie.”What we should bear in mind when we read this figure is that it does not represent the number of actual visitors to the festival. Festivals work hard to secure a positive image in the global competitive context, and so attendance figures are an important measure of success that is artificially boosted – in the case of Rotterdam, the published figure also includes all potential admissions through tickets sold at the festival box office to people visiting exhibitions at associated cultural institutions – in order to reach the impressive 367,000.