The Fribourg International Film Festival Artistic Director Reflects on Audience-Centred Programming, Political Curation, and Why Festivals Must Resist Becoming Cultural Algorithms

At a time when film culture is increasingly shaped by streaming platforms, algorithmic spectatorship, and global festival hierarchies, Thierry Jobin continues to defend a different idea of curation — one rooted less in prestige than in human connection.

As Artistic Director of the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF), Jobin has spent more than a decade shaping one of Europe’s most distinctive festivals dedicated to cinema from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Under his leadership, FIFF has developed a programming identity that resists both institutional elitism and reductive “world cinema” framing, approaching curation instead as an act of cultural mediation between films and audiences.

For Jobin, festivals should do more than exhibit cinema; they should evoke curiosity and emotional openness, inspiring genuine empathy in audiences.

“You’re curating for the filmmakers and  audience, not for yourself or the festival” he tells Kinopear.

Originally trained as a journalist and critic, Jobin spent years writing for newspapers and radio across Switzerland before moving into festival leadership. His relationship with cinema began not through institutions or industry structures, but through spectatorship itself.

At 15, he was already writing film articles and saving money to attend the Locarno Film Festival. That early experience continues to shape his programming approach today: cinema must remain emotionally alive and accessible rather than becoming culturally intimidating.

Beyond the “Good Festival Film”

One of Jobin’s strongest critiques of contemporary festival culture is the growing tendency toward homogeneity — films increasingly designed to circulate efficiently through festival ecosystems rather than genuinely connect with audiences.

“The danger begins when festivals start selecting films because they feel like ‘good festival films,’” he says.

For Jobin, many festivals risk becoming detached from spectatorship when programming prioritises institutional validation over audience experience. He recalls periods where international festivals often screened similarly paced, socially coded arthouse films that became difficult to distinguish from one another.

Instead, he believes festivals must carefully consider how audiences enter unfamiliar cinematic worlds — particularly when presenting cinema from regions often framed by distance or exoticism within Europe.

This became one of the reasons FIFF increasingly embraced genre frameworks within its programming. Under sections such as Cinema de Genre, the festival has explored westerns, thrillers, sports films, cooking films, and comedies from around the world.

The logic is not simplification, but accessibility.

“If I tell someone to watch a Vietnamese film, they may hesitate. But if I say it’s a Vietnamese thriller or western, it helps audiences feel more confident to emotionally connect with the experience.”

Genre, in this context, becomes a cultural bridge rather than a commercial compromise.

“You have to help audiences imagine the film.”

The approach also reflects Jobin’s broader rejection of how “world cinema” has historically been framed within parts of Europe — often through poverty, suffering, or sociological observation rather than cinematic innovation.

For him, cinemas from Asia, Africa, and Latin America matter not because they provide cultural pity or geopolitical explanation, but because they continue to reinvent cinematic language itself.

Festivals as Human Spaces

What distinguishes Jobin’s philosophy is the extent to which he sees festivals not merely as screening platforms, but as social and emotional spaces.

At FIFF, hospitality, conversation, food, migration, memory, and communal experience are integral to the curatorial process itself. The festival’s smaller scale allows audiences and filmmakers to interact more directly, creating an atmosphere increasingly rare within heavily industrialised festival environments.

Jobin believes this human scale has become one of FIFF’s defining strengths. Without the pressures of large film markets or A-list competition structures, the festival can focus more fully on audience engagement and cultural encounter.

That approach has proven particularly meaningful for diaspora communities living in Switzerland. Over the years, audiences from countries such as Sri Lanka, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Iran have encountered cinema from their countries of origin collectively through FIFF screenings — sometimes for the first time alongside their children.

For Jobin, these experiences reveal the deeper social role festivals can still play within fragmented societies.

“Everything We Do Is Cultural and Political”

Discussions around curation inevitably arrive at politics, particularly in a moment shaped by war, ideological polarisation, and increasingly fractured public discourse.

For Jobin, however, the political dimension of curation is unavoidable.

“Everything we do is cultural and political.”

Yet he resists reducing political cinema to slogans, branding language, or institutional positioning. Instead, he sees festivals as increasingly rare public spaces where audiences can collectively encounter perspectives beyond media simplification and algorithmic echo chambers.

Cinema, he argues, still allows audiences to engage with political realities through lived experience rather than abstraction.

“Cinema allows you to understand how people actually live.”

This perspective has shaped FIFF’s long-standing commitment to cinemas frequently marginalised within dominant global circulation systems. Long before diversity and inclusion became institutional vocabulary across the industry, FIFF had already dedicated programmes to women filmmakers, underrepresented voices, and overlooked cinematic histories.

Importantly, Jobin approaches inclusion less as a branding exercise than as a question of representation, access, and cultural curiosity.

Reframing Film History

By inviting filmmakers to select key films, Jobin aims to generate curiosity and respect, inspiring audiences to approach diverse cinematic histories with openness and interest.

For a major Iranian cinema programme, he invited Iranian filmmakers to select the films they considered most important in shaping their cinematic culture. The results challenged many familiar Western assumptions surrounding Iranian cinema and revealed a much broader, more internally diverse cinematic landscape.

Similar approaches later informed programmes dedicated to Mexican cinema and other national film cultures, often foregrounding overlooked films and neglected filmmakers absent from dominant international narratives.

For Jobin, festivals should not merely preserve established canons. They should actively reopen them.

This idea also reflects his continuing background as a journalist and curator rather than a purely institutional programmer. Throughout the conversation, he repeatedly returns to curiosity, spectatorship, and cultural exchange rather than market positioning or prestige accumulation.

“The Heart of a Movie”

Perhaps the clearest articulation of Jobin’s programming philosophy emerges through an idea borrowed from legendary French programmer Pierre Rissient: “the heart of a movie.”

The phrase continues to shape the way Jobin watches films today.

Like most programmers, he cannot watch every submission in full. Instead, he relies heavily on rhythm, instinct, and emotional immediacy. What matters most is whether a film feels necessary.

“There’s a difference between the films you could make and the films you have to make.”

For Jobin, this distinction remains fundamental. Technical competence alone is never enough. What ultimately matters is whether the film carries emotional urgency — whether the filmmaker genuinely needed to tell this story rather than merely constructing something designed to fit existing festival expectations.

That instinctive relationship to cinema also explains why he continues to resist overly industrial approaches to programming. He remains suspicious of films that feel calculated primarily for circulation rather than expression.

Festivals in the Streaming Era

Despite the overwhelming accessibility of global cinema through streaming platforms, Jobin does not believe festivals are becoming obsolete. If anything, he believes they are becoming more necessary.

For him, audiences are increasingly overwhelmed by abundance and endless choice. Festivals, therefore, function less as gatekeepers than as trusted curators capable of creating meaningful cinematic experiences from an overwhelming volume of content.

“We are like a restaurant. The menu is the festival.”

The metaphor captures FIFF’s philosophy precisely. Audiences attend festivals not simply because films are unavailable elsewhere, but because they trust programmers to construct experiences that are thoughtful, surprising, and emotionally coherent.

At the same time, Jobin remains deeply committed to preserving curiosity within film culture itself. Even after decades of programming thousands of films, he still describes cinema first and foremost as an emotional experience capable of transforming how audiences see the world around them.

That understanding traces back to childhood memories of seeing his father emotionally shaken after watching Apocalypse Now — an early realization that cinema could profoundly affect people beyond mere entertainment or information.

Decades later, that same belief continues to guide his understanding of film festivals.

Not as prestige machines. Not as cultural algorithms. But as spaces where cinema can still create surprise, encounter, conversation, and shared emotional experience.

And in an increasingly fragmented audiovisual landscape, that may be one of the most valuable forms of curation left.