Why did Studio Kartel choose pink for Queer Film Festival Utrecht?

Five editions in, Queer Film Festival Utrecht had built something worth protecting. What started as intimate movie screenings had grown into a multi-day, city-wide experimental film festival celebrating the rough edges of queer cinema across Utrecht’s historic sites and cultural hubs. The programme was outspoken, the community loyal and the artistic direction sharp. The identity, however, told a different story. It looked like it belonged to a different festival entirely – outdated, incomplete and leaning on clichés that failed to capture the intelligence and defiance running through QFFU’s DNA. Utrecht-based Studio Kartel was brought in to rebuild the brand from the ground up. Co-owners Bob Hensen, Head of Design, and Jesse Vernooij, Head of Strategy, received near-complete creative freedom. Apart from the festival’s name, everything was open for reimagining. The studio applied its own strategic research methods, conducting deep dives into QFFU’s values, personality, brand archetypes and positioning before touching any visual work. For a festival operating at the intersection of queer culture and arthouse cinema, that groundwork required sensitivity. One of the studio’s team members brought first-hand experience in queer culture and its modern customs, providing an essential internal compass for decisions that might otherwise risk insensitivity. The strategic research surfaced a positioning that would shape every design decision: cool but educated, edgy but cute. These deliberate tensions gave Studio Kartel a specific target to aim for – an identity that could attract younger audiences without alienating the older generations who had supported the festival from its earliest screenings. The QFFU team had been considering putting emphasis on reclaiming space in a turbulent and sometimes hostile environment, which pushed the studio to explore the activist dimensions of LGBTQIA+ history more explicitly. They gathered information on queer protest movements throughout history and the aesthetics associated with them, and conducted interviews with QFFU’s programmer to understand his perspective on the power of activist statements through film.