Every story has a landscape behind it. A mountain that pressed itself into a culture’s myths. A river that drew the borders of a community’s life. A forest, a coastline, a desert, a valley — shaping the food people eat, the language they speak, the grief they carry, the gods they imagine.

The Rinjani International Film Festival exists for the films that know this.
RIFF is an independent international film festival held annually in Sembalun, Lombok Timur, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia — in the shadow of Gunung Rinjani, within the Rinjani-Lombok UNESCO Global Geopark and Biosphere Reserve. We celebrate cinema from every corner of the world, in every genre, across every form — feature films, short films, documentaries, animation, and beyond.

What unites our films is not a subject. It is a quality.

We look for stories that bear the unmistakable imprint of the place, the heritage, and the Earth that made them. Stories that could only have been told here, by these people, at this moment in history. Stories that illuminate the natural and cultural inheritance of our world — and the urgent challenges it now faces.

Our slogan is our entire programme in four words:
Stories Shaped by Our Earth.

BORN FROM A VOLCANO, BUILT FOR THE WORLD. THIS IS WHERE WE CAME FROM.
WHERE WE TELL OUR STORIES.

RIFF did not begin as an idea in a studio or a boardroom. It began in a landscape.
The festival’s roots reach back to the Rinjani Geopark Film Festival, a modest but meaningful annual event held as part of the Geofest International Conference under the Rinjani-Lombok UNESCO Global Geopark programme. That festival understood something important: that the extraordinary landscape of Rinjani — the caldera of Samalas, the sacred crater lake of Segara Anak, the volcanic soils that have fed Sasak farmers for centuries — deserved to be in conversation with cinema.

We are keeping that understanding. We are expanding everything else.

RIFF is the evolution of that festival: independent, internationally oriented, and open to stories from anywhere on earth. We remain rooted in Rinjani. We remain committed to the geopark’s values of conservation, education, and sustainable local development. We remain, above all, devoted to this specific place — its extraordinary geology, its living cultures, its people.

But now the conversation is global. And we are inviting the world to join it.

THE GOLDEN LONTAR.
THE HIGHEST AWARD FOR
STORYTELLERS OF OUR EARTH.
THE RIFF’S BIGGEST AWARD.

The lontar is the sacred palm leaf manuscript of the Sasak people of Lombok. For centuries, their histories, cosmologies, genealogies, and stories have been inscribed upon it — a material produced by the volcanic soil and tropical climate of the Earth itself. A story written on the land.

Our highest award takes its name from the lontar. The Golden Lontar is awarded each year to the film that most profoundly embodies this festival’s reason for existing: a story shaped by our Earth, one that explores the natural or cultural heritage of our world with honesty and power, and that brings awareness to the challenges faced by our people and our planet.

It is our Palme d’Or. Our Golden Lion. Our Major Award. And it is made by hand, by a Sasak artisan, from materials drawn from the geopark itself.