The Light Festival is the one thing in the Amsterdam calendar I have never got bored of, which is notable because I have now seen a lot of editions of it. This is the short version. The detailed write ups, edition by edition, live over on cramberts.com, which is where I put the proper travel stuff.
What follows is what has actually stayed with me across the years, which turns out not to be the ambitious pieces.
Darth Vader fishing in the Amstel
By a distance the cutest thing the festival has ever put on the water. Not the most impressive, not the most technically clever, not the one that photographs best. The cutest. A Sith Lord, sat on the Amstel, having a quiet go at the fishing.
That was edition 10, over the winter of 2021 into 2022. I have looked at a great many illuminated installations since and it is still the first one I mention when anybody asks.
Walk it, do not just do the boat
We usually do both. The boat is the version everybody books and it is genuinely good, but if you only do one, walk it.
Two reasons. You go at your own pace, so you can stand in front of the one you like until you are finished with it rather than gliding past on somebody else’s schedule. And you can break it up, doing a few installations an evening across a couple of weeks instead of consuming the whole route in one go.
That second point is the one I would press. Treating it as a single event you tick off is the fastest way to stop enjoying it. Treating it as something that is simply on for a few weeks, that you wander into after dinner, is much better, and is also roughly how people who live here actually experience it.
The strange one was 2021
That edition ran under coronaregels, and it closed at 17:00. Sunset was before that, so there was a window of perhaps an hour where the thing was both lit and open.
I expected that to be bleak and it was not. The city was emptier than I have ever seen it in December, which suited the festival enormously. But it was also busy in a way that took me a moment to understand, because everybody in Amsterdam was desperate for something, anything, to do that was outdoors and legal. So you had a quiet city and a crowded route at the same time, which should not work and somehow did.
It is getting more commercial
This is true and I cannot decide whether to mind.
Better, because more money means bigger and more reliable installations, a route that is properly organised, and a festival that will still be here in ten years. Worse, because the more sponsored and packaged it gets, the less it feels like a thing the city is doing and the more it feels like a thing being sold to the city.
Both of those are the same sentence about most successful festivals, so I am not claiming any insight. I am still going every year and still enjoying it, which is the only review that really counts.
