Helen Westerik is a film historian and great lover of experimental films. She teaches film history and researches the body in art.
Steve McQueen is an artist who narrates big and difficult subjects in a physically tangible way. Hunger strike, sex addiction and our discomfort with male sexuality, slavery. These are the things we would rather not see anymore, not want to discuss and certainly not want to feel. In his feature films, McQueen manages to strike a balance between the aesthetic and the physical ...
What do you get when you combine shadow play, Weimar cinema, gamelan and Javanese myths? A mix that demands a lot from the audience, but is a delight if you are willing to surrender to it. Indonesian director Garin Nugroho does not make easy films. Often they are visually stunning, like Opera Jawa, but the plot gets in the way a bit...
The Golden Calfs have not even been handed out yet and the next film festival is already about to begin. On Friday 30 September, the 11th Buddhist Film Festival Europe (BFFE) will kick off at Eye in Amsterdam with a very special film. The opening film is produced in one of the smallest film countries and one of the most fascinating countries in the Far East: Bhutan. According to IMDB...
How can you rewrite an intensely complicated history from a different perspective? By using grotesque glass puppets and not actors. This revolutionary invention was shown at the Holland Festival on 8 June, and can still be experienced there 9 June. In that film, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky takes us back to bygone centuries and shows us...
Anyone who can remember the fall of the wall has grown up with the threat of nuclear attack. And with that comes the idiotic government advice to get under the table in case of a nuclear explosion, preferably with a colander on your head. And to keep plenty of canned food and water on hand.
Things have been rumbling in the film world for some time: Why is the silver screen so, er, white? And where are all the women anyway? #OscarsSoWhite but also #OscarIsADude! Many people in the industry have already expressed their displeasure at this. At the previous Oscar ceremony, actresses aimed their arrows at equal pay, or rather, the lack of it. This year, many an African-American actor and...
Whole generations of children have grown up with Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and their friends. The universe in which adults are conspicuous by their absence, but children's emotions are remarkably complex. And that is probably also the appeal of the television cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired exactly 50 years ago. Charlie Brown has no sense at all of...
With one day to go, it's time to look at what stood out about the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. The picture of the whole festival is diffuse, as befits a fest whose programme booklet is almost three hundred pages thick. There was, as always, a sea of films about abuses and current political issues, but there were...
It doesn't often happen to me that just under 30 years after seeing a film, I still remember in what state I left the theatre. Supreme confusion it was. Was all this real? As a filmmaker, were you allowed to hit your interviewees? Was it staged? It was too horrifying to imagine everything really happening
American filmmaker Les Blank stole my heart a long time ago with the short docu he made about Werner Herzog: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. And that is exactly what happened in that film. Herzog lost a bet to Errol Morris: he never thought the latter would finish his Gates of Heaven. And so...
Today's IDFA viewing tip is directly opposite yesterday's. Yesterday was uplifting and heartwarming. Cartel Land, on the other hand, is hard, raw, unpleasant and brutal. It could hardly be otherwise, as Matthew Heineman's film is about the war on drugs in Mexico and Arizona, which is just north of it. At the risk of...
Today's IDFA viewing tip is the kind of film I normally stay away from: a feel-good film that is stylistically neat, but nowhere innovative. And yet I went flat and with me the whole audience. Why? For the same reason that a group of men with tablas and sitar gets the Jazz at Lincoln Center flat. The combination of western...
Today's IDFA viewing tip is for a special film about a special man, Sun Mu. That's not his real name, it means 'without borders'. And that is very appropriate for this artist. For years, he was a successful propaganda artist for the regime in North Korea. Until he ventured the great crossing. He swam (literally!) to freedom and has been living since the...
I didn't have to think long about today's tip. Chantal Akerman's latest film runs this afternoon at 13:15. No Home Movie is about her mother, who survived Auschwitz, and her final days. And about the difficult relationship Akerman had with her mother. She tells in an interview that they were in Mexico together once
For 500 years, Hieronymus Bosch has captured the imagination. His paintings remain enormously expressive, even though we may now have lost sight of the ecclesiastical context. In the run-up to the major retrospective that the North Brabant Museum is organising next year, a selection of Dutch art historians and curators will set out to examine Bosch's paintings. What...
Can there be beauty in an atomic bomb? Or in the explosion of a nuclear reactor? I don't think so, but I'm going to find out tonight. In Atomic Living, filmmaker/writer/presenter/producer Mark Cousins explores what that's really like, living in the atomic age. Because in addition to the horrors, we also have X-rays and other extremely useful medical applications. Once again, he uses...
The first IDFA tip of the day is immediately a double bill and both films are decades old. They are in the top 10 of Errol Morris, this year's chief guest. Las Hurdes - Tierra sin Pan by Luis Bunuel is a half-hour film that made documentary history. Bunuel was also known then for Un...
At Amsterdam's Brakke Grond, the Dancing on the Edge festival (DOTE) opened yesterday with an evening that immediately showed what the span is all about. The first performance, Blank, engaged directly with the audience. The second, and official opening performance, Plastic, was more about the dynamics between the performers themselves and with the soundscape. With her opening speech
It is not often that a film about an event in 1992 is so poignantly topical. That was when a group of some 300 right-wing radicals set fire to an asylum seekers' centre in Rostock. Miraculously, no one died then. But it did scar many for life. Among them was the director of Wir Sind Jung, Wir Sind Stark. Filmmaker and son of...
In a full University Theatre on Tuesday 6 October, Pierre Audi gave a master class for young singers, dramaturgs and directors. Three scenes had been prepared by the students and were then expertly filleted by Audi. "Sorella, que dici?.... Prenderò quel brunettino", from Mozart's Così fan tutte began as a scene of two punk girls gripped by consumerism. The director and trainee dramatists...
Not many directors have become very iconic very young. Chantal Akerman was, both for experimental film and feminist. She broke through in 1975 with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that is as disruptive as it is understated. It is her most important work, and also her most radical. The protagonist leads an existence of...
Among the dozens of film festivals in this country, there is one that forms a small island of tranquillity and contemplation. The Buddhist Film Festival Europe, now in its 10th year, is a multi-day festival with, about and by Buddhists, or Buddhist-inspired. Now that everyone is all mindful, we go back to the source with festival director
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