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...
The man's gaze turned upwards. He looks puzzled. Why is he hanging here now? Here, in Amsterdam? He comes from Spain, doesn't he? Then he hung in St Petersburg for years. This room, as deep red and imposing in size as the ''Spanish Hall'' in the Hermitage, by the way, looks an awful lot like the room where it hung for so long. Incidentally.
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
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...
Next Friday is the day. Then, speakers in the fields of technology, economy and design will climb the stage in the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam to talk about their 'ideas worth spreading'. This year's theme is 'the perfect trifecta', because if there is anything magical according to founder Jim Stolze, it is the interaction between audience, speakers and performers. Notable...
What titles come to mind when you hear the name Arvo Pärt? Sonatina opus 1; Symphony no. 1; Perpetuum mobile, or Fratres; Für Alina; Spiegel im Spiegel? My guess is the second set, because it was with pieces like these that Pärt conquered the world in the late 20th century. Audiences flocked in droves to immerse themselves in his sonorous sound world, but...
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...
IDFA 2015 opens strongly with intriguing family history A Family Affair, but the main programme feature is Benjamin Barber: Jihad vs. McWorld.
Music students are generally conservative. When I studied musicology in the 1990s, we could go to the concerts in new-music temple the IJsbreker for only five guilders. I eagerly used this opportunity to hear the very latest notes by living composers like Pauline Oliveros and Sofia Gubaidoelina for a trifle. I never saw a single fellow student there. Still I am...
The annual Autumn Consultation on burning issues in the film industry was entirely devoted to the plight of small artistic film. Are too many titles being released?
Maaike Engels (video artist and filmmaker) and Teun Voeten (war photographer and cultural anthropologist) made Welcome to the Jungle. A documentary about the utter chaos in the makeshift migrant camp near the canal tunnel in Calais, where some 6,000 people are now waiting in harsh misery for their chance to travel clandestinely to England. Welcome to the Jungle is a painful and bij...
Last spring, while looking at Catinka Kersten's newly installed sculpture on the patio of museum Beelden aan Zee, Iris Le Rütte's sculpture Daphne caught my eye. A woman who instead of a head and arms stretched branches to the sky. It is a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the nymph Daphne, on the...
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
Terezín, 1944. In the most deplorable conditions imaginable, Victor Ullmann completes the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. The camp authorities forbid a first performance after a few rehearsals. The unmistakable allegory on Hitler and his downfall leads to one of the rare forms of censorship in the camp, which the Nazis showed as an example to the Red Cross....
Virtual reality will be the new hype next year, we are promised. A sneak preview could already be enjoyed at an Amsterdam pop-up cinema.
Next week sees the start of festival Dancing on the Edge. Unlike its name suggests, this festival, with performances in The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam, is not only about dance, but also about film, theatre and politics. The 'Edge' it is about, the festival looks for in its theme: an urgent artistic dialogue with the Middle East. More needed now than...
KLIK Amsterdam Animation Festival 2015 at EYE aims to introduce a wide audience to the international vanguard of animation film.
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...
As I wrote in my earlier article about the Nederlandse Dansdagen, choreographer Loïc Perela won this year's Nederlandse Dansdagen Maastricht Prize. It earned him 12,000 euros to put into his new project HASHTAG. The award has helped some previous winners on their way (Monique Duurvoort, Joost Vrouenraets, Erik Kaiel, Muhanad Rasheed, Joeri Dubbe,...
The India Dance Festival received just a little less attention from the national media this weekend than the Amsterdam Dance Event. Something that theatre director Leo Spreksel of The Hague-based Korzo Theatre was a bit worried about on Sunday. Because for three days now, his halls have been so muddy that he even turned away visitors who came all the way from Switzerland....
"It's all right." In how many songs of the Top 2000 does that phrase appear? Too many to mention. So now the task is to sing all those different "It's all right"'s in the melody in which every audience will recognise them. The four actors in 'Total Eclipse of The Heart' by Theatre Group Kassys fill a thick hour in this way....
29th Cinekid children's film festival opens with new television drama for youngsters. In the Medialab, children can make their own VR glasses and do virtual bungy jumping.
Eddy De Clercq, the Godfather of Dutch house and dance culture, wrote his autobiography, Let the Night Never End, together with Martijn Haas. A story about the birth of the DJ scene in the Low Countries, the rise of house music and nightlife with raging parties full of sex, dance, art, booze, swag and snuff. Against the backdrop of the advancing...
With Henry by Itamar Serussi, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam makes an exciting statement. After all, the kickoff of the anniversary season is not a corny look back at 70 years of dance history, but stands in the middle of the present and looks ahead. Scapino does so with a relatively unknown choreographer delivering his first full-length work, in an unusual dance style. Mars Not entirely unknown is Israeli Itamar Serrusi. He is...
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