In 2014, The Cutter published a review of De Wereld Draait Door. What not many people will know is that prior to that moment, there was a weeks-long battle behind the scenes over this publication. De Wereld Draait Door tried with all its might to stop the episode by not giving permission to quote the footage. Initially,...
It is a fresh and lively book, the new novel by Adriaan van Dis (74). In his characteristic humorous tone, Van Dis broaches the big themes of our time in KliFi: climate change, the refugee crisis, political populism, (im)freedom. When in the republic of the Netherlands a crushingly hot summer turns into a hurricane and a village of refugees is wiped out, silence...
When he left Dunbar over two years ago for a round-the-world bicycle trip, Scottish Dean Nicholson (32) could not have suspected how much his life would change. When he rescued a kitten a few weeks old from a ditch in Bosnia, his life took a completely different turn. Since then, Nala and he have been inseparable, cycling together...
Things can change. In 1979, Iran changed from a Western-oriented secular state to a spiritual dictatorship, where Islamic leaders call the shots. Women must henceforth go through life veiled and music is banned as extremely sinful. Four decades later, three women founded the Iranian Female Composers Association. In America, though. 'Music is like a drug, those who feel...
It is scorching hot in Paris on the day of the interview with Tatiana de Rosnay (58). In her new novel Flowers of Darkness, Paris suffers yet another heatwave, with the thermometer touching 48 degrees. 'The past few days have been almost as bad as in my book,' De Rosnay tells via Zoom from her Parisian study....
It still came as a shock, the sad news that comedian, presenter and theatre-maker Marc de Hond died yesterday. Around the beginning of corona, we were still in touch briefly about his theatre tour Voortrijdend inzicht, which he made as a legacy for his children. How unfortunate it was that most of the performances now had to be postponed indefinitely. His health situation...
South African soldiers thought by fighting along during World War II they would gain the right to vote and independence, because they were promised that. But after the war, not freedom but Apartheid awaited them. With We are the Avengers of it all, writer Conny Braam sheds light on this painful history. Four years ago, Conny Braam (72) published the successful novel Ik ben Hendrik...
It is high time for collective action, now that arts organisations have closed and activities are at a standstill. Plea for a support fund for culture, to which governments, funds and companies contribute in unison. We all notice it: live cultural offerings are at a standstill due to the coronavirus. Much has been written and talked about the importance and value of culture in recent weeks. That...
We are now a good month after the start of the intelligent lockdown. Slowly, a new normal is beginning to emerge, where we are no longer exclusively fanatically following all the tweets about corona. The concerns are still there and certainly where the cultural sector is concerned. The entire sector, nationally and internationally, is engaged in the titanic task of keeping the public...
'Like asking after a play or a concert which seats they had in the auditorium.' According to Gerrit Heijkoop, it is not interesting to know what software you can use to share knowledge online, or organise video chats. 'You can go to Facebook, to YouTube, and then there are all kinds of programmes. If you want to communicate, it goes...
Need to escape from all the misery in reality? Of course, you can binge-watch endless feel-good movies or exciting series, but opening a good book about a disaster in the outside world is at least as effective - look, it's actually not that bad with us! You might also pick up a few valuable do's and dont's for emergencies; a warned person counts....
Last December, we had no internet and no TV/netflix for a week. The Customer Disconnection Department of KPN, formerly XS4All, had not understood that a broken cable in our neighbourhood could have had anything to do with it. One of the funny effects of these fibre-less days was that I finished reading four books. Something I normally do only on...
'I always draw out my characters before I start composing. They are inspired by people I see on the street, personalities I admire, details that make someone special... I usually focus on one specific aspect of a character, a dominant mood that I then highlight in my composition.' Born in 1990 in Istanbul, Meriç Artaç was already...
Police sirens sound less frequently in Groningen than in a city like Amsterdam. When they sounded last Wednesday night, it was because residents of the premises behind the local art academy, Minerva, raised the alarm. Standing on the roof was not an owl, but an almost naked man shouting that he was going to rob the Coop. Mads Wittermans, the actor in question, had forgotten the...
Post-colonial criticism and reflection ran like a thread through this year's Holland Festival programme. Not only William Kentrigde and Faustin Linyekula, the associate artists with whom the festival's programmers collaborated, their work addresses the devastating effects of centuries of Western European trade and commerce. In reframing political and social history and reclaiming...
Agnès Varda, once one of the few female filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, always upheld that free creative spirit. On 29 March, she died in Paris. Her rich oeuvre is an ode to life.
When the longlist of the Man Booker International Prize was announced on 12 March this year, two things stood out. First, of course, that our own Tommy Wieringa had won a place on this list of fiction translated into English. Even more striking was that 11 of the 13 titles had been published by small, independent publishers. That development...
The heritage sector is not the sexiest sector of the Dutch cultural world. Even though nude exhibitions are flying around your ears this season, you're more likely to think of obscure museums, monuments, stamp collections, old stuff. This is how it happened that the Digital Heritage Netherlands Foundation could exist for almost 25 years without anyone in the 'more popular' arts (stage, film, literature)...
That publishers and writers are struggling is not news. That something needs to change in connecting with readers too. But what? That is the big question no one has an answer to yet. Publishers have rapidly lost their prestige, their monopoly and often their canal houses. On the other hand, the phenomenon of...
Rabbit Hole is the name of the programme with which the International Film Festival Rotterdam dives into the world of internet memes. With a Meme Café, vlogging Chinese and the dazzling feminist pamphlet Make Me Up.
'How many realities can we handle? For me, that is the theme of 2018. Those ladies from North Korea who were cheering, for example. But it was also in Halbe Zijlstra who had lied about Putin's dacha.' Greg Nottrot, theatre maker from Utrecht, had set out for this year to create an end-of-year performance that would capture the zeitgeist well....
DocLab 2018 is no longer about the latest technology, but about the human experience. What menu can artists serve us with digital media and artificial intelligence. Examination of reality, playful installations, the Humanoid Cookbook and collaboration with MIT
Searching for what I stand for and what path I should take, time and again I come across facts that confuse and amaze me. I live in a country where only a single woman is in De Volkskrant top ten most influential people - in tenth place, that is. Only three out of 100 young Dutch millionaires...
Three black men wash up on a small island. This threatens to throw a spanner in the works of the residents and their economic plans. So everyone prefers to pretend that nothing has happened. Archipelago of the Dog, Philippe Claudel's new novel, is a haunting book with lightness peeking through at times. The French bestselling author worries: 'Once, nuclear weapons constituted...
It could be the ideal balmy summer evening: watching a movie under an idyllic starry sky. On the autumnal evening of Friday 6 September, however, open-air cinema Zienemaan en Sterren turns out to be more of an exercise in endurance. It is raining, the temperature is dropping, but the Groningen audience remains undisturbed: kop d'r veur and umbrella open. "Every city had an open-air cinema except Groningen. That...
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