Festival Annecy 2020 - Are animated films too white?
Animation Festival Annecy 2020 is online. The Black Women in Animation panel addresses the paucity of black role models for young viewers in animation.
youth
'Only now do I have a fairly comforting life.' Frank conversation with Hans Dorrestijn
Cabaret artist Hans Dorrestijn is known as a gloom and professional grumbler. But in recent years, Holland's blackest joker has less and less to complain about: he has had great success with his nature books and his cabaret shows, and won several awards. This week he turns 80, but he does not want to stop - his new book Wensvogels has just been published. In nine candid questions
Holland Festival opens online with Memories of my body. About the body as a battlefield
In the pre-corona world, Garin Nugroho would open the Holland Festival with his performance The Planet - A Lament. It would no doubt have been as impressive an experience as his Setan Jawa staged in 2017. We would be enchanted by his dancers and purified by the story. In the stripped-down online version of the Holland...
The Q of figurehead and bassist
I have always found the Q to be a nice fresh thing. Now unfortunately I am not a synesthete, but my imagination tells me today that the Q feels cheeky. Sounds nice and succinct. The Q qlaps into my qeel and is punchy blue. Or shiny. Not ordi, but tough. Of shiny metallic seventies leather. The Q in a catsuit. Supple now plays...
On uncertainty, drift and desire for freedom, and yes, sports too: 7 life questions to Wilfried de Jong
Freedom and openness are essential in Wilfried de Jong's life. Don't pin him down on one trait, because then he will get pissy. 'I am not "that guy from sports".' That's right, De Jong is a theatre and television producer and writer, among other things. About sports, for instance. His new book The man and his cycling stories will be in stores from this week,...
'Pain takes away all the words.' Wytske Versteeg wrote about that which is always silenced
Did she finally write and publish the book she had been wrestling with for years, it initially snowed under due to corona and her earlier novel about a pandemic. Fortunately, Wytske Versteeg's Verdwijnpunt has now found its way to readers. It is a haunting book about sexual violence. 'The dilemma with writing about pain, is that pain takes all the words away from you.'
Dutch artists call for massive support for free theatre producers.
In a fire letter to Minister van Engelshoven, more than a thousand actors and directors ask to financially support the free theatre producers in the Corona crisis. Together, the free theatre producers annually provide 60% of the supply in Dutch theatres and theatres. They do so with their own investments and without subsidies. Through the measures taken in the fight against Corona
Paolo Cognetti: 'The mountains give me a lesson in humility every time.'
With his novel The Eight Mountains, Italian writer Paolo Cognetti (42) broke through internationally in 2017. Without Reaching the Top again takes place at great heights. 'The mountains give me a lesson in humility every time.' Without Reaching the Top is the travelogue of Cognetti's mountain trek in late 2017 through a high plateau in Nepal near the...
Serge van Veggel performs Opera Melancholica: 'Depression is a big social problem - a million people are on pills'
'My love for opera is rooted in my youth. Emotions you feel as a young person become almost tangible in opera. While listening, I often experienced a catharsis.' Director Serge van Veggel zooms in on depression and delusion with the production Opera Melancholica. Starting point is Philip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher, presented as a form of 'anatomical...
Oerol hit on tour in the Netherlands: Uniform, about the longing for commonality
Dance performance Uniform by creator Nastaran Razawi Khorasani, a huge success at Oerol 2018, is being remade. The performance will be re-created, premiere on Saturday 15 February 2020 at Maaspodium, Rotterdam and tour the Netherlands until 10 April 2020. Uniform is a dance performance about the desire for commonality, an ode to the follower. Uniform What is the power...
Only minimal recovery of Dutch film in good 2019 cinema year The Lion King best attended.
With over 38 million visitors, 6.5% more than in 2018, 2019 was a good cinema year. Unfortunately, the recovery of Dutch cinema is still minimal.
Netflix's The Witcher is having an identity crisis. But if you make it to episode five, you'll want to know how it ends.
With much fanfare, Netflix's The Witcher was announced. Except for some comments about Superman in a white wig, there was and is a lot of interest in the film adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy book series. Successor to Game of Thrones. With the way that one ended? No thanks! I'm not familiar with the books or the games myself, but Netflix's description...
When was the last time I hopped? Eye impresses with Francis Alÿs' expo on the world as child's play
An exhibition with only children playing, doesn't that quickly become too tacky or cosy? Not if the artist is Francis Alÿs. Although it is hard not to smile at the sight of a sandcastle, I left the room with a head full of questions about the nature of humanity. No small feat of hopscotching kids and girls
'Don't be too quick to think you know someone.' Six life insights from writer Rosita Steenbeek
She survived a brain haemorrhage and a serious car accident. As a result, writer Rosita Steenbeek (62) no longer has a fear of death, but an enormous zest for life. It has enriched her. By looking death in the eye, I understood that love is the most important thing in life'. 1. You can also be happy without a relationship 'I've been alone for a number of years and...
Colson Whitehead writes gripping book on cruelty in US juvenile justice: 'The system is still intact'
With his slavery novel The Underground Railroad, American writer Colson Whitehead broke through worldwide. His impressive new book The Nickel Boys is once again about a gruesome page in recent American history. Torture, rape, even murder: at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, it was the order of the day. For as many as 111 years, the...
Why youth is the future and fake art does not lead to real art at Theatre Festival Boulevard.
Bossche Theatre Artemis is, after International Theatre Amsterdam, the best theatre company in the Netherlands. The company owes this to an illustrious past (Pauline Mol!!) and to Jetse Batelaan. This director recently received the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale for his disruptive oeuvre. This consists largely of performances in which children take power, without...
Jeremy Dutcher on Amsterdam Roots: 'I think we can expect something very beautiful in the generations to come, as long as we keep singing our songs.'
It is, so in his normal clothes, a cheerful, spontaneous guy who walks up to me in the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet. Jeremy Dutcher the Canadian singer who is one of the main guests at this year's Amsterdam Roots festival, hardly shows any traces of the jet lag he must have undoubtedly sustained from his flight, which took off a few hours earlier...
'Give your opponent a kiss on the cheek.' Eight life questions to writer Mark Haddon
The huge success of his novel The Miraculous Incident with the Dog in the Night - nearly ten million copies sold - brought British writer and visual artist Mark Haddon financial freedom, but not peace of mind. He recently published his new novel, The Dolphin. 'I always think: when this is finished, then I will have peace of mind. But that carrot on the stick for...
Colonisation is not a relationship. But we still need to establish that relationship, this Holland Festival showed.
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...
'My cat saved me from death'. Seven life questions to author Jeanette Winterson
When it turned out she was in love with a girl, she fled her unhappy childhood with her strict religious adoptive parents. The book she wrote about it, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, made her world-famous overnight. But as an adult, she still got the bill. It was her cat that saved her from a self-chosen death. Seven life questions to...
What a broken-down bus has to do with liberation and feminism. Dancer Djino Alolo on Piki Piki at the Holland Festival
Djino Alolo Sabin (1990) sits there, relaxed, in the morning at the hotel in Brussels. The night before, he has danced his solo Piki Piki for the first time, which will also be shown at Theater Frascati during the Holland Festival. The performance touches on many intense themes, but is anything but melodramatic. Rather, it expresses a relentless optimism....
Why the most artistic film genre struggles to get off the ground. The growing pains of the dance film, part 1.
There is a lot of grumbling about Dutch cinema: it is too good, not creative enough, there is not enough experimentation. However, there is one small island where other laws apply. Where, sometimes with hefty budgets and sometimes for next to nothing, films are made that speak a different language: the dance film. No psychologising, no endless dialogue, but...
Jesús de Vega makes Choreopop: 'There must always be something that causes friction.' (What a childhood in Gran Canaria does to a dancer)
'I have broken every bone on the left side of my body at least once. My knee ten years ago, my elbow five years later, a toe, a finger, and under my left eye I have a scar from a stone someone threw at me when I was a kid.' Jesús de Vega, dancer, choreographer, videographer and teremin player, has had the requisite...
'We can compete with Disney.' Why the long Dutch animated film is going to break through with Heinz and Bunuel
'Heinz' and 'Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles', both out on 18 April, signal an important development in the field of feature-length Dutch animation. A breakthrough is in the air. On stubbornness and co-productions, Anne Frank and Miss Moxy. And what else is on the horizon.
Agnès Varda (1928-2019) - a warm heart and an irrepressible lust for filmmaking
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.
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