Long before flower arranging, forest bathing and tidying up in Japanese became hype, Paulien Cornelisse was already a big fan of the country. Her new book Japan in a hundred little pieces is like a manual Japan for beginners. Her love for Japan once began with Bobby & Kate's colourful, mole-sweet-smelling eraser - similar to Hello Kitty - that...
It is 1895. Colonel Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin) has just been promoted, to his own surprise, to head the French army's intelligence service. To get rid of the sewer smell there, literally and figuratively, he frantically yanks on the window in the musty office. It won't open. A touching image in J'Accuse, one of the most talked-about films of this...
In Verstoten Vaders, Elena Lindemans impressively highlights a huge, tucked-away social problem: of many tens of thousands of children who have to let go of one of their parents after a divorce. Elena: 'While making 'Wife Beats Husband' - a film about men who are victims of domestic violence - I came into contact with fathers who are abandoning their children - almost...
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 week, my in-box and my social media feed were full of cancellations. Screenings, film festivals and museums: everything I was looking forward to or contributing to was cancelled or shelved. Understandable and sensible. But also maddening, and a loss of income for me and many others in the cultural sector. Still, there are things that...
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...
Russian Lera Auerbach (1973) does not shy away from big challenges. And that is an understatement. Most recently, she made a big impression with her cycle Goetia 72: in umbra lucis. She composed this setting of the names of 72 demons for the Netherlands Chamber Choir and the string quartet Quatuor Danel. A CD of 72 Angels: in splendore lucis, in which...
"We are hopeful," is the reply when I speak to a colleague just before the start of the Berlin film festival. For curious as to how the choice of Carlo Chatrian as the new artistic director has fallen among German critics. Chatrian, previously director of the leading arthouse festival in Locarno, lies well, I understand. Whether this 70th Berlinale will see all that new momentum...
How many female choreographers do you know who create a full-length ballet for a top classical ballet company? - I thought. Before going to Frida, I get word that a Latin American young woman has been hospitalised. Loss of a lot of blood, and unborn child. The cheerful girl I know weakly raises a thumb from the hospital bed on WhatsApp....
What. Have. We. Terrible. Much. Too. Learning. If there is 1 thing the musical Tina makes clear, it is that. Especially at the stormy premiere, Sunday 9 February, a few hours before storm Ciara blew the last bubbles out of the Utrecht champagne glasses. An almost completely white auditorium, in Black Tie, that is, with only a few people from...
'Had I not possessed three things unrelated to music, I would have perished early on from loneliness and disillusionment,' wrote Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) at 60. Those three things were: 'Iron health, a distinct fighting spirit and a modest but independent income.' Whereas women in the nineteenth century were condemned to compose
In the trailer for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which kicks off on 22 January, film images crumble into abstract shapes and colour patterns. It has to do, I understand, with the wonder of the irrepressible urge to make stories. Once, a cave dweller put a painted hand on the rock face. In the digital age, we conjure stories with coloured pixels. The...
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.
The Holland Festival wishes you a happy 2020! The full programme of the 73rd festival edition will be announced on 11 February. You can already order tickets for the five productions below. Also in this newsletter: vacancies for a head of operations/controller, an employee development and interns for the communication & marketing and production departments; and aus LICHT named Opera of the Year 2019....
In the days when Europe was still a loose collection of city-states and duchies, where groups of men, for want of football, went on raids a few times a year to burn houses and rape women, a language emerged in the marshlands of the Rhine delta. We know this because plays were written in that language, which is among the earliest preserved...
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...
They have learned something at Boekman. The foundation, which since this year has had the honour of managing the culture index, understands that trend graphs say precious little. We have observed this several times on this site, and the researchers now confirm this wholeheartedly. So this year the club is doing things differently. For the past few months, sixty wise men and women have been...
The 32nd edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam has opened with Sunless Shadows. Confessions of young women jailed for complicity in the murder of their father or other man in the family grow into a haunting statement about oppressed women in a male-dominated society. The only Dutch film in the international competition is Rotjochies by Maasja Ooms.
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...
'There is an information war going on right now, which shows how important data is. The Assange case is the most poignant example of this.' Dutch-German composer Iris Ter Schiphorst wrote a piece about Julian Assange, the now controversially declared founder of Wikileaks. She is on a mission with this: 'Although Wikileaks has never been caught at a single fault, Assange has been accused of...
Ensemble Modern presents world premieres by German-Dutch Iris ter Schiphorst and Turkish Zeynep Gedizlioğlu in November Music. And that is good news, because the female composer remains too often invisible even in 2019. In the brochures of any Dutch orchestra, you will find none, or only a single work by a woman. On the new Heart & Soul list of...
The Dutch Film Festival is about to erupt. A spacious week with a broad overview of everything moving on Dutch screens, from public film to short student film. Last year was noisy: directors, editors and cameramen expressed gloom about the quality and guts of patriotic film. Visitor numbers don't seem to be overblown either, although...
Since a still-famous, superbly dressed theatre deity declared me unfit for a future in his theatre in 1991 because of my shabby wardrobe, things have never really worked out between me and fashion, although these days my wife guards me from making too big a mistake. Not a very good starting point for a report on a fashion exhibition in Schiedam, but go ahead....
A cheerful novel about nuclear weapons, that was to be Holy Trientje. Writer Anne-Gine Goemans based the book on the true story of American nun Megan Rice, who - at an advanced age - managed to enter the United States' most heavily secured nuclear bomb complex with nothing more than a pair of concrete scissors. 'I thought it was so beautiful, brave and naive.' Hiroshima 'failure' Every...
This weekend, there was some fuss on Twitter. Something about a Nazi comparison that didn't quite work out. Now there is quite often a fuss on Twitter because of a Nazi comparison that doesn't quite work out, but this time it concerned one of our cultural figureheads. Kees Vlaardingerbroek, artistic director of the NTR Saturday matinee and former head of programming at the Rotterdam...
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