Wrong Time Wrong Place opens IDFA - documentary as dance with chance
In John Appel's new documentary Wrong Time Wrong Place features survivors of the shooting on the Norwegian island of Utoya and the preceding bombing, which killed 77 people.
documentary
NFF 2012 - Jos Stellings The Girl and Death enchants Golden Calf jury
The big question was how many of those seven Golden Calf nominations Plan C would manage to cash in. To everyone's surprise, this petty crime comedy that attracted less than 7,000 visitors in cinemas had garnered even more nominations than
NFF - 'The rules of Matthijs' mandatory curriculum for emergency workers
The crop of feature-length documentaries screened at the Netherlands Film Festival is good. They are extraordinary stories, sometimes startling, sometimes penetrating, sometimes fodder for much discussion, and almost all very beautifully filmed. We wish the jury much wisdom. The nominated documentary 'The Rules of Matthijs' is interesting for everyone, but should be compulsory reading for social workers,...
NFF 2012 - Robert Oey impresses again with Negotiated
Every night at the Netherlands Film Festival there is an important premiere, and on Sunday it was Robert Oey's new documentary, about messengers and survivors. Killed shows a side of our military mission in Afghanistan that has received little coverage. 25 Dutch soldiers died there. The film is in a way a tribute to them, but...
#NFF Opening film Nono sings away from dull realism
What a festive opening film it was! The Dutch Film Festival's choice of Nono, the zigzag child had of course to do with the fact that Dutch family films will be specially put in the festival spotlight this year. But even apart from that theme, it was an unmissable kick-off. Because we may like to grumble that the weather was not...
Awards for experimental docu and absurdist fiction
EYE is pulling out all the stops. This year, the final exam papers of the students of the Netherlands Film and Television Academy will get an ideal presentation in the largest auditorium of this new film centre. What is also new is that yesterday, immediately following the screening for press and relations, awards were handed out for best commercial (The End, Soon), best documentary (A Twist in...
"The Life and Death of Marina Abramović": bumpy business with Antony as rock #HF12
Antony, Dafoe and Abramović together on one stage, directed by Robert Wilson - it promised to be the hit of the theatre season. But Abramović's private life does not really lend itself to a triumphant or compelling narrative.
In Accordion Wrestling, 10 Finnish wrestlers compete with 1 accordion player. The weirdest show on #hf12
One by one, Helsinki Nelson's wrestlers come running onto the stage of the City Theatre. On the mat is the biggest of the bunch, lying on his stomach, stretched out in a defensive position. Alternately, his opponent tries to tip him, pushing him flat on the mat with both his shoulders. In vain. Accordion punk rocker Kommi Pohjonen comes on, and...
Nearly dies Wunderbaum's Detroit Dealers from an overdose of ideas, but survives through unexpected musicality #HF12
In Detroit Dealers, Wunderbaum mixes a personal family story with the decline of Detroit, once one of the most influential industrial cities in the world, and philosophical musings on the car, as a romantic metaphor of progress and the American Dream. The show swings in all directions. Detroit Dealers is part documentary film, jazz concert, performance, spoken word poetry, rap battle, and theatre. This overdose of...
As gentle and intelligent as the very young dancers are handled, reactions to Boris Charmatz's 'Enfant' #HF12 are often wild.
Youth these days mostly evokes the thought of danger. Society suffers from a distorted ideal image that leaves real children little room to play. Eventually, therefore, they rebel in Enfant. But until then, the very young performers still mainly have the role of adjunct or capstone, complement or extension of the nine adult dancers. The new...
'Community Art is Slow Art': Margreet Bouwman and Eugene van Erven on the Community Arts Festival 2013 #vvu
Young people from Guatemala, nightingales from Northern Ireland and theatre-makers from the interior of Peru. Just some of the guests at the Community Arts Festival to be held in Utrecht in June 2013. Music, film and theatre with ordinary people behind and in front of the scenes, accompanied by professional artists. What else do they have in common?
Pure camp with tremendous theatrical intelligence in (M)IMOSA, in which four flamboyant drag queens vie for attention
Maniacally, she gallops across the stage, stomping like Michael Flatley on crack. Gravely thin and bare-chested, Marlene Monteiro Freitas tap-dances around. She squeezes her tits and pulls handfuls of (fake) hair from her scalp. "My name is Mimosa Ferrara," she panted menacingly, as her black leggings sag off her ass and linger just above the pubic area....
CineCrowd shows at short film festival Go Short that crowdfunding works
In the short Dutch film Ceci n'est pas un rêve, which premiered at the festival Go Short (Nijmegen, 14-18 March), the cityscape of Paris slowly transforms into a dreamscape. You could call it a surrealist documentary, in which filmmaker Amos Mulder has incorporated influences from early German film pioneer Walter Ruttmann as well as modern computer animation. With further...
Awards for Dutch Chewboy
Towards the end of this Berlinale, it could be heard in the corridors that the Danish costume piece A Royal Affair about a nipped-in revolution was surely going to win the Golden Bear. However, the jury did not care about that and designated Caesar Must Die by the Taviani brothers as the best film. The jury chaired by...
Berlin 2012 - Shakespeare knew it all
Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows...
IFFR 2012 - Sobering report from Egypt hit with festival audience
That Martin Scorsese's mesmerising Hugo was number one in the audience rating for a while at the Rotterdam festival is not so surprising. What is surprising, however, is the film that emerged as number two yesterday and has now ousted Hugo from first place: the documentary Back to the Square in which filmmaker Petr Lom looks at how things stand in Egypt after the...
IDFA awards Planet of Snail
IDFA's jury neatly balanced poetry and politics by awarding among the feature-length documentaries the moving Planet of Snail (South Korea), alongside the Palestinian village-set 5 Broken Cameras, a Palestinian/Israeli/French/Dutch co-production. Planet of Snail by Seung-Jun Yi received the main award, the VPRO IDFA Award for best feature-length documentary. The fireworks of...
IDFA screens Tahrir 2011, eyewitness account of Egyptian revolution
A bit alienating it is. Watching at IDFA the eventful account of Egypt's February Tahrir 2011 revolution while at the same time, in Tahrir Square, the second phase of resistance against the dictatorship is in full swing. A kind of 'back to the future' feeling. Tahrir 2011 is a relatively unpolished, but with a sense of urgency in...
IDFA 2011 kicks off with Danish documentary stunt work: The Ambassador
The crisis rages on and the Arab world is in flux, but in the documentary world, the time for big stories is over. At least that was the conclusion drawn by festival director Ally Derks at a press conference ahead of the 24th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (16-27 November). Unlike a decade ago, documentary filmmakers now focus...
Sarah Moeremans camps out at the theatre and shows young actors all over it during #dekeuze
Director, actress and theatre designer Sarah Moeremans is holding office in the lobby of the Rotterdam Schouwburg for a year. Titled "My First Camp", she has moved into the front hall to be more in touch with the various users and visitors in the building and the world around it. Has the public space become a wilderness, which...
Netherlands Film Festival - Tuschinski Award for If I didn't have you
The Tuschinski Award for best graduation film of the Film Academy was awarded this afternoon at the Dutch Film Festival to Anne-Marieke Graafmans for her documentary If I didn't have you. What is special about the presentation of this award for up-and-coming talent is that the commercial cinema business and independent film criticism are here together for a while. The Tuschinski Award will be presented and with 5000 euro...
Festival 'The International Choice' opens as it should: abrasive, confrontational and tad disturbing #thechoice
Strange how quickly history detaches itself from your memory. We here had gradually come to think that the camping riot in Cairo's Tahrir Square was some kind of summer of love. That everyone there was cramming roses into cannon shells singing together and that the whole world was just there to give each other love and hugs. Time for a lesson in rebellion....
Wagner premiere: mangled Lohengrin kind of straight out of Wagner temple in Bayreuth
"Kinder!, macht Neues!, Neues!, und abermals Neues!" wrote Wagner to Franz Lizt. And after the very first Festival, he concluded that next year everything had to be different. Even an entirely new theatre he did not consider out of the question.
Via Intolleranza II is an irresistibly witty theatrical chaos about the construction of an opera village.
The lung cancer survivor who died last year Künstler Christoph Schlingensief - all-rounder, provocateur, director, life artist - gets on the Holland Festival an extended tribute: the opening performance Mea Culpa, a programme of seven feature films, and Schlingensief's swan song Via Intolleranza II.
Deathly ill caught Christoph Schlingensief up the wild plan to get into Burkina Faso an opera village from the ground up, Remdoogo. A self-sufficient sanctuary where people from different cultures could meet, and to make art together there for an extended period of time. This follows similar initiatives such as the Avenida Theatre in Mozambique, set up by author Henning Mankell. Schlingensief sought to merge art and life. Driven by a long-standing fascination with the rich African culture, and inspired by the ideals of his great hero Joseph Beuys.
Via Intolleranza II is Schlingensief's attempt to capture, in a maelstrom of documentary, music, visual art, film, performance art, lecture, opera and theatre, the early process of becoming Remdoogo. A performance about a process. At the same time, Schlingensief also seems to question his own motives. Via Intolleranza II was his swan song - he died three months after the premiere. The show will have its Dutch premiere on Saturday 4 June.
You'd be interested to know what Spalding Gray and Christoph Schlingensief would have had to say to each other.
Cover of Spalding Gray At the Holland Festival, two minds wander. The loudest is that of Christoph Schlingensief, Germany's most independent filmmaker, theatre-maker, activist and enfant terrible, always good for controversy. After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, he processed his anger and fear in Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, presented in 2009 at...
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