A year before his death in 1972, M.C. Escher’s process and essence was captured by fellow Dutch creative Han van Gelder for the 20-minute film Adventures in Perception. The documentary, while short, is a striking portrait of the artist, whose tessellations, perspective-shifting drawings, and studies garnered fans in both the art and scientific fields. The film was crafted for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands’ program “Living Art The Netherlands.”
Tag: NETHERLANDS
In Vakantie Van de Filmer, filmmaker van der Keuken brings together various audio and visual materials: memories of an elderly married couple, personal holiday photos, the saxophonist Ben Webster, poems and a portrait of his grandfather who introduced him to the world of photography. A representation in which the various spaces flow together prompting reflection about the tension between film and photography, time standing still and the moving image. Van der Keuken revises and reformulates, like an alchemist, his own aesthetic principles and shows how these tie in with his own social environment.
Ivan’s best friend, Kamen, is in an American hospital, in coma after an accident. Since he’s denied a visa to the USA and can’t stay by his side in his last moments, Ivan decides to set off for Bulgaria countryside, taking the camera Kamen has given him. There’s a legend in Kamen’s place of birth – a small mountain village – that one song could bring people back to life. Ivan starts a journey to find it and record it, collecting a myriad of stories along the way. Will he succeed?
Once upon a time in a forest, an elephant encounters a snail, when suddenly it begins to rain. The snail asks the elephant whether he wants to come inside his shell. The elephant accepts this kind invitation even though the snail’s house is a wee bit small.
In its sixty-five minutes, Paz Encina’s first film, carries Ramón and Cándida, an aging couple living in the deep country, from sunrise, when they hang their old hammock between two trees in a clearing, to sunset, when they take it in. Settled in its tenuous grasp, they talk about the heat, the rain, the dog that won’t stop barking, the war, and their son, Máximo, who is doing his military service and hasn’t been heard from lately. The father lives in hope, the mother in fear, and scenes of their daily rounds of labor and rest—images of a contemplative pictorial exaltation—are joined by voice-over flashbacks revealing the story of their son’s departure and the rumors that followed.
An independent-thinking doctor in a rural community with his own ideas of how medicine should be practiced begins to find himself ostracized from the community after one of his patients commits suicide.
Set in Antwerp, Belgium in the early 70s, Left Luggage tells the story of Chaja, an impetuous, liberal-minded philosophy student. She has a complex relationship with her parents, who both survived the Nazi concentration camps. She needs money so she gets a job as a nanny for a Hassidic Jewish family whose world is completely alien to her liberated lifestyle. She becomes close to their son and through this relationship learns about the lives of her own parents.
Frac, a mime who is suffering from a severe bout of depression, happens to meet a troupe of circus entertainers and immediately falls in love with one of the stars, Giulietta. But while his affection for Giulietta and admiration for the performers gives him a new lease on life, Giulietta’s father, the leader of the troupe, opposes the relationship and is determined to keep them apart. Meanwhile, Frac and Giulietta discover a gang of children who are held prisoner by a criminal leader who forces them to do his bidding, and they devise a plan to win the kids their freedom.