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Venice/Toronto saddle up with Dutch western Brimstone Dutch line-up Karlovy Vary, Venice, Toronto and San Sebastian Star profile: Layla M.’s Nora el Koussour REM doc: Koolhaas on Koolhaas CineMart and HFM join forces with BoostNL

Issue #24 September 2016 Venice/TIFF/San Sebastian issue Download the free app for iPad and Android

Index 4-5 Koolhoven goes West Brimstone, starring Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce and Carice van Houten, selected for TIFF and Venice 6-7 Firing Brimstone The production behind Martin Koolhoven’s first “Dutch western” 8-9 Anger behind the veil Mijke de Jong’s Layla M., a portrait of a radicalized young Islam woman, is Toronto-bound 10-11 Haven sent TIFF Kids gives nod to Nicole van Kilsdonk’s The Day My Father Became a Bush, the story of a young girl’s walk to safety during wartime 12-13 Risky Bezness Alex Pitstra profiles his relationship with his longabsent father in Bezness As Usual, selected for Toronto 14-15 Design for living REM, Tomas Koolhaas’ portrait of his celebrated architect father is selected for Venice 2016 16-17 The Ascent of Tan Amy Tan’s Ascent, comprising a series of stills of Mount Fuji, world-premiered to great acclaim at Locarno 2016 18-19 Downbeat Dad Martijn Maria Smits discusses the inspiration behind his Waldstille, selected for San Sebastian

24-25 Laguna sunrise Dutch producer Jan van der Zanden talks about his minority co-pro interest in Deepak Rauniyar’s White Sun, selected for Venice Orizzonti 26-27 Cuba libre Transit Havana, Daniel Abma’s doc about transexuals in Havana awaiting gender reassignment surgery, was a big hit at the recent Karlovy Vary Film Festival 28-29 Festival news Dutch films on the international film circuit 30-33 Help from our friends… EYE’s new state-of-the-art Collection Centre is up and running and run with the help of wonderful volunteers, both Dutch and refugees new to the country.

34-35 Feather vs fur Simone van Dusseldorp discusses her Cinekid opener Owls & Mice 36-37 Cool for kids (and adults) Cinekid, the renowned fest for family and youth films celebrates its 30th edition this year, and shows no sign of slowing down 38-39 Tiger ’s Calf CineMart and the Holland Film Meeting have launched BoostNL, designed to strengthen market support for Dutch and international projects 40 Star profile Nora el Koussour, star of Mijke de Jong’s Layla M.

20-21 Independence day Dutch minority co-pro mockumentary King of the Belgians, directed by Brosens and Woodworth, is selected for Venice Orizzonti 22-23 Prisoner of fortune Mahmoud al Massad’s Blessed Benefit, about life in a Jordanian jail, gets TIFF Discovery nod

Cover still: Brimstone Photo: Philippe Antonello

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Martin Koolhoven See pages 4 - 7

COLOPHON See NL is published four times per year by EYE International and The Netherlands Film Fund and is distributed to international film professionals.

Editors in chief: Marten Rabarts (EYE), Jonathan Mees (Netherlands Film Fund) Executive editor: Nick Cunningham Contributors: ­Geoffrey Macnab, Joost Broeren Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper Circulation: 1400 copies © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International 2016 CONTACT Sandra den Hamer CEO EYE E sandradenhamer@eyefilm.nl Marten Rabarts Head of EYE International E martenrabarts@eyefilm.nl EYE International PO BOX 74782 1070 BT Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 758 2375 W www.eyefilm.nl Doreen Boonekamp CEO Netherlands Film Fund E d.boonekamp@filmfonds.nl Ellis Driessen International Affairs Netherlands Film Fund E e.driessen@filmfonds.nl Jonathan Mees Head of Communications Netherlands Film Fund E j.mees@filmfonds.nl

Photo: Pief Weyman

Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfonds.nl

Layla M.

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Mijke de Jong

Koolhoven goes West

Martin Koolhoven

Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone has been called the first “Dutch western.” A big international movie shot in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Spain, it stars Dakota Fanning as a mute heroine hunted down by a psychotic preacher (Guy Pearce).

Geoffrey Macnab reports.

Director Koolhoven states that Brimstone is set in the “menacing inferno of the old American west.”

“I wanted to write a western, but I also wanted it to be personal and original. In the end that meant the movie is hard to compare with any movie, including westerns,” he explains of the project’s origins.

The Dutch writer-director (whose previous credits include Winter In Wartime and Schnitzel Paradise) professes himself a big admirer of the graphic novels of Brian Azzarello, Garth Ellis and Alejandro Jodorowsky whose vivid and often violent work influenced the way he approached his script. Another inspiration was Charles Laughton’s classic southern Gothic movie The Night Of The Hunter which had

a psychotic preacher of its own, memorably played by Robert Mitchum. Despite citing Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West as a particular favourite western, one of Koolhoven’s aims was not to make it look and feel like other westerns. “It is purposely not an hommage to any films,” he underlines.

“It was hard, especially since I hadn’t written in such a long time.

It was a multi-layered, complicated script, so it took over three years,” Koolhoven adds of his struggles to complete the screenplay.

Right from the outset, there was a very favourable response to Brimstone. Big-name stars queued up to take roles. The filmmakers had an initial list of three actors and five actresses that they wanted to approach for the leads. Koolhoven’s casting director told him to give the screenplay to the top agencies and then just wait. “He said agents would call us immediately, trying to get their actors in the movie. That is exactly what happened. The agents of two of the three names on our list came to us, so then I had to really think which one I wanted and I picked Guy Pearce. He was the first to come on board.”

With the female lead, it was a more complicated story. Koolhoven was very enthusiastic about Mia Wasikowska, who quickly signed up. Then, the schedule changed and Wasikowska had to pull out for personal reasons.

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“That was just before shooting started, so things looked bad. But luckily, because of the changed schedule, Dakota Fanning was now available. She was on the list of five, but I had not met her, because she was already doing a movie. We met in Germany, just before I started shooting and it was very clear it had to be her. She was extremely motivated and wonderful.” Leading Dutch actress, and Game Of Thrones siren, Carice van Houten also stars, as does the series’ male lead Kit Harrington.

The director pays fulsome tribute to his producer, Els Vandevorst. She initially approached him with a project just after he left film school.

Het Zuiden (South, 2004) was their first film together and they’ve been regular collaborators ever since.

“During the pre-production of our next movie together (Winter in Wartime) we got along so well that we wanted to form a company together, but that didn’t actually happen until 2010 when we started N279 Entertainment,” Koolhoven recounts. “Brimstone would be unthinkable without Els. I probably would not have written it, it certainly would not have been produced and when the movie was ready, a lot of people got scared and it was Els that pulled us through.

She’s got balls of steel. I guess I’m the Brim and she’s the Stone….”

Venice Competition / Toronto Special Presentation

Brimstone

Martin Koolhoven

Photo: Philippe Antonello

‘I wanted to write a western, but I also wanted it to be personal and original’

Director: Martin Koolhoven Script: Martin Koolhoven Production: N279 Entertainment (NL), X-Filme (DE) Co-Production: FilmWave (UK), Prime Time (BE), The Jokers Films (FR), Dragon Films (SE), Film Väst (SE), Paradiso Films (NL) Sales: Embankment Films 5

Firing Brimstone How does a Dutch producer put together a sprawling, big budget, 150-minute, English-language western with big name stars?

Brimstone producer Els Vandevorst explains.

“Initially, I had two ways to finance this film,” Vandevorst recalls of the sometimes fraught experience. The first was to go to a US studio and to ask it to put up the backing. The downside there was that the Dutch filmmakers would almost certainly have lost artistic control. The second solution was to follow the example of Danish mavericks Zentropa, who fund their Lars Von Trier features by involving small armies of European co-producers.

Vandevorst took the second option, thereby ensuring final cut, but giving herself a logistical nightmare.

Koolhoven is a brilliant director but not, prior to Brimstone at least, one with a bankable international reputation. “I knew it would be a very, very tough gig for me,” Vandevorst says with understatement.

At least, the response to Koolhoven’s dark and violent script was very enthusiastic. (This was a revenge story about a young woman and her daughter fleeing a vengeful preacher.) First partners were the Netherlands Film Fund who backed the film through its development and also stepped in with production funding. Then French financiers (and art house specialists) Backup Media signed up, followed by UK sales outfit Embankment Films.

Also pivotal in the film’s journey from script to screen was Londonbased production and financing outfit, New Sparta Films.

‘From the start we supported Brimstone, and it’s a fascinating project to be involved in,” stresses Film Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp.

“The Fund had faith in Martin Koolhoven and Els Vandevorst who both have clear creative and international ambitions.”

By early 2015, Vandevorst was working with German producers and studio managers Babelsberg but at the last minute they could not be involved, jeopardising German support. Fortunately, a few weeks before shooting, co-producer Paul Trijbits introduced her to new German partners X-Filme and the project was back on track.

“The script was brilliant and the director extremely interesting and talented,” comments X Filme CEO Uwe Schott. “This is what X Filme does constantly, European co-productions, sometimes with a majority participation, sometimes minor. This project was a minor investment, but nevertheless very important to us because of the quality of the project… It is X Filme’s speciality to produce this way.

Internationally and with US appeal, but full of European talent such as Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas and Hologram For A King.”

Casting on Brimstone proved a challenge. When the script was

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shown by casting agent Des Hamilton to the top American agencies, there was a rush of enthusiasm among A-list stars to appear in the film and it took some negotiation to fix a final cast that included Dakota Fanning and Kit Harington, Carice van Houten and Guy Pearce as the vengeful preacher.

This is an English language movie set in the US (albeit shot in Europe) that received substantial backing from the Film Fund, but Vandevorst was determined that it should retain a strong Dutch flavour. She was able to ensure that almost all the key crew members (including composer Junkie XL) were Dutch.

“The fact that Brimstone is selected for competition in Venice and a special screening in Toronto deserves respect,” adds Boonekamp. “These selections are a perfect kickstart to reach out and overwhelm audiences worldwide.”

Yes, it has been an exhausting project to make but Vandevorst isn’t sure she is ready to return to making low budget art house films quite yet.

After Brimstone, she has the appetite and expertise to carry on making films on a very grand scale.

As she puts it, “I am not saying that we can only do big films but Martin and I are both quite ambitious. If you have the opportunity and the momentum (to make bigger films), you have to do it.”

Venice Competition / Toronto Special Presentation

Brimstone

Martin Koolhoven

Photo: Philippe Antonello

‘A rush of enthusiasm among US A-list stars to appear’

Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone Dakota Fanning and Kit Harrington

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Anger behind the veil Photo: Pief Weyman

match played between her Muslim friends is all too real, and all too violent. And she has a propensity towards romance and affection which is heart-warming.

Mijke de Jong

Mijke de Jong’s Layla M., world premiering in Toronto before heading to BFI London FF, is a searing portrait of a young radicalized woman who rejects her native Amsterdam for a new life in the Middle East.

Layla is a smart, articulate, footballloving woman in her late teens, studying for her exams. She is computer savvy, highly adept at social media and fancies the nice looking boy who pops over from time to time. But Layla practises what many consider an extreme form of Islam. She quotes radical scripture, rejects her moderate father and imams at her local mosque and agitates for the right to wear full burka. “Allah will be my guide in this alien country,” she declaims.

But the portrait of Layla that director Mijke de Jong paints is far from critical or judgmental. She may be at times impetuous, but her political activities are not totally without justification. She is outraged by online footage of the murder of Muslim children, she fears (and name-checks) Geert Wilders and the politics of the Dutch Far Right and the police raid on a friendly football

Eventually she feels compelled to leave the West behind for a new life in the Middle East, together with her young husband Abdel, where she experiences happiness, tragedy and disillusionment in equal measure.

“When we started, the Arab Spring had just begun,” explains director De Jong, who engaged in a detailed consultation process with Amsterdam’s Muslim community before the shoot. “Young Muslims from all over Europe were radicalizing and moving to Syria.

Initially, we saw resemblances to the freedom fighters from the Spanish Civil War. At the time we didn’t know how violent and endless the battle would become.

But we (screenwriter Jan Eilander and myself) were aware that the dissatisfaction and resistance of young Muslims who don’t feel at home in Amsterdam also had something to do with us (nonMuslims) and that our new film would touch upon this subject…

Never before have I worked on a film that has struggled so intensely with the spirit of the time.”

The role of Layla is played brilliantly, and with the most acute sense of authenticity, by newcomer Nora el Koussour, whose feature debut this is. El Koussour has just graduated from the theatre school in

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Rotterdam and has recently been accepted into The Maastricht Theatre Academy.

“Nora immediately intrigued me, but it took me some time to make a final decision. Like it often goes, the decision was made after an unexpected moment. After a screentest – Nora was just about to leave – I asked her to sing an anasheed (a religious song), together with Ilias, who plays her boyfriend/ husband Abdel. It happened to be her favorite anasheed, one she used to sing when she was little. Ilias started singing and Nora joined in.

It was overwhelming, so much passion. Those two together...

I was completely touched. Then I thought: If she can do this, then we can make this work.”

The film will be released in the Netherlands by leading arthouse distributor Cinemien. What reaction does De Jong expect, or at least hope for, from local audiences?

“I hope that people are touched, that the film raises questions, that they understand a girl like Layla.

And a boy like Abdel,” she says.

“That people will start thinking less in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. That it makes angry boys and girls think twice and that locals might have a somewhat different approach when sitting in the tram, next to a woman wearing a headscarf. But altogether, I hope that my films will make the world a little softer. The more you know, the more you’ll understand.”

Nick Cunningham

Toronto Platform Competition

Layla M.

Mijke de Jong

Photo: Pief Weyman

‘Never before have I worked on a film that has struggled so intensely with the spirit of the time’

Director: Mijke de Jong Script: Jan Eilander, Mijke de Jong Production: Topkapi Films (NL) Co-Production: Menuet (BE), Chromosom Film (DE), Schiwago Film (DE) Sales: Beta Cinema Supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, VAF, Eurimages, Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, FFA, CoBO 9

Kids

The Day My Father Became a Bush Nicole van Kilsdonk

‘Co-production helped in visualizing what kind of world it would be for the film’

Director: Nicole van Kilsdonk Script: Marleen Versprille, Nicole van Kilsdonk Production: Lemming Film (NL) Co-Production: Nukleus Film (KR), A Private View (BE), Minds Meet (BE) Sales: Beta Cinema

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Haven sent

Nicole van Kilsdonk

Nicole van Kilsdonk’s adaptation of the acclaimed Joke van Leeuwen novel The Day My Father Became a Bush is selected for TIFF Kids.

The director talks to Nick Cunningham.

Life changes for ten-year old Toda the day her father is called up to defend his country against the Others. She must walk to a faraway country to find safe haven in the house of her mother, a woman she barely knows.

Photo: Gregg Telussa

As her journey continues, Toda responds to life on the road as a nomadic child refugee, becoming more independent and resilient as she discovers both adventure and new friends en route.

The action takes place in a strange land, and one that is pointedly not the Netherlands. It is familiar but disorientating, populated by retired generals in hidden castles and battalions of infantrymen herding refugee children away from the war zone. Even the language spoken in Tota’s mildly dystopian destination country is disconcerting, replete with curlesques, prefixes and suffixes.

The film is produced by the prolific Amsterdam-based Lemming Film (see page 34) with whom Van Kilsdonk made Taking Chances (2011), another film about a girl coping with her father’s departure for war. “It actually helped when Lemming Film suggested The Day My Father Became a Bush could be a co-production with Croatia, and not just because of the financing,” stresses Van Kilsdonk, referencing Croatian co-pro partner Nukleus Film.

“I didn’t want it to be totally fairytale such as Dik Trom (Arne Toonen, 2010), which is very stylised and placed within a much more absurd world, I wanted to have some feeling within the real world.

So I visited Croatia and it really helped to give the feeling that this is a Europe that you cannot really identify. It is clearly not Holland but it could be Austria, it could be Croatia of course, the North of France, so it really helped in visualizing what kind of world it would be for the film.” The other production partners on the film are Minds Meet and A Private View, both from Belgium.

Without giving too much away, the film is book-ended by scenes of safety and comfort. Is this a necessary pre-condition of films within the family genre? Kind of, is Van Kilsdonk’s response.

“We invented the character of Stickie (an orphan boy that Tota meets during her journey and whom

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she wants to adopt), and making cookies didn’t exist at the end of the book. We wanted to give the feeling that the father was still in the war but still in touch, and that even though she doesn’t really know her mother, it is ok there. I think for children you want to give them some hope but not in a totally unrealistic way… In the book she gets a letter from her father saying that after the war they’ll find a solution to their separation, which felt a bit too easy as if now all of a sudden this would not be a problem any more. We didn’t want to give the impression that everything could be solved in one day.”

Van Kilsdonk acknowledges her country’s reputation for producing high quality audiovisual product for youth and family audiences, but she urges the local distribution sector to maintain an equally bold strategy in marketing and delivering this to sophisticated audiences.

“When you travel you see that in many countries films for kids means either animation, or they are very childish or the acting is quite poor. So in that sense we do have a strong tradition in the Netherlands,” she stresses. “But distribution has changed, and we need to be aware of this and give it a new impulse because (this quality) is not as obvious any more as it used to be.

If you compare it with other countries it is good, but not as good as it could be.”

Risky Bezness

Alex Pitstra

In his second feature documentary, Dutch filmmaker Alex Pitstra responds to his absent father’s request for him to visit him in Tunisia, putting in motion a decade-long saga of failed expectations and chronic misunderstanding. Nick Cunningham reports.

Back in the late 1970s Mohsen Ben Hassen and his older brother Salem were at the top of their game, Casanovas in their prime, experts in the dark art of ‘bezness’. Charming and handsome, their prey were foreign women visiting the resort town of Sousse in Tunisia. One such woman was the Dutch Anneke who fell for Mohsen’s considerable charms. On the rebound from a failed marriage, she visited him again and again before arranging his passage back to the Netherlands where they were married.

Filmmaker Alex Pitstra, aka Karim Alexander Ben Hassen, was the product of this union, born in 1979.

But his parents’ marriage was doomed to failure, and Alex grew up fatherless. Depressed by his father’s lack of contact, Alex adopted his mother’s Dutch surname in his

mid-teens. Then at the age of 25 he received a letter from Tunisia. His father wanted to make contact again and Alex responded positively.

But then the requests for money began. For Alex, it seemed that his father had never forgotten the ‘bezness’ trade, but now he plied it in an altogether less Westernised, less secular Tunisia.

“Yeah, the film is actually about the rise and demise of the bezness during the golden years in Tunisia, the whole history playing against this backdrop of my father’s early mastery of it in the 1970s,” agrees Pitstra, who shot footage for ten years through to 2015 although actual production on the film commended in 2012. “But then we, the children, arrive in Tunisia – and when I confront him we are standing at this dirty empty hotel pool, this empty soul maybe, with its wounds, where there is a sense of loss, and you can feel it in him too.

And there is a showdown.”

The reasons for this showdown are many. For the past decade Alex has felt like a cash-cow, bailing out his father or investing in his various nefarious business deals. As important­ly, he still feels the pain of his abandonment and the harsh treatment meted out by Mohsen to Alex’s mother. And accompanying him is his half-sister Jasmin, Mohsen’s daughter from a second failed marriage, a woman whose socialism and feminism are dia­ metrically opposed to the outmoded opinions and attitudes of her father.

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His father wanted to make contact… but then the requests for money began

Bezness As Usual

Alex Pitstra

Docs

Jasmin was the original focus of the film, which received Netherlands Film Fund backing just shy of €100k, but Alex and his producers at Amsterdam-based Selfmade Films soon came to the conclusion that he should be the subject, that his journey of self-discovery was the key editorial line they should follow.

But this entailed more than an investigation of his troubled relationship with his father (who himself questions Alex’s own ‘bezness’ motives in making his film).

Alex’s mother is one of the key protagonists too, and she takes considerable umbrage at her own son’s perceived abandonment of her when Mohsen came back into his life. In one poignant and extended scene she lays bare her pain, referring to Alex as a selfish bastard, declaiming, “you’d do anything for your friends, but your mother can go to hell.”

“It was terrifying constantly having to think about whether to use this scene,” comments Pitstra. “I was thinking ‘who am I to put myself into the centre and make myself so important, assuming that there is a film in my story’. So I had a lot of trouble, and throughout the whole process I tried to accept that it might become something that could be valuable to other people.

I hope that this is the case, that I have succeeded and that it resonates with audiences on a more universal level.”

Director: Alex Pitstra Script: Alex Pitstra Production: Selfmade Films (NL) Supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, VPRO, CoBO 13

Design for Living countryside is subordinated to the needs of the increasingly whimsical, free and innovative city ideal.

Tomas Koolhaas

Tomas Koolhaas’ portrait of his father, the highly acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Hoolhaas, is selected for Venice Special Program. The director talks to Nick Cunningham.

The architecture-themed REM may comprise a profile of a great architect by a very talented film­maker son, but don’t expect a praise-­laden, hagiographical listing of the man’s achievements. Rather, REM is a highly cinematic treatise on aesthetic­ ism and practice, with discussion of a building’s end-use by its occupants assuming equal status to the lofty intentions of the designer.

The film’s form comprises a series of headings and statements which are then expanded upon in image and voice-over, delivered by Rem himself, offering an audio stream of consciousness that both complements and contrasts the precision of the film’s visuals. We follow him in his OMA offices, on building sites within China and the Middle East, at the Venice Biennale upbraiding a journalist for asking exasperatingly facile questions or standing within the Dutch landscape expounding on how the

“I considered an even more nonlinear structure where the connection between the overall concept and what you are hearing and seeing is even less straightforward but in the end I didn’t want to alienate most viewers, and in reality, the less linear the film the less people will ‘get it’,” Koolhaas underlines. “One of the reasons I chose the quote/chapter structure was because although I felt some people would be able to sit back and open their minds to a more stream of consciousness experience where the connections were less obvious, many people would not.”

One can argue that the heart of the film, shot over a four-year period, beats with the likes of homeless Phil who plays piano every day in the bowels of the Seattle Public Library, which itself resembles an open book, or his down at heel counterpart Mark for whom the building offers a sense of peace and solace. “Music and literature I choose over any drug,” he says. As Rem is represented in elegant voice-over, the invisible of society are finally rendered visible.

The architect Rem is baldly stating his design intention, to distribute facilities without concern for class, race or economic status, and that there is a considerable divide between the building as conceived on paper and its subsequent use.

A building therefore has two lives.

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Director Tomas concurs, putting his argument in cinematic terms.

“What has always interested me about architecture is how it is used by people, and what goes into planning for that use. I don’t care much for the lofty, hypothetical jargon-laden, ideological battle of wits that architecture discourse has all to often become, so it makes sense that my film focuses more on the humanistic aspects of the work.”

Within a domestic setting, we visit the fabulous Maison Bordeaux in the bucolic French countryside, constructed for a man whose physical impairments demand ease of movement, hence the application of hydraulics to allow elevation of work and living spaces within the book-lined atrium. “The house is a tool to live a satisfying life,” explains the owner’s daughter Louise.

The film was funded via grants and a Kickstarter campaign, and economic expediency determined that most roles were performed by Koolhaas himself, those of producer, director, cameraman and editor. This was not, he argues, cause for complaint. “I think there’s a cohesion of style and a deeper subtextual level you can achieve when it’s you doing everything.

That level is almost impossible with different people doing different tasks, for the simple reason that its almost impossible to immediately communicate abstract creative ideas verbally without any element of ambiguity,” Koolhaas concludes.

REM

Venice Special Program

Tomas Koolhaas ‘What has always interested me about architecture is how it is used by people’

Director: Tomas Koolhaas Script: Tomas Koolhaas Production: Paragon Films

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Photo: PHirth

The Ascent of Tan

Fiona Tan

Less than a year after her debut feature History’s Future premiered at IFFR, artist/film­ maker Fiona Tan has completed a second feature – one in a completely different register, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

Ascent is a love story composed entirely of still images. “The photographs are from a collection of 4000 that I’ve been able to bring together, all of the same subject, namely Mount Fuji,” director Tan explains of her Locarno selection.

On a visit to the Izu Photo Museum around three years ago, Tan was struck by the range of pictures the museum had of the mountain.

There were images from the early days of photography; from the Second World War and from the period of the American occupation.

She was told she had access to everything in the collection. The Museum also launched a website on her behalf, asking members of the public to upload any images they had of Mount Fuji.

“I said I need a mountain of images.

They said Mount Fuji is 3776 metres high and why don’t we try to get that

many images. That is how we ended up with about 4000.”

Early on, Tan expected that the film might be around 10 minutes long.

However, when the material came in, she realised she had a far richer and more diverse store of images that she had anticipated. The project therefore began to grow in scope. “Like many artists and filmmakers, I am a great fan of Chris Marker,” Tan states. In particular, she admired Marker’s classic 1962 sci-fi drama La Jetée, which also used still images and voiceovers. “I thought, wow, I’d really like to make a film using only still images.” But while Marker’s film was less than half an hour in length, Tan made a full length feature. “It felt like I was trying to do the impossible for a while but I think it has kind of worked!”

Ascent is the story of two lovers: an English woman and a Japanese man. This couple has had a longterm relationship, albeit across continents. Early in the film, it is revealed that the woman’s lover is dead. She is grieving, trying to come to terms with his death, and she has been sent a big box of his mementoes: letters describing his climb of Mount Fuji and photographs of the mountain. As she pores over the material, she thinks not just of the man she has lost but about the relationship between photography, film and philosophy.

On a logistical level, Ascent was more straightforward to make than

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History’s Future which had an ambitious shooting schedule and multiple locations. Nonetheless, Tan points out that any new piece is “as difficult or more difficult” than the previous one. “The challenges were very different. The challenges were… how on earth to make a film!

It was really trying to come to grips with what cinema is because I was making it with something that isn’t cinema. I am just using photographs and still images. That is starting from an impossible starting point in a way.”

In preparation for the movie, which was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, Tan did extensive research on Mount Fuji. Gradually, she began to realise just how much resonance the mountain has in Japanese culture and philosophy.

Tan was also aware that photos of the mountain never quite do justice to the way it is experienced by hikers who actually visit and ascend it. She also realised that there were profound differences in the way western visitors regard the mountain and how it is viewed by the Japanese themselves.

Ascent will be shown both at film festivals and in cinemas – and in galleries. There are two versions: a film version and an installation version. Having made two features back to back, Tan is about to take up a position as artist in residence at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“I am pulling my whole family over there… we will see how that adventure turns out,” she ends.

Locarno Competition

Ascent

Fiona Tan ‘I said I need a mountain of images’

Director: Fiona Tan Script: Fiona Tan Production: Antithesis Films

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San Sebastian New Directors Competition

Waldstille

Martijn Maria Smits ‘All stories tell something personal about their creator’

Director: Martijn Maria Smits Script: Martijn Maria Smits Production: Circe Films

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Photo: Anouck Wolf

Downbeat Dad

Martijn Maria Smits

Geoffrey Macnab talks to Dutch director Martijn Maria Smits, whose drama Waldstille is selected for San Sebastian 2016.

Photo: Anouck Wolf

Martijn Maria Smits acknowledges that he was at a lowish ebb when he conceived his new film, Waldstille.

Several of his other projects had been previously turned down for funding. “I felt rejected, I felt misunderstood,” he remembers.

It didn’t help that this was during a period when the Dutch government was reducing its support for the arts in general. For a very short period, the writer-director had begun to doubt that he would ever make a new feature.

Instead of basking in self-pity, Smits decided to use his situation as an inspiration for a new script about a character who has similar feelings of rejection. Waldstille is the story of the fall and rise of Ben. He lives a seemingly happy life with his girlfriend Tinka and their young daughter Cindy. Then, one night, he has too much to drink at a party. On the way home, he is responsible for a car accident in which Trika is killed. He is given a prison sentence.

On his release, his parents-in-law,

who’ve been looking after his daughter, are understandably very hostile toward him.

Smits knew that casting would be crucial. To play Ben, he needed an actor that the audience could sympathise with, even at his lowest points. “Thomas Ryckewaert is a good friend of mine, we made a film together before, so he was one of the first I had in mind during the writing period,” he reflects on the choice of Ryckewaert to play the lead. “Of course, I tried to cast Matthias Schoenaerts but that was a no-go. At the end, all stories tell something personal about their creator... Thomas and I share the same interests in art, in life, we have the same humour, he is like my brother, he is like me, but then better looking and a lot smarter.”

In Waldstille, produced by Circe Film and funded within the Film Fund-supported De Oversteek scheme, the director aims for a realist, documentary-style look, reflecting the downbeat subject matter. His approach was the opposite to what it had been on his previous feature C’est déjà L’été or on TV movies like Emilia and The Prostitute And The Girl. In the past, he tended to work out problems on set and to rely on improvisation.

With this film, “everything was structured and written out.” It helped that he was working with a very accomplished cinemato­ grapher, Frank van den Eeden, who understood his goals and knew just how to help him achieve them.

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Yes, he acknowledges a degree of frustration at having to wait so long between his first feature back in 2010 and Waldstille. Nonetheless, none of his work in the intervening years has gone to waste. One long gestating feature that didn’t come to fruition was Everything We Always Had Was Now but its ideas and themes fed into a short film he was able to make earlier this year.

“I guess in the end all films are a continuation and are connected in a way,” the director reflects, but adds that even when a filmmaker is

‘The director aims for a realist, documentarystyle look, reflecting the subject matter’ tackling familiar material, he or she may be “in a different mood or different stage in your life – and that influences the way you tell the story and the shape of the film.”

Now, after all the reversals along the way, Smits has a San Sebastian premiere to enjoy. “I have never been to San Sebastian before. To be honest, I’m still in the editing room with Waldstille recutting, so I’m still focused on that.” he says.

Nonetheless, he sees the Spanish festival as a perfect launchpad for his movie.

Photo: Bart Dewaele

Independence day

Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth

Jessica Woodworth talks to Nick Cunningham about her and partner Peter Brosens’ subversive mockumentary about a Belgium split asunder and a King’s hapless attempts to forge a new sense of unity.

A nation’s inherent (and absurd) sense of dichotomy is examined to the max in the comedy King of the Belgians, selected for Venice’s Orizzonti Competition. In the film, co-produced by Topkapi Films with the support of the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive, the francophone community of Belgium decides to call it a day and claim independence.

The problem for the country’s impotent King Nicolas III is that all of this happens when he is on a diplomatic mission to Turkey during a solar storm that obliterates most forms of communication and any chance of air travel home. The king’s mission therefore, along with two very straight-laced political mandarins, a personal manservant and a documentary filmmaker with questionable motives, is to get home by land or sea (or by whatever means necessary) to attend to the

constitutional crisis. This, as one can imagine, is easier said than done, and the journey takes on the mythical proportions of an odyssey.

Of course the film’s political backdrop is one of identity crisis within a fragile Europe uncertain how to react to the current refugee dilemma. The journey home through Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Albania is a constant reminder of the war in the Balkans, while the King’s wooing of an authoritarian Turkey is what sets up the dilemma in the first place.

But we must not forget that while King of the Belgians is very political, it is a comedy too, which is distinctly new territory for the filmmaking duo of Brosens and Woodworth. To crank up the satire, King Nicolas III is Flemish, something the actual (and distinctly Francophone) King Philip is not (although Nicolas’s French is just as questionable as the real king’s Flemish). And if either of the communities were actually to declare their independence, it would be far more likely to be the Flemish than the Walloons, as happens the film.

“If we referred to the European and local political situation in too dense a way it would threaten to cause the whole story to crash. So it was a delicate balancing act between keeping a constant and fresh tone without allowing it to be come pedantic, and to maintain a rhythm,” Woodworth points out.

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“Rhythm is everything in comedy, and I have to admit after making three rather sobering films before (La cinquieme saison, Altiplano, Khadak) which kind of exhausted us, this was even more challenging.

We didn’t know how hard comedy would be.”

Nevertheless, their efforts were not in vain, even if them took four years to find the finance – “we knew we were capable but it was very difficult to convince the financiers,” says

‘If we referred to the European and local political situation in too dense a way it would threaten to cause the whole story to crash’ Woodworth. What’s more, now they have this one under their belt the pair intend to revisit the character of Nicolas III and his travails in the future as he looks to secure national (and European) unity.

“The king feels for us like a character that involves another step, so we are going to continue his odyssey,” Woodworh confirms.

“This is something that we feel eager to develop. In these dark and fragile times we really believe that humour is one of our most potent weapons. There is a place for powerful and relevant comedies.”

King of the Belgians Venice Orizzonti Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

‘We didn’t know how hard comedy would be’

Director: Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth Script: Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth Production: Bo Films (BE) Co-Production: Topkapi Films (NL), Entre Chien et Loup (BE), Art Fest (BU) Sales: Be for Film 21

Prisoner of fortune

Mahmoud al Massad

At least in prison, the water is hot, there is a sense of community, you can play cards and you get served up some decent food. It is better there than on the outside. That is the conclusion reached by Ahmad, the builder hero of Dutch/ Palestinian director Mahmoud al Massad’s debut feature, Blessed Benefit, selected for TIFF Discovery 2016.

The film is 60% based on a true story, Al Massad claims. A friend of the director was sent to prison for three months for what seemed like an entirely trivial crime. He had failed to finish a building job and was sued. At first, he was dismayed at being behind bars. Then, he compared his new situation to everyday life in Jordan and very quickly decided he was better off.

“He was my friend. I was very worried about him. I had known him for 20 years,” the director recalls. Al Massad went to visit him in prison (and again after he was released). “He looked good. He was whispering to me because he didn’t want his wife to hear him. He said he was really having a good time.”

The director very quickly realised that the prison was being run far more efficiently than society as a whole. He paints a bleak picture of contemporary Jordan as a deeply dysfunctional place. Amman, the capital city, is as expensive a place to live in as any western European city and yet pay is very low.

“If you would ask how these people would survive, your brain would explode to find an answer,” Al Massad says. He argues that the politicians have failed the country.

“The situation is not getting better, even one per cent.”

As Al Massad acknowledges, his film is very different from the typical prison drama like Hunger or Midnight Express in which inmates suffer extreme deprivation. In his movie, prison is a refuge. It is “more comfortable than your own house.”

The film has taken four years to push into production. Al Massad, who divides his time between Jordan and Utrecht in the Netherlands, has enjoyed considerable success with his previous films Shatter Hassan (2001), Recycle (2007) and This Is My Picture When I Was Dead (2010). The script for Blessed Benefit won a variety of prizes, among them the Abu Dhabi Shasha Grant, the Arte Cinema Award and the Global Film Initiative Award, and it was chosen for the Cannes Atelier.

The director pays tribute to his Dutch backers, in particular the

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Netherlands Film Fund. “I am so blessed with the Fund,” he underlines. (The Fund has supported some of his previous projects too.)

What’s more, German sales powerhouse Beta Cinema has taken world sales rights on Blessed Benefit and the film will premiere in Toronto. Whether it will be screened in Jordan remains open to question. The director has been warned that it might be considered subversive and disloyal.

Al Massad found kindred spirits in his Dutch co-producers, New Ams Film Company, run by Julius Ponten

‘The Jordanian prison was being run far more efficiently than society as a whole’ and Sander Verdonk. He met Ponten in Jordan where they were screening their film Rabat.

“I really admired what they did with Rabat. I am doing the same thing, investing my own money and making a film in any way I can.

I remember making my film Recycle in Jordan. I didn’t have a penny.

I was broke. I was working and working to make this film. On Rabat, they did the same thing.

I thought I’d love to work with these guys. We are young and we are on the same level.” Geoffrey Macnab

Blessed Benefit

Mahmoud al Massad

Discovery

Director: Mahmoud Al Massad Script: Mahmoud Al Massad Production: Twenty to Twenty Vision (DE), Yo Image (JO) Co-Production: New Amsterdam (NL) Sales: Beta Cinema 23

Laguna sunrise

‘A movie easily accessible to an international audience…’

Director: Deepak Rauniyar Script: Deepak Rauniyar, David Barker Production: Aadi Productions (Nepal) Co-Production: The Film Kitchen (NL), Louverture Films (US) Sales: The Match Factory 24

Venice Orizzonti / TIFF Contemporary World Cinema

White Sun

Deepak Rauniyar

One of the first co-productions cooked up by former Waterland execs Jan van der Zanden and Ineke Kanters at their new company The Film Kitchen is Deepak Rauniyar’s White Sun. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

The Nepalese drama tells the story of Agri, a Maoist guerrilla who returns to his home village after many years away to bury his father.

It turns out to be a very troubled homecoming. This was one of a number of projects supported by HBF+NFF, International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund and the Netherlands Film Fund’s mutual co-production scheme.

“We picked out this one because it had a human and a political storyline,” Van der Zanden says of the ingredients in Rauniyar’s project that appealed to The Film Kitchen. After speaking to him for the first time via Skype, he and Kanters were impressed by the writer-director’s talent. He already had one feature to his name, Nepal, which had screened in the Berlinale.

They were convinced that White Sun would also have a festival life.

Deepak Rauniyar Rauniyar divides his time between New York and Nepal. An added attraction in working with him was the chance to collaborate with New York co-producers Joslyn Barnes and Danny Glover at Louverture Films. (The Film Kitchen has another project from Jan-Willem van Ewijk called Sleep due to shoot partly in the Rocky Mountains – and so having worked with American partners beforehand can only be a help.)

White Sun didn’t have an especially smooth gestation. The project was delayed by a huge earthquake in the region. “In the beginning, I was thinking: ‘will this work, will this work?’ You can have a nice and good plan but if Mother Nature doesn’t come along, there is no way to make this film.”

No, Van der Zanden and Kanters weren’t actually in Nepal for shooting themselves. “In the first place, I hate travelling and in the second place, I was so busy with other things that I just couldn’t make it,” Van der Zanden says. He points out that on Hubert Bals Fund backed movies, shot in remote places, it isn’t that unusual for the European co-producers to do their work from their home base. The Film Kitchen execs were still happy that they had a creative input on the project.

“If we don’t play a (creative) role, then we won’t step into it,” he says of the attitude The Film Kitchen takes to films that it supports. They

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were reading and commenting on drafts of the script from an early stage. They asked questions and were able to help Rauniyar to make his story more accessible to a western audience. For example, they warned the writer-director that viewers who didn’t have an intimate knowledge of Nepalese history and politics simply wouldn’t know that the drama was unfolding shortly after the civil war. Rauniyar listened to their advice both at script stage and while he was editing. The result is a movie far more easily accessible to an international audience.

White Sun is screening in Venice’s Horizons (Orizzonti) section and has now been picked up for world sales by leading German company The Match Factory.

The Film Kitchen is barely a year old but its slate is already bulging.

Alongside White Sun, it has many new film and TV projects on the boil, among them Nicole van Kilsdonk’s upcoming feature, Sweet Lies (about a love affair between two divorcees in their 60s), due to shoot in October.

In the meantime, Van der Zanden is hoping soon to secure a Benelux distributor for White Sun – and perhaps to make it over to Nepal for the film’s first screenings there.

“I am just dying to go there!” Van der Zanden declares. He just has to overcome his fear of travelling first.

Cuba libre Photo: Johannes Praus

male transgender. “He outed himself and said he thought we were the right people to make this movie… Mariela’s mouth went wide open. Then, she gave a heartfelt, if some­what awkward compliment. She said, ‘Oh, you were done so good.’”

Daniel Abma

Geoffrey Macnab talks to Daniel Abma, whose Transit Havana screened to great acclaim in Karlovy Vary Docs Competition.

Daniel Abma had an unlikely ally when he was making Transit Havana, his documentary about transexuals in Havana awaiting gender reassignment surgery. Not long after arriving in Cuba, Abma had an audience with Mariela Castro, daughter of President Raul Castro (and niece of Fidel Castro.)

Mariela told him that she “was doing the job that her mother started”, supporting the project that allows sex change surgery for Cubans. “I met her several times.

She is a very strong and warm person,” Abma comments.

The idea for the film had come from his friend Alex Bakker. He and Bakker had met to watch a movie and have a beer. Bakker mentioned that he knew a Dutch surgeon who went regularly to Havana to perform surgery on transgender people. This surgeon knew Mariela.

At the first meeting with her, Bakker revealed that he himself is female to

Bakker was there throughout shooting and was a key collaborator.

He wrote a script that was used successfully for the application for Netherlands Film Fund support and helped research the project. With Mariela’s backing, the filmmakers were able to gain access to some unlikely locations. For example, they are almost certainly the first foreign film crew ever to have shot in a Cuban prison. At the same time, the filmmakers made it clear that they were independent. They weren’t going to show any of their material to the authorities or to ask for their blessing.

came to introduce themselves. The filmmakers said they were planning to make a movie about transgender people and asked was there anyone interested… everyone raised their hand. Alex’s status as a member of the community was instrumental in gaining their trust. “They knew our intentions were good. They are activists – like we are in a way.”

After Transit Havana’s selection at Karlovy Vary, Abma is hoping it will be selected for the Havana Festival year-end. If that’s the case, they can have the Cuban premiere with the protagonists in attendance.

Abma was startled by how trusting his three main subjects – Juani, Malú and Odette – were of the filmmakers. “We were so surprised.

We thought this is such an intimate and sensitive topic that it might be difficult to find protagonists. When we asked, everyone was like, ‘yes, of course, I’d love to participate!’”

Does the director consider his documentary to be optimistic about the plight of transgender people in Cuba? “I think in the film, the message is uncertain,” Abma reflects. In Havana, surgery waiting lists aren’t organised in the same way as at European hospitals. It wasn’t a case of waiting for your name to work its way up a list.

The system isn’t transparent. The operation is very difficult – which is one reason why experienced western European surgeons are called on to come to Cuba. However, CENESEX is now planning to open a gender clinic in Havana.

At one stage, the filmmakers visited The National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX), the government organisation run by Mariela. Here, members of the trans community met on a terrace once a week. There were 20 or 30 people sitting when Abma and Bakker

Transit Havana has already opened in the Netherlands. Abma, however, is yet to decide on his next film. As he explains, he throws himself into projects and will spend years working on them. “I make movies that need a lot of time… I have several topics but it is so difficult to choose.”

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Karlovy Vary Docs Competition

Transit Havana

Daniel Abma

Mariela Castro is doing the job that her mother started‌

Director: Daniel Abma Script: Alex Bakker Production: Witfilm (NL) Co-Production: Kloos & Co (DE), HFF (DE) Sales: Rise and Shine World Sales 27

Festival news:

More Dutch selections at in a quirky film about integration, migration and a family that is trying to make sense of it all. After the film’s world premiere in Quinzaine we are now very honoured to have the film at TIFF.”

Ayhan and Me The short film Ayhan and Me, directed by Amsterdam-based Turkish/Dutch filmmaker belit sag ˘, is also selected for TIFF. According Ayhan and Me by belit sag˘

By The Time it Gets Dark by Anocha Suwichakornpong

Toronto

By The Time it Gets Dark Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature By The Time it Gets Dark, selected for TIFF, won the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant after it was pitched at CineMart 2010. The jury was impressed by the use of unconventional ‘episodic’ storytelling to evoke a strong and highly personal perspective on contemporary Thailand. The film offers a contemplative reflection on Thai history and society through multiple storylines. Comments Suwichakornpong: “It is my attempt to deal with the impossibility of making a historical film in a place where there is no history. What begins as a single narrative soon becomes fragmented, and ultimately devours itself. There are no beginning or ending points. Time is both transfixed and moving.”

Import Ena Sendijarevic’s short film Import, produced by Layla Meijman for Amsterdam-based Pupkin Film and which chronicles a single day in the life of a Bosnian family living in the Netherlands, is also selected for Toronto. “When Ena and I started talking about future projects after her Import by Ena Sendijarevic graduation in 2014 she told me she wanted to make a film about the very first encounter she had with the Netherlands when she moved here from Bosnia 20 years ago,” explains producer Meijman. “I fell in love with the starting point of the film for it it to be focused on the absurdity of the life of a refugee and to not diminish the characters to victims but to emphasize instead their humanity. This resulted

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to belit, the film was made as a response to the censorship process that the film was going through from its idea phase until its realization. “The Istanbul exhibition that Ayhan and Me was supposed to be part of was cancelled (read censored) five days before the opening,” she claims. “It was a very urgent video for me. It is very much dealing with the situation now, the situation of the art world in Turkey but also the general political situation in Turkey, which is constantly changing and is very chaotic… TIFF is a perfect next platform for me to reach a wider international audience.”

Other Toronto selections include Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune (co-producer Topkapi Films) and a retrospective screening of Heddy Honigmann’s Oblivion.

the Summer A-Fests Locarno Clan Stephanie Kolk’s short graduation film Clan was selected for Locarno 2016 Pardi di Domani competition.

“I made this film because the ease with which a group of people can exclude someone fascinates me.

One or two pairs of eyes within the group meet, and the group’s walls are up. Everybody understands. It’s a collective decision that doesn’t need any words. And for that reason, nobody bears responsibility individually.

“In Clan we observe how this human, animal process unfolds in a commune, where a newcomer is turned into a stranger. In our modern world, this process is at play on a large scale, maybe more so than ever before. Still, with this film I wanted to concentrate on how it works on the smallest scale. The human scale: the glances, the body language, the physical constellation of people. With Clan I have tried to make a film about ordinary people, who look at each other and wait for someone else to take action.”

Other Locarno selections include Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By The Time it Gets Dark (see above)

Clan by Stephanie Kolk

Karlovy Vary

Falling Frames

Galloping Mind Galloping Mind, the first feature of celebrated theatre director Wim Vandekeybus and selected for Karlovy Vary 2016, was co-produced

by Dutch production company Phanta Vision. Main producer is Bart van Langendonck of prolific Belgian company Savage Film.

Galloping Mind by Wim Vandekeybus

“Vandekeybus is a director who always seeks the borders of the medium. With Galloping Mind he describes a fascinating and confusing world that deals with greed, passion, impossible love and loss,” says Phanta Vision’s Petra Goedings. “Producer Van Langendonck proves again and again that he has a nose for quality in both people and projects. How could you say no to the fascinating world Vandekeybus created with his script and his way of directing, together with a strong creative producer. We are all proud we were able to make this film happen!”

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In the short Falling Frames German direcor Johannes Langkamp, a graduate of the Academy of Art & Design (AKI) of the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in the Netherlands, uses framing and perspective to explore the visualization of threedimensional space through the twodimensional medium of a video camera. “Originally I intended to make just a short experimental video sequence which explores space through a static shot. Driven by curiosity I wanted to drop 25 wooden frames (of a 16by9 aspect ratio) into the camera’s birds eye perspective,” Langkamp explains.

“My intentions to just do a “microproject“ however failed. It took me six months to work out this one minute sequence.”

Falling Frames by Johannes Langkamp

Other Karlovy Vary selections included The Land of the Enlightened

by Pieter-Jan De Pue, Neon Bull by Gabriel Mascaro (Dutch co-producer Viking Film) and Oscuro Animal by Felipe Guerrero (Dutch co-producer Viking Film).

Help from our friends… stills, 78,000 posters and cinema apparatuses.”

On September 16, EYE completes its relocation to Amsterdam North with the official opening of its brand new Collection Centre. For the first time in the museum’s history, the complete archival collection will be housed and accessible in one location. Behind the scenes, work on the move has been underway for months, with the helping hand from dozens of volunteers, both Dutch and new to the Netherlands. Joost Broeren reports.

The keys to the newly built EYE Collection facility were handed over to EYE last January, and the first employees of the archive began work there in April. Then the first pieces from EYE’s immense archive started the move in June. It is an immense operation, and was still continuing as of late August. Frank Roumen, Director of EYE’s Collection Department articulates the scale of the task: “Our collection consists of some 40,000 films, which means that there are over 210,000 film cans which need to be transferred. Aside from that there’s the so-called paper collection with over 700,000 photo

For the first time in the museum’s history, the complete collection will be available in one place, alongside working spaces for EYE’s collection and restoration experts. There’s just one exception, the archive’s collection of nitrate film prints from the earliest days of cinema.

“These are highly flammable materials, so they’re not allowed within residential areas,” stresses Roumen. “They will remain in their current location, in climatecontrolled spaces in unmanned bunkers on the Dutch coast.”

Since the complete archive would be passing through human hands as part of the move anyway, EYE took advantage of the occasion to apply a barcode system to its entire collection. “We started that in

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Photo: Ton Söder

Frank Roumen

Over the last seven decades, this ever-growing collection was spread across numerous locations in and around Amsterdam, as there wasn’t a single building with the capacity (both in volume and in storage conditions) to house it all.

“That also meant that our employees were spread out,” Roumen explains, “which could be difficult at times. It has been great to have everyone together in one location since we moved in April.

And it’s only a stone’s throw from the museum building (opposite Central Station), so communication with the other EYE departments is much easier as well.”

EYE Collection Centre The complete collection will be available in one place alongside working spaces for EYE’s collection and restoration experts

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January,” says Roumen. “All 210,000 film cans were stickered and scanned. As the film cans move into their new home at the depots, that location is scanned as well, so by the end of October we’ll know exactly where all our films are. It’s a huge undertaking, which was carried out with the help of around sixty people.”

Many of these were volunteers.

While these were drawn in part from EYE’s regular volunteer group and the network of the Friends of EYE, a special case was the institute’s collaboration with the Dutch Council for Refugees.

Through this scheme, several refugees from Syria now living in The Netherlands collaborated on EYE’s collection project as well as in other EYE departments.

‘These former refugees have become part of EYE’s large group of volunteers’ “The Dutch Council for Refugees helped us to contact refugees who had been in The Netherlands for a while and had residency status, thus allowing them to work for us”, Roumen says. “Eight former refugees worked with us on the barcoding of the films for one or two days a week and some of them have stayed on in other capacities.”

One of them is Yousef Khamij, who fled his home country Syria with his

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EYE Collection Centre wife and daughter in 2014 and has been living in Amsterdam for a year now.

Aside from following classes three days a week to learn Dutch, Khamij can be found at EYE twice a week, where he now assists the institute’s facility services.

It’s a welcome activity, he says. “In my home country, I worked as a builder, installing aluminium doors and window frames. It’s great to be able to continue my work here.”

These former refugees have become part of EYE’s large group of volunteers, who are invaluable in much of the institute’s day-to-day functioning.

For many volunteers, the activities at EYE have become part of their daily routine after retirement. One such example is Noortje Hogendonk, who turned 80 just days before we spoke to her about her activities at EYE. “I’m still getting

‘In my home country of Syria, I worked as a builder, installing aluminium doors and window frames.

It’s great to be able to continue my work here’ used to it!” she laughs. Hogendonk has been volunteering at EYE since the museum opened the doors of its new location in Amsterdam North in 2012.

“I had volunteered at Victim Support for eleven years before that, but it was time for something different. I live just around the corner from the museum, so when I saw the call I immediately went for it.” At EYE, Hogendonk often works as a host in the museum’s expositions as well as at the film screenings.

“We collect the tickets, give out information, and give people directions through the building – it’s a beautiful location, but the layout can be a bit confusing!”

Photo: Ton Söder

Fred Pieters has been at EYE even longer. “I started in 2009, right after my retirement. I’ve always had a great interest in film, so this was right up my alley.

Back then the museum was still in the Vondelpark, in the centre of Amsterdam. I worked as a host, although there was less to do because there was much less room for expositions in the old building. And I also assisted in spotting films for the purposes of having them translated.”

When EYE moved in 2012, Pieters moved along with them. “That’s also when I started doing odd jobs for EYE International. For instance, I helped sort through the entire VHS collection – all these old videotapes of films that were released in The Netherlands. I spent two years on that, calling distributors and producers to ask them for digital versions so we could replace those old tapes.

Since one of my other hobbies is cooking, I have a lot of films about food at home, and I was lucky enough to be able to add some hard-to-get titles to that collection through this work.”

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The group of volunteers will see a lot of new faces starting in October, when the Collection Centre will be fully operational. The new building houses the eight depots in use by EYE to store its film archive and all related materials – including one state-of-the-art facility where master copies and original negatives will be kept at sub-zero temperatures to elongate their shelf life as much as possible. But it will also be the new home for the library, now renamed the EYE Study. The volunteers will help describe EYE’s collection and act as hosts for this part of the centre, which will be open to the public Tuesday to Friday, noon til five.

“We’ve had to make do for the last year, because we closed the collection to prepare for the move,” says Collection chief Roumen.

“But in October we’ll finally be open for business again, for anyone with an interest in learning more about cinema. We have a close connection to the University of Amsterdam, but of course we also hope to attract students from other universities for their research and possible collaborations. The new building will be a great help in that respect: there’s no need to take a lengthy subway ride to far-flung parts of Amsterdam anymore; you simply hop on the ferry and you’re here.”

Feather vs fur

Simone van Dusseldorp

Simone van Dusseldorp describes her new film Owls & Mice (opening this year’s Cinekid) as a follow-up of sorts to her 2009 feature Frogs & Toads, she tells Geoffrey Macnab, and there may be another two films in her cycle of “animals and children” films.

Van Dusseldorp is a regular attendee at Cinekid, one of the foremost international festivals for children’s, youth and family films.

One of the prime attractions of the event is that it doesn’t just programme bland, mainstream children’s movies. Cinekid is not averse to showing darker, more challenging films as well.

Not that Owls & Mice is a ‘heavy’ film. The writer-director describes it as one of her lighter efforts. It concerns Meral, a young girl struggling to adjust to a new school.

At home, she makes friends with a mouse called Peeppeep – and this little critter opens up a new world to her when she secretly takes it with her to summer camp. An owl also features prominently in the story too...

“The animals are the not the problem,” Van Dusseldorp says of the creatures she worked with on the movie. “Children are harder to direct than animals.” She points out that any filmmaker collaborating with kids needs to be patient. It can be hard work holding the interest and enthusiasm of the child actors.

Before shooting begins, she goes to great lengths to discover if her young stars really do enjoy acting – and to ensure that they are not being pushed into a project by their parents.

Making movies isn’t always fun.

“I always look to find out if the children are strong; if they can be watched by 50 adults on set without going shy,” the director explains of her method. “It is without the parents – I don’t involve the parents.” The young actors are given a taste of what working on a movie is like. She then tells them to go home and “sleep on it.” If they don’t enjoy the process or aren’t up to it, she warns them that it is best to admit it at the outset. If they do agree to be in the movie, they have to promise to stick it out until the end. For the director, the trick is being “nice but also not too nice,” and making sure the kids take their responsibility seriously.

Hiba Ghafry, the young actress who plays Miral, was nine years old when shooting began. Van Dusseldorp had told her casting director that she wanted to work with a Moroccan actress rather than with yet another blonde haired Dutch girl. The film isn’t intended to have any obvious

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political subtext. It is about friendship, not about race.

Nonetheless, she was keen to cast a mixed group of kids from a range of different backgrounds. She was also keen to work with real animals to garner more convincing performances from the children.

Owls & Mice was made by Lemming Film, one of the most respected production companies in the Netherlands. “They know how to produce children’s films and that’s very important.” On films with children, there are challenges with scheduling – the kids can’t shoot

‘Lemming know how to produce children’s films, and that’s important’ during term time, for example – so sometimes, it will take longer to shoot a scene than with more seasoned adult actors. Van Dusseldorp praises her producers for taking every logistical problem in their stride. The film received backing from the Netherlands Film Fund and the Netherlands Film Production Incentive.

Having made Owls & Mice, Van Dusseldorp has already completed another project – about young boxers – and is preparing a new installation piece. “ I want to do something new, really new,” she says of a project in which, for once, there are unlikely to be any kids or animals.

Owls and Mice

Opening Film Cinekid

Simone van Dusseldorp

Photo: Victor Arnolds

‘With kids, the trick is being nice but not too nice’

Director: Simone van Dusseldorp Script: Simone van Dusseldorp Production: Lemming Film (NL) Sales: Attraction Distribution 35

Cool for kids (and adults)

Nienke Poelsma

It’s the 30th anniversary this year of Cinekid, the Amsterdambased film, TV and new media festival for children, running October 12 - 21. Head of the Cinekid for Professionals Nienke Poelsma talks to Geoffrey Macnab.

Nienke Poelsma points out just how rapidly the Cinekid festival has grown over the last three decades.

Cinekid started as a “really small cultural initiative screening a few films and series” but has mushroomed to become, as she calls it, one of “the most remarkable children’s platforms in the world.”

Over the course of the festival 60,000 children are expected to visit the festival to watch the films, documentaries, VR installations, TV dramas and cross media productions, and to participate in VR and interactive installations and workshops within the programme.

The core industry programme has been in existence for 15 years and is set to grow more. One sign of the event’s success is the number of projects hatched in the Junior Co-production Market that are made and go on to secure selection

in the main programme. This year, there are seven films in selection that came through the market, among them such titles as 2013 project Blue Bicycle by Turkish director Ümit Köreken, screening in Panorama, and Dutch Family Film Competition contender Siv Sleeps Astray from director Catti Edfeldt Arn. Co-directed and scripted by Lena Hanno Clyne, this whimsical Swedish-Dutch co-production about a 7-year old girl who converses with mysterious badger friends was in the co-production market in 2014.

(See See NL January/February, Berlin Generation 2016) Since the first co-production market over half of the presented projects – 52% – have secured finance and were completed. This is reckoned to be a very healthy strike rate.

Cinekid doesn’t just show movies for kids. The festival helps coax these films into existence – and calls on the expertise of the children themselves to decide what should be made. Selected projects from the co-production market are presented to the children in the Test And Pitch initiative. “We do it in certain age groups. We go from 3 to 6, from 6 to 10 and from 10 to 12,” Poelsma explains. One requirement is that all the kids understand and speak English. They watch works in progress and are then invited by the moderator to give their opinions to the professionals. And no, says Poelsma, addressing the fears of film professionals whose work isn’t so kid-oriented, the children aren’t

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too rowdy. “It is wonderful to see how engaged they are… and how smart they are. They make such intelligent comments,” Poelsma says.

There will be a Media Literacy seminar during the festival attended by numerous high profile professionals and experts working within the kids’ audiovisual sector, and the European Commission will be in attendance to address questions about the future of European children’s content at the European Film Forum.

Poelsma is heartened that the festival is paying attention to gender and diversity. Even in kids’ films and TV, she notes, a certain gender bias is evident. “That really

60,000 kids are expected to visit the festival frustrates me personally. Already in cartoons and films for children, most of the time there are boy characters in the lead,” she suggests of the persistent stereotyping. “Even if you go into a toy store, it is blue on one side and pink on the other… although there are a lot of people working for equal gender representation there is still as a long way to go.”

Cinekid 2016

Cinekid Medialab

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Tiger CIneMart and the Holland Film Meeting are joining forces in September to launch BoostNL, a 5-month initiative designed to strengthen market support for Dutch and international projects.

Nick Cunningham reports.

Five Dutch and seven international projects will benefit from a series of rigorous and bespoke monitoring sessions during the first BoostNL program that kicks off in Utrecht late September and continues into Cinemart 2017. All the projects, two of which are works-in-progress, have already received acclaim for their quality and originality, and all of the international projects have already received ‘quality assured’ approval courtesy of a previous CineMart selection or funding from the Hubert Bals Fund. The monitor­ ing sessions will run the full gamut of problem solving, from creative to technical to financial and legal.

The BoostNL inititaive was born out of a joint desire on the part of market bosses Marit van den Elshout (CineMart) and Vanja Kaludjercic (HFM) to widen the remit and increase the effectiveness of their respective co-production events. “The inflation of markets has put us into a position where we have to reflect differently on what we do,” points Kaludjercic. “Three or four days at a festival is not enough for most producers with a project. Boost NL will offer support that follows up in a very personalized way each project along a 5-month trajectory at least – if not longer.”

’s Calf Van den Elshout concurs with this view. “This program allows us to really follow through in terms of the projects’ development and it marks a first very concrete step which can offer real value to each one, and the producers can benefit greatly from the partnership support that we will offer.”

The four Dutch projects in development are Dreamscape, directed by Anna van der Heide and produced by Iris Otten for Pupkin Film; In the Arms of Morpheus, directed by Marc Schmidt and produced by Janneke Doolard for KeyDocs: Quicksand by Margot Schaap and produced by PRPL’s Ellen Havenith and Sacha Polak’s Jade, produced by Marleen Slot (Viking Film). Polak’s feature debut Hemel won the Fipresci Prize at Berlin Forum 2012 while her second feature Zurich won the CICAE Award at Forum 2015. The Dutch work-inprogress is Quality Time, directed by Daan Bakker for Pupkin Film.

Kaludjercic argues that the opportunity that BoostNL offers Dutch filmmakers is considerable, given both the intensity and longevity of the program.

Jade producer Slot further stresses its international appeal. “Jade just received production money from the Netherlands Film Fund and development money from the BFI and we are very much looking forward to taking part in BoostNL,” she comments. “It’s a great initiative combining the Holland

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Film Meeting and CineMart, two platforms that are very dear to us.

BoostNL will give Sacha and Viking Film the opportunity to work intensely on the film and will help us to push it forward and to bring it to the attention of international financiers and distributors.”

Van den Elshout underlines how positive Dutch and international producers are about an initiative that sets out to elevate projects to optimum level, ready for the next stage within their cycle, whether that be pitch, production, marketing or release. “This is a partnership that is very open in terms of what we can offer and what they need. We have been very open

‘Three or four days at a festival is not enough for most producers with a project’ in saying we are not offering the Holy Grail but a different way of presenting your project – not quite a lab, not quite a market but very tailor-made, and not within a formula where everybody is doing the same kind of script development or hosting the same workshop on how European co-productions work.

“It is not at all general. And it is good to bring projects back that we have already supported, drafting in leading experts and using our strengths to make them better,” she concludes.

NFF Holland Film Meeting IFFR CineMart

Zurich Director: Sacha Polak Script: Helena van der Meulen Production: Viking Film (NL) Co-Production: Rohfilm (DE), AÂ Private View (BE) Sales: Beta Cinema 39

Nora (22) graduated from the Theater School Rotterdam in Summer 2016 and will enter the Academy of Dramatic Arts Maastricht from September. She was chosen by director Mijke de Jong to play the lead in Layla M., selected in competition for TIFF and BFI London FF. Nora’s feature

screen debut as the eponymous Jihadi bride is astonishing – powerful, emotional and highly nuanced.

“It was amazing to see how Nora grew during the preparation,” comments De Jong. “As soon she felt confident and trusted she began to fly and fly and fly.”

Photo: Edgar Wetsel

Taking flight: Nora el Koussour