SEE NL #23

#Talent Issue Verhoeven back in Cannes Competition with Elle Oscar-winner Dudok de Wit’s feature debut in Un Certain Regard Film Fund invests in talent Never a better time to go Dutch co-pro Fassaert and Gould New doc masters Dutch line-up at TriBeCa, Cannes and Annecy

Issue #23 May 2016 Cannes/Annecy issue Download the free app for iPad and Android

Index 4-5 NieuweBorn identity EYE International’s Marten Rabarts discusses the extension of the SEE NL identity 6-7 Instinct for Cannes Paul Verhoeven is back in Cannes competition with Elle, 24 years after his notorious Basic Instinct 8-9 Elle in vogue Editor Job ter Burg discusses Cannes competition selection Elle and working with The Netherlands’ most acclaimed film export 10-11 Wit and wisdom Oscar-winning Michael Dudok de Wit is selected for Un Certain Regard with his animated feature debut The Red Turtle

30-31 Heddy days Leading documentarian Heddy Honigmann talks to See NL after winning the €150,000 Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Award 32-33 EYE on a Dutch Master The latest EYE exhibition focuses on the Dutch master DOP Robby Müller 34-35 Short Cuts News from the Dutch film industry 36 Cannes Producer on the Move Janneke Doolaard of KeyDocs

12-13 A Winter’s Tale Koutaiba Al-Janabi’s Daoud’s Winter, produced by Trent, is selected for Cannes Atelier 14-15 Tijger burning bright Film Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp reports from Beijing on the huge potential for Dutch/ Chinese collaboration 16-19 State of Affairs Documentary filmmakers Tom Fassaert and Ester Gould discuss their momentous past year 20-21 Norway goes NL co-pro Hans-Jørgen Osnes talks about co-producing with The Netherlands on his Handle With Care 22-23 Festivals: lowdown from the Lowlands Dutch festival news 24-27 Talent, in short The Film Fund’s Dorien van de Pas outlines how investment in new Dutch talent is paying huge dividends 28-29 Holland gets animated Eight Dutch films in selection at the world’s leading animation festival

Cover still: Elle

Paul Verhoeven See page 6

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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 Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper Circulation: 2600 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 Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfonds.nl

Michael Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle See page 10

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Nieuweborn identity EYE International’s Marten Rabarts, head of international promotion for Dutch film, is joining forces with Het Nieuwe Instituut for Architecture, Design and New Media at Cannes 2016, not only to present the broad spectrum of creative diversity that is Dutch cinema but also the best of contemporary Dutch design culture. What’s more, the tricky question of branding a nation’s cinematic offer has been cracked. Nick Cunningham reports.

It took a while for the penny to drop.

All the time that Rabarts was looking for a succinct and poignant expression of Dutch film identity, there it was in the name of this very magazine that for the past five years has been successfully promoting Dutch film across the world at the leading international film festivals.

“The extension of the SEE NL title is a smart step forward; It’s a title that urges people to look at us. Moreover it’s an identity for all Dutch film culture.” he underlines. “So now SEE NL will be the promotional home for our films, our directors and the Netherlands film professionals. The SEE NL banner also provides an umbrella for the great Dutch film festivals, the EYE Film Museum and its collection, the Fund and the Commission. These are the cornerstones of Dutch film culture which the SEE NL identity will represent.”

It was for Cannes 2015 that Rabarts first had the idea to invite some of The Netherlands’ top makers and designers to share creative space in the Festival Pavilion with their cinema counterparts. This created a business environment that was both cool and stylish and very easy on the eye, and one which raised international footfall towards Dutch cinema.

In 2016 guests can lounge on the eye-catching furniture of Moooi and Studio Job, take meetings at tables

by Bert Jan Pot and Marcel Wanders, and be greeted by luxury brand NLXL Wallpaper, designed by Piet Hein Eek. “Even the walls will be covered with work from the collection of the Rijksmuseum, reminding visitors that the Netherlands has been bringing great art to the world for centuries,” Rabarts asserts. “We soft-launched the new SEE NL branding at the EFM with a design that complimented the Martin Gropius Bau itself. The attention generated by the stand, in particular Marcel Wanders’ iconic horse lamp, translated into excitement to know more about the many films we had in the selection and the market. The visual impact and playfulness of what we did created a unique meeting point.”

Rabarts argues that the time is ripe to underline the Dutch film cultural identity after recent years when Dutch filmmakers have been in the

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ascendancy at international film festivals. “There has been growth, expansion and change with really successful festival outings,” he argues. “Toronto was a recordbreaking year for Dutch selections, we had a fantastic array of films at Berlin, especially documentaries and, in the USA, 2016 has already been a breakthrough year with films and interactive projects being selected in Sundance, SXSW, and TriBeCa in quick succession.”

The Production Incentive is, he claims, enabling Dutch producers to raise the bar in terms of output, international co-operation and quality, and the Film Commission is notching up success after success attracting film producers to shoot and post-produce here (see Short Cuts, page 34). Meanwhile Rabarts has also upped the ante in terms of engagement with international festival programmers.

“This is a connection that we have really looked to strengthen,” he points out, “bringing the programming community to the Netherlands for tailored screening visits. I think it is essential that when festival directors and programmers look at Dutch cinema they are not just seeing a film on the screen, they have an understanding of where its roots lie, who made it, and what the film is telling us.

Bringing more of these people to the Netherlands is playing an important role in that.”

Project SEE NL

Photo: Yvonne Witte

‘SEE NL is an identity for all Dutch film culture’

EYE International’s Marten Rabarts

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Instinct for Cannes Maverick Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has made films in the Netherlands and in Hollywood.

Now. aged 77, he has directed his first French feature, Elle, screening in Cannes competition. He talks to Geoffrey Macnab.

Yes, Verhoeven says, the famous French cult of the auteur is still in existence. “It is wonderful there.

That’s not the case in the United States, with the exception of 10 or 15 directors. It is the studio that decides.”

In Hollywood, Verhoeven suggests, the director has become “as interchangeable” as the screenwriter.

“They change them as if they’re cattle,” he adds. In France, by contrast, filmmakers are revered and cinema “culture” is taken very seriously. It was “very scary,” though, working in French, a language he had not spoken in 60 years since his father sent him to Paris when he was a teenager. Before shooting began, he spent a week at a language institute in the Netherlands, brushing up his French.

Elle stars Isabelle Huppert as a rape victim who begins to stalk her assailant. The film, which had originally been planned to shoot in English, is based on a novel by Philippe Djian, author of Betty Blue.

When the filmmakers decided it made more sense to produce the film in France, Huppert quickly

came aboard. “She wanted absolutely to do the movie.”

Verhoeven describes Huppert as “not only a superior actress” but a “very audacious” one, with no fear of tackling taboo subject matter.

“She fully trusted me and I trusted her. I let her go and let her have a lot of freedom…it would have been very, very difficult to find somebody else in the world who could do what she did.” The director is at pains to point out that Elle is “absolutely not” a revenge story. The film heads in a direction that is likely to take audiences by surprise.

Verhoeven agrees that he has often made films with strong female characters, whether Basic Instinct with Sharon Stone or, more recently, Black Book with Carice van Houten.

His Turkish Delight (1973), the highest grossing Dutch film in the country’s box-office history, featured a very strong female lead in the form of Monique van der Ven, as did The 4th Man (1983) that starred Renée Soutendijk.

“I think that seems to be more obvious (in my work) because there are not many people who do that but, in reality, if you see the other movies, you see I’ve worked with Arnold (Schwarzenegger) and Michael Douglas. Kevin Bacon was important in Hollow Man…my Dutch movies have always Rutger Hauer as the main character. There are a lot of male characters.”

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Verhoeven suggests that he gives female characters “equal importance…and that is already exceptional… the whole industry is based on male performance.”

“I love women,” he continues. “I am much more at ease with women. I am more open and show more of myself with [them],” Verhoeven reflects. “I grew up thinking women are fantastic and I still think that. I certainly have many more female friends than men (friends).”

The film’s highly disturbing rape scene was very precisely choreographed and challenging to film. Editor Job ter Burg talks about how difficult it was to edit such brutal material (see p8). Verhoeven relied heavily on “the intuition of Isabelle ” in tackling the scene. “If there was something that would bother her, I’d think, OK, she’s the character, she knows better than I.” A quarter of a century ago, Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct opened the Cannes Festival - causing a sensation and making Sharon Stone a global star in the process. Now, the director is back - and it looks as if the new film is going to create quite a stir too. Verhoeven muses over the thousands of films that are submitted each year for selection at the world’s most prestigious film festival. “To be chosen as one of 20 in competion, that feels really nice!”

Cannes Competition

Elle

Paul Verhoeven

‘the film heads in a direction that is likely to take audiences by surprise’

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle

Production: SBS Productions (FR) Co-Production: Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion (DE), Entre Chien et Loup (BE) Script: David Birke Sales: SBS International Sales 7

Photo: Felix Kalkman

Elle in vogue Job ter Burg

Editor Job ter Burg first worked with Paul Verhoeven on Black Book back in 2006. He later edited on Verhoeven’s Tricked (2012), the freewheeling “user generated” drama made through crowd funding and with the help of the general public. Now, he has edited Elle, Verhoeven’s new feature starring Isabelle Huppert which will screen in competition in Cannes. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

“Working with Paul is always great,” Ter Burg says of his collaborations with the Dutch director of Basic Instinct and Total Recall. He had stayed in touch with Verhoeven since Black Book and describes the filmmaker as a friend. Verhoeven had said he was keen to bring the editor on board on any subsequent projects that he managed to finance. Several fell through but Elle, Verhoeven’s first film made in France, received the green light.

The editor describes Elle as “a film about a strong woman, which probably makes it quite feminist” but also as “controversial enough to rub some people the wrong way.”

The main character, the editor continues, is “a very complicated person” who makes “weird decisions” and continually defies audience expectations. Huppert is playing a character out for revenge against a man who raped her.

“You have this great actress playing a character you may not always fully understand, but are fascinated by.

That is one of the things that we were able to hook onto in the editing. Her performance was so powerful and her character is so fascinating.”

One of the pleasures of working with Verhoeven, Ter Burg suggests, is that he allows his collaborators creative freedom. “He is not so much the kind of guy who gives people instruction because he likes people to do their own thing and then to respond to that. He can always change it if he feels he has better ideas. With most people I see him working with who he trusts and respects, he asks them to do whatever they think is right at first.

Whenever it doesn’t feel right, he can always change it.”

With Verhoeven shooting digitally with more than one camera – “shooting most scenes with two cameras when it made sense, was something that liberated him” – it was inevitable that there would be a huge amount of material to sift through. That wasn’t such a departure from Black Book, which

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may have been made on film but nevertheless had 83 shooting days.

“To be honest, I think one of the hardest parts was that the action [scenes] in Black Book were fun to do. The action scenes in Elle, although there aren’t too many, are very nasty because they involve physical abuse and that’s not something easy to watch…going over that for a couple of days can be tough. If that footage is powerful and it is working – and it was – it really starts getting to you.”

The editor is used to working with strong-minded auteurs. Alongside his films with Verhoeven, he has also done several films with Alex van Warmerdam. “I respond really well to films with great ideas and to filmmakers with interesting ideas.

One of the greatest things about our job is that it is never the same…with strong directors, they never make the same film twice.”

Ter Burg started work editing Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone (billed as the first Dutch western) immediately after finishing Elle - and he started working on Elle immediately after finishing van Warmerdam’s Schneider vs. Bax. It has been a breakneck and very demanding schedule. Ask him what he is up to next and he sighs. “When this is done, I am ready for a little vacation!”

Elle

Cannes Competition

Job ter Burg, editor

‘Paul rediscovered the free style used on Turkish Delight’

Production: SBS Productions (FR) Co-Production: Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion (DE), Entre Chien et Loup (BE) Script: David Birke Sales: SBS International Sales

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle

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Photo: Claude Pauquet

Wit and the wisdom Michael Dudok de Wit

Michael Dudok de Wit, the brilliant Dutch-British animator, presents his first feature The Red Turtle at Cannes. Not that anyone will mistake him for a newcomer. Dudok de Wit, who is in his early 60s, has won an Oscar, a Cesar and a BAFTA for his short films, and is long acknowledged as an utterly distinctive artist and filmmaker.

The Red Turtle has extra significance in that it was co-produced by Studio Ghibli, the Japanese company co-founded by renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki and for which he made such classics as Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away.

Dudok de Wit first became aware of Studio Ghibli’s work in the early 1990s when he saw some of it at the Annecy Festival. “Very quickly, I realised that there was a difference.

Their films had a depth and a passion which really stood out for me,” Dudok de Wit recalls.

On The Red Turtle, Dudok de Wit collaborated directly with Studio Ghibli’s Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata. Miyazaki was less directly

involved. Dudok de Wit first met him a few years ago when he made his own pilgrimage to Studio Ghibli during a trip to a festival in Japan.

“Sheer love for their films made it an obvious destination,” he reflects.

“The real reason I love their films so much is that in spite of the cultural difference, you feel closeness to the beauty and the mystery and the emotions. Technically, they don’t work in the way that we do. They animate differently…they use less drawings per second (than in the west) but that is compensated because every drawing is really strong. It could be that after having done calligraphy for so many centuries, they have it in their blood to be very graceful and elegant in their drawing style.”

Dudok de Wit hadn’t previously felt the desire to make a feature. “I really, really love short films. They are a very pure expression of an individual. You can make them alone or with a small group of fiends. They are like poetry.

They come obviously from you. To make a feature film was not an obvious ambition.”

For him even to consider tackling a feature, Dudok de Wit knew that he would have to be utterly passionate about the project. The “trigger” for The Red Turtle was pulled by Studio Ghibli themselves. “Very unexpectedly, they wrote to me saying they loved my short film Father And Daughter and that if ever you consider making a feature, we

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would be interested to be a part of it.” Dudok de Wit was both flattered and startled by this letter. What also drew him to work with Ghibli was the knowledge that they give the director the final say and always respect the artistic vision behind the project.

Like most animated features, The Red Turtle has had a very lengthy gestation. Dudok de Wit has been working on it for many years. His French producers Why Not Productions put him in touch with Pascale Ferran, a writer-director with a very distinguished live-action filmography of her own. Ferran ended up co-writing the screenplay.

The film has no dialogue. It is set on a deserted island on which a man is stranded. As part of his research, Dudok de Wit watched old films of Robinson Crusoe as well as Master And Commander and Castaway. He visited the Seychelles to study the wildlife, “to get the feeling of the heat and the sounds” and to take pictures of everything from insects (including “a very fat spider”) to tropical sunsets.

Now, the film is ready to be unveiled in Cannes, will he make another feature or will he go back to shorts?

“I don’t know yet. I am still in that tiredness that comes at the end of a project…(but) one thing is certain.

Unless I have a story, I feel totally passionate about, I don’t want to commit myself to a feature.”

The Red Turtle

Cannes Un Certain Regard

Michael Dudok de Wit

‘An utterly distinctive artist and filmmaker’

Script: Michael Dudok de Wit, Pascale Ferran Production: Studio Ghibli (JP), Why Not Productions (FR) en Wild Bunch (FR) Sales: Wild Bunch 11

A Winter’s Tale

It is hard to think of a project more personal than Koutaiba Al-Janabi’s Daoud’s Winter (selected for the Cannes Atelier).

Daoud’s Winter received support early on from International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund. Then Al-Janabi came together with Dutch producer Trent from Oak Motion Pictures in Berlin where they were both attending the film festival. “I read about the project and there was one sentence that grabbed me,” Trent remembers.

This was a line from the director saying he wanted to “show the war… without showing the war.”

The film, due to shoot in Jordan later this year, is the story of a young man whose hopes and ambitions for his life are put on hold when he is drafted to fight in the Iran / Iraq war in the late 1980s. He ends up working in a morgue, cataloguing the dead. When he comes across an actual survivor, he decides to take the living body back to the man’s family, even if it means deserting.

“For me, this was really fascinating.

Then I saw his previous film Leaving Baghdad and we started to communicate by email.” In Berlin, the producer and director agreed to meet for a coffee – and they immediately hit it off. “During that coffee, both of us noticed that we had the same ideas. We liked each other, we trusted each other and there was a connection.”

“It is a little bit of my family story,” the Baghdad-born director reflects. “My family went through this darkness.

My father was executed…it’s a mosaic. I put all these small puzzles together and we built the story.”

Eventually, Al-Janabi suggested that Trent might be the producer. At first, Trent though he’d be better suited to the role of Dutch co-producer.

After all, he didn’t have close contacts in the Middle East where the film was going to be shot. In the end, though, he took the role as producer, asking Al-Janabi to help him.

Koutaiba Al-Janabi

Al-Janabi escaped from Iraq at the age of seventeen. He was never given the opportunity to bury his father. His travels took him to Budapest and eventually to London - but even 30 years later, he was still trying to come to terms with his feelings of loss and separation from his family.

Trent had realised early on that this was a film that could never be funded only in the Middle East.

Over the last three years, the project has gradually been gaining momentum. It was selected for the

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Torino Film Lab and, more recently, won the main Production Award at Framework as well as being selected for Dubai Film Connection. There are now French co-producers (Alcatraz Films) and Lebanese backers (Orjouane). SANAD in Abu Dhabi has come on board as has the CNC. Trent is looking to attach another European partner.

The script is finished. “What we hope to find in the Atelier is the best structure for the film to enable us to make it,” the producer states. “We hope to meet sales agents, TV partners, co-producers and many of the funding institutions from the Middle East and Europe.” The filmmakers have already appointed a Jordan-based line producer and are beginning to scout locations and to cast the movie.

Trent runs his own production company in Amsterdam but is confident that his business partner, producer-director Charlotte Scott­Wilson (recent prize winner at Tribeca, see page 24), will be able to look after the shop if he is absent in the Middle East for a prolonged period.

“The ambition of our company is not to work on 20 projects at the same time. We like being involved in a project from beginning to end 100% – and that also means during the shoot.” Geoffrey Macnab

Daoud’s Winter

Cinefondation Atelier

Koutaiba Al-Janabi

My family went through this darkness.

My father was executed…

Script: Koutaiba Al-Janabi, Adaptation: Koutaiba Al-Janabi & Antoine Le Bos Production: OAK Motion Pictures (NL) Co-Production: Alcatraz Films (FR)

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Dutch-Chinese treaty goes into action

‘We wanted to find a place where our ambitions could meet’

From left to right: HOU Keming, CEO of the China Childen’s Film Association (CCFA), introducing the Seminar and the team of Cool Kids Don’t Cry, Writer Karen van Holst Pellekaan, Producer Harro van Staverden, Director Dennis Bots and Moderator ZHANG Zhenqin, Vice Director of CCFA and translator

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Tijger burning bright Following the signing in October 2015 of a co-production treaty between the Netherlands and China, Film Fund director Doreen Boonekamp led a delegation of Dutch professionals to Beijing in April 2016 to activate the business of creative collaboration. Nick Cunningham reports.

“At the end of the day, a treaty is just a piece of paper. It creates an important framework but you have to bring it to life by creating a real exchange, not only on a cultural level but also on an economic level.

We went to Beijing to really expand on this important partnership.”

The China visit may have lasted a mere three days but, for Boonekamp, it was extremely effective. She and her team were able to pitch and explain the Dutch production modus operandi, replete with keynotes, screenings, case studies and one-to-one meetings, to a Chinese professional audience eager to learn and collaborate.

By the end of the visit, Boonekamp was confident that in the near future several bilateral productions would be in development (or in production), top-level script-coaching sessions would be de rigeur, a framework for the distribution of both commercial and arthouse Dutch films would be in place and a newly established network of keen production talent

from both sides would be eyeing up an even rosier future.

At the heart of the Dutch pitch was films for kids and family, a genre in which the country’s industry has excelled in terms of box-office, festival success and international sales. “This is a strength of the Dutch film industry on one hand, and on the other there is a great desire on the Chinese side to diversify in its production output,” Boonekamp comments. “It is an extremely fast growing industry but its professionals have a problem in applying diversity within their production. But equally, like us, there is a demand for good stories to offer to their children. At the seminar, therefore, we wanted to find a place where our ambitions could meet.”

Leading Dutch producer Leontine Petit of Lemming Film presented her assessment of the European model for the co-production of children’s films and how it could be applied within a China/Dutch framework. The subsequent screening of Cool Kids Don’t Cry and case study by producer Harro van Staverden, director Dennis Bots and scriptwriter Karen Holst Pellekaan proved to be revelatory for a Chinese audience used to more commercial, less uncompromising kids’ fare.

(The films ends with the death by leukemia of the film’s key protagonist.) “We got many positive reactions to the film about the high

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level of acting and the way the story was told, and we explained how and why the film worked very well in the Netherlands. They understood this and from our interaction we were able to learn a lot about the Chinese industry.”

On the final day the delegation took many meetings with production companies keen to discuss the mechanics of collaboration, and the Dutch professionals in turn pitched their film ideas to like-minded Chinese counterparts. What’s more, the meetings underlined Dutch determination to put in motion a system for script coaching to hasten the process of bitateral co-operation.

Next stop for the Netherlands/China Express is Cannes, and then Cinekid in October, where Chinese filmmakers will, in kind, present their industry and new projects to potential co-producers.

“When you start collaborating internationally you have to be aware of the fact that you have to invest in a network,” Boonekamp stresses, “that you really exchange on the content level, that you make your films available for them to be seen and that you really get to learn much more about each others’ industries and culture and ways of filmmaking.

We understood this even more in China. What we achieved there was so much more concrete than we could ever have imagined before we arrived.”

State of Affairs...

A Family Affair profiles Fassaert’s enigmatic and glamorous, but essentially cruel, grandmother who created a schism within the family when she abandoned them for a life in South Africa.

Tom Fassaert

Two Dutch documentary filmmakers have been making significant waves over the past six months following the world premieres of their new works.

Tom Fassaert’s A Family Affair opened IDFA 2015 to great acclaim (and he has recently been listed by Variety as one of the ten doc filmmakers to watch in 2016). After Ester Gould’s A Strange Love Affair With Ego won Best Dutch film at IDFA her Strike A Pose world-premiered at Berlinale before sashaying on to Tribeca and Hot Docs. Nick Cunningham reports.

In the beginning it was all very daunting. Tom Fassaert finished the edit on his highly emotive and very personal doc A Family Affair a day before its world premiere at IDFA. On the same day the director’s own family nervously watched the film for the first time, and now he was expected to go forth into the vast auditorium of the Amsterdam’s Tuschinski cinema to present the film to an expectant and sophisticated audience. “It felt like going onto stage naked,” he remembers of the experience.

“I showed my family the film just before the premiere, so I knew their initial reactions already, but I think they didn’t expect the whole IDFA experience to be so big,” Fassaert adds. “They were contacted by friends and family they hadn’t been in touch with for decades. But the most intimate moment was showing them the film that first time in my home, as they saw and heard things they never knew before.”

As the film unspooled at the premiere, Fassaert’s reservations and fears began to dissipate. The response was extremely enthusiastic. After more and more screenings were booked at the festival it became the most highly attended film in IDFA history, with audience figures exceeding 5000. It picked up the festival’s Jury Award and then, after its Dutch release, the film attracted more than 20,000 cinema-goers, a remarkable feat for a Dutch documentary.

“It managed to reach a broader audience, bigger than just documentary lovers, people who wouldn’t normally go to the cinema to watch this kind of film,” he adds.

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And the success looks set to continue. A Family Affair has screened at three international festivals to date and has picked up two major awards, including the Best Film Prize of the International Competition at the Brazilian doc fest It’s All True. “This is all part of this whole surprise. I was making something very delicate, very intimate, almost on my own. I was shooting and editing it solo. It was small and it felt like a hobby project, and now it is going out into the world and so many people are reacting to it.”

During IDFA the film sold to Netflix, a deal which meant that Fassaert could close the finances on the enterprise. It also meant that this relatively small Dutch documentary will be accessible by the vast international Netflix subscriber base of over 70 million households in over 190 countries. “For me this is outside of my fantasy frame,” the director enthuses.

Such has been the intensity of the past five years making the film, Fassaert is happy to accompany the film to many more festivals across all corners of the globe during 2016.

“The film was extremely intense to make. I have never been on such a roller coaster so actually I was extremely exhausted, and I still am, so I am taking all the time just to get inspired by other films and by music,” he professes.

Continued on the next page

A Family Affair

Tom Fassaert

‘The film was extremely intense to make. I have never been on such a roller coaster...’

Tom Fassaert’s A Family Affair which opened IDFA 2015

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...the Goulden girl Ester Gould

Ester Gould, on the other hand, has thrown herself straight back into the work fray despite the many claims on her time from international festivals that have selected her two recent docs, A Strange Love Affair with Ego, a paean to narcissism inspired by the older sister she idolised, and Strike A Pose, co-directed with Reijer Zwaan and telling the life stories of the vogueing dancers from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour of the early 1990s and Alek Keshishian’s subsequent documentary Truth or Dare.

Currently working on a 6-part documentary series about debt for Dutch broadcaster NPO, there was simply not enough time to commit to the international fest circuit to promote the films. “I signed up for the TV series. It is a beautiful project and there is really something to be said for keeping on working. But it would have been nice to celebrate these two films a little more as well. But it is at it is.”

Despite their shared theme of flamboyancy, Ego and Pose couldn’t be more different stylistically,

Gould concedes. While Ego is essayistic in form, Strike A Pose is more traditional, relying on interviews to camera, archive and dance sequences during which the dancers are put through their paces 25 years on.

Gould had never intended that the festival premieres of the two films should almost coincide. That was how things fell into place. “And to be honest, it is not something I would advise other filmmakers to do, to finish two feature length films within such a short period of time,” she stresses. “Sometimes it works out that way, as film processes have their own logic. It is incredible and amazing and wonderful but at the same time it is a little bit too much, although I don’t want to sound like I am complaining.”

Nevertheless her determination to make the films as she originally envisaged them never wavered. “As a director there is something very valuable in sticking to your own plans and not being distracted or hampered by the needs of funds and commissioning editors and all the feedback you receive. With both films I stuck to what I, or what Reijer, had in mind and we didn’t let ourselves get too distracted, such as in the case of Strike A Pose to be more critical of Madonna or to have her more in the film. We felt it was such a clear choice to choose for the dancers.”

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“What I take out of this is that you have to be stubborn, have a thick skin and continue with whatever you have in mind,” she adds.

Negotiations are continuing for sales to several countries for Strike A Pose – “we do have reason to believe that the film will do well in sales,” she underlines – and, like Fassaert, Gould has been nominated by Variety as one of the Top 10 European female directors to watch in 2016. Assessing this fact, she acknowledges the debt she owes to fellow doc filmmaker Heddy Honigmann (see page 30), for whom she worked as assistant director on a number of features.

“I never went to film school, so I consider Heddy my own private film school, just one that took a little longer,” Gould underlines. “What I learned from her is that right through the process, right up until the final edit, you ask is there something missing, is there balance? You carry on the research to improve the film.

“I just try and tell the stories. I never felt I had a style, even though I think that Ego has a distinct cinematography which I really enjoyed creating, but all the decisions I make always come from the narrative. I don’t think in advance about the kinds of shots I want to make. My starting point is always the narrative and what the story is about.”

Strike a Pose Ester Gould & Reijer Zwaan

Photo: Linda Posnick

‘Ego and Strike a Pose couldn’t be more different stylistically’

Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan’s Strike a Pose, selected for Berlinale and TriBeCa

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Norway goes NL co-pro Arild Andresen

Norwegian Arild Andresen’s Handle With Care may have shot a mere three days in The N ­ ether­ lands, but Dutch financing still accounted for over 11% of the film’s budget. Producer HansJørgen Osnes of Norwegian production house Motlys explains the benefits of going Dutch.

Handle With Care, a complex and tragic tale of loss and separation, was shot within three countries across two continents (Norway, The Nether­lands and Colombia) and is a 3-way European co-pro between Norwegian Motlys, Dutch producer The Film Kitchen and the Danish SF Film Production, and made with the assistance of Colombian service production firm DiaFragma. In the film a man, following the death of his wife, decides in desperation to return to Colombia, the birthplace of their adopted son.

What is noteworthy is the high level of Dutch involvement. “For the European part of shoot there was a Dutch/Norwegian crew, and for the whole shooting period the production designer and line producer were Dutch,” explains

producer Osnes. “They followed the whole project from start to end.”

A number of key scenes were shot in the Netherlands, including one in a Jumbo Jet located in the Lelystad airplane museum, close to Schiphol Airport. “We had a whole day in the Boeing 747, and this was really lucky as it was both modern and nearly intact. This production decision seemed very logical as the characters in the film would naturally have gone to Colombia via Schiphol.” Jan van der Zanden of The Film Kitchen was able to make the necessary calls to secure the aircraft, together with line producer Ben Bouwmeester.

“We set up the Dutch shoot as a separate part of the production with a specific team for Holland, and it was thoroughly planned throughout by the line producer. Finding the right people for the job was a very important part of the process, people who can work within the limitations, who share the artistic vision and whose chemistry works, and who are able to pull it off because filmmaking is a difficult and time-consuming process.” The Dutch schedule also included the shooting of a near-fatal car crash, a studio build of an offshore cabin and studio-based hotel scenes.

The Netherlands Film Fund granted €150k in minority co-production support and the total Dutch spend will eventually weigh in at €285k, against which Motlys will qualify for

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a 30% cash rebate courtesy of the Netherlands Film Production Incentive. With post-edit picture lock expected by the end of May 2016, visual post-production work will be undertaken by Dutch Filmmore ahead of the film’s expected December 2016 delivery.

Osnes emphasises the similarity between the Norwegian and Dutch funding bodies in their insistence on producers looking to foreign shores to secure co-pro finance.

“They understand more and more that co-production is vital, and it is very interesting as a project can often go both ways. You always look towards future collaboration on your co-producers’ other projects.”

He also notes the sense of loyalty and camararderie within his Dutch production counterparts after first choice Lemming Film, who took a co-production credit on Motlys’ Blind (2014), were too busy to commit to Handle With Care, and therefore suggested Van der Zanden of The Film Kitchen.

“Jan and I started a collaboration that has been really superb. He came in at quite an early stage so he was also involved with the script and gave very informed feedback on it, which is of course an important part of the process as well. Together with the Dutch line producer and production designer, we all developed the film as a whole, always in line with the vision of the director,” Osnes concludes.

Handle With Care

Minority co-production

Arild Andresen

‘We started a collaboration that has been really superb’

Script: Arild Andresen, Jorge Camacho, Hilde Susan Jaegtnes Production: Motlys (NO) Co-Production: Waterland Film (NL)

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Photo: Bert Nienhuis

Festivals: lowdown from IFFR

Ally leaving

Major news out of the world’s leading documentary film festival is that its director and cofounder, Ally Derks, will stand down during the 2017 event.

Prior to her departure Derks will spend 2017 living and working in Berlin as a fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy. Visual artist and filmmaker Barbara Visser will oversee IDFA in 2017, the year that marks the festival’s 30th Ally Derks anniversary. “This seems like a good moment to say farewell and pass on the baton to the next generation,” commented Derks. “It has been 30 wonderful years, and saying goodbye is always a little painful. But I think the time is right.”

IDFA Bertha Fund - Cannes selection Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré, A Chadian Tragedy, the first film to come out of the IDFA Bertha Fund Europe funding scheme launched in 2015, has been selected for Cannes Special Screenings section. The France/Chad production features survivors of the regime of former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré who was arrested in Senegal in 2013 and prosecuted in 2015 for crimes against humanity.

At editing post/production stage are four more IBF Europe films, including The Grown-ups (Maite Alberdi, Chile/Netherlands) produced by Rotterdam-based Volya Films and MicroMundo producciones (Chile). The project was pitched at IDFA Forum 2014. Alberdi directed the international hit Tea Time that is now also available on Netflix Latin America.

IDFAcademy The 2016 IDFAcademy Summer School, which offers first or second-time directors the opportunity to meet and work with highly esteemed filmmakers and film professionals, is set to run July 4-9 in Amsterdam. Sixteen projects from all corners of the globe have been selected for both script development and editing consultancy. Tutors on hand to offer expert guidance include esteemed documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner, whose First Cousin Once Removed won top prize at IDFA 2012, and Dutch editing guru Menno Boerema.

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Two CineMart projects have been selected for Cannes 2016. These are Apprentice

by Boo Junfeng (Singapore, CineMart 2012) in Directors Fortnight and Happy Time Will Come Soon by Alessandro Comodin (Italy/France, CineMart 2014) in Semaine de la Critique.

Two Hubert Bals Fundsupported films in Cannes Wolf and Sheep by Shahrbanoo Sadat (Afghanistan), which received HBF Script and Project Development in 2011, is selected for Directors Fortnight. The film is a fantasy-filled drama about a community in a small village in Afghanistan. Meanwhile Davy Chou’s Diamond Island (Cambodia), recipient of HBF Script and Project Development in 2014 is selected for Semaine de la Critique.

Diamond Island tells the story of a young man who leaves his village to work within the ultra-modern construction sites of of tomorrow’s Cambodia where he discovers an exciting world of wealth, girls, nights and illusions.

Diamond Island by Davy Chou

the Lowlands Hubert Bals Fund deadlines: Script and Project development: 1 August Post production: 1 August NFF + HBF funding: 4 October HBF Plus Europe Distribution: date tba CineMart 2017 deadline: 1 September 2016.

Vanja Kaludjercic

“For the upcoming edition we’re implementing a series of new activities for the project participants. The new initiative will offer a personalized full-on expertise that accompanies high quality projects in development on a long run, making sure that in every step of their development and market implementation process they can benefit and reach out to some of the key experts in the industry and have continuous support from project markets.”

Deadline for submission of projects to HFM Co-pro Platform: July 1.

HFM new Direction In March 2016 Vanja Kaludjercic, formerly of Les Arcs and and Paris Co-production Village, was appointed as new head of the Holland Film Meeting (HFM, 22-25 September), the international industry arm of the Netherlands Film Festival that looks to stimulate high-level co-production activity within the Dutch and international production sectors.

“These are exciting times for the Dutch film industry. Outstanding emerging talent and substantial co-production opportunities make it a fertile ground to continue developing HFM as an important meeting place for both the local and international film industry,” she told See NL.

Job Joris and Marieke’s (Otto), HAFF Junior Audience Award winner

HAFF The pulling power of the Holland Animation Film Festival, as well as the importance of the Utrecht-based animation industry, was underlined by the city’s hosting of Cartoon Business, the renowned forum for international animation financing and production talent, immediately after the 2016 festival edition.

“Cartoon Business puts Dutch animation on the map,” adds HAFF director Gerben Schermer, whom Netherlands Film Festival director

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Willemien van Aalst refers to as ‘our ambassador for Dutch animation abroad’. “We are a low production country but with a lot of ambition and talent, and there are now possibilities in the form of the new cash rebates. If you are talking about the Netherlands and if you are talking about Dutch animation, then you are talking Utrecht.” See page 28 for Dutch films at Annecy

Cinekid In collaboration with NFDC India and DutchCulture, Cinekid for Professionals will welcome a delegation of Indian scriptwriters of children’s films to the next edition of the event running 18-21 October. The children will take part in the industry programme to get them acquinted with the international children’s media industry, to enhance their writing skills and to test their stories on an international audience. “Cinekid is very happy with this new collaboration since this is a great way to support the vibrant and emerging Indian children’s film industry,” comments Nienke Poelsma, Head of Cinekid for Professionals.

Festival submission deadlines New media: 1 June Film & television: 1 July Cinekid for Professionals deadlines: Junior Co-pro market: 15 June ScreeningClub: 1 September

In short, talent... decided to put some of this money toward the production of shorts.

The programme supported an initial slate of eight shorts.

Charlotte Scott-Wilson

Working with new talent is “better than botox” for making you feel “young at heart,” jokes Dorien van de Pas, Head of New Screen NL at the Film Fund. Van de Pas has overseen the setting up of the new Shorts Talent Development Programme, which is already showing spectacular results. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

As Van de Pas notes, the Fund has long been receiving applications from young filmmakers planning short films. Until recently, though, there was little funding set aside to help them, other than the Kort! project (which supports 10 shorts each year in collaboration with NTR, Media Fund, CoBO and public broadcaster NTR) and postproduction support. There were sometimes “small jewels” among the applications but the Fund wasn’t in a position to help in their production. That is why Van de Pas is so enthusiastic about the shorts talent development programme.

When extra public funds for New Talents became available to the Fund early last year, Van de Pas and Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp

One of the films, Charlotte ScottWilson’s Hold On (Houvast), was a Best Narrative Short award winner at the TriBeCa Film Festival in late April while Import by Ena Sendijarevic has been selected for Quinzaine.

“For us, it is important to find the new filmmakers who haven’t made many shorts already, but who we consider talented,” Van de Pas says of the programme’s intention.

(Filmmakers with one short already under their belt are still allowed to apply – but if two films or more, then the scheme is not for them.)

The programme is intended to encourage producers as well as directors. The Fund doesn’t fully finance any films. They’ll provide up to 75% of the budget and it is up to the producer-director team to secure the rest of the money. The maximum contribution per film is €30,000.

The scheme is open to documentary as well as fiction. What applicants appear to relish is how few constraints are placed on them.

Shorts can be a few minutes long or last for half an hour - it doesn’t matter. They can be made in any form. Running times of the eight films selected in the first round range from 8 to 22 minutes.

Van de Pas notes that almost all of the applicants have been “auteurs”

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who’ve written their own projects as well as direct them. When she and her colleagues were selecting the projects, what they were looking for first of all were strong creative voices. Sometimes, they may have thought a script had rough edges and needed further refinement but they were still intrigued by the vision behind it. They then considered the business plans and the production team behind each.

The emphasis is on making decisions quickly but in a relaxed way and on giving the filmmakers as much freedom as possible.

Bureaucracy is kept to a minimum.

It’s an important point of principle for the Fund and the filmmakers that the shorts are seen as worthwhile in their own right, not simply as stepping stones on the route to their directors making features. The scheme is intended to give opportunities for experiment.

Documentary makers can take a stab at fiction. Talents from the commercials world can try their hand at storytelling without having to sell a product. “You want to give them a chance. People can experiment and find their own voices,” Van de Pas suggests.

Speak to filmmakers involved and they are enthused at the opportunity the programme has given them.

Unlike their film school projects, they’re able to pay their cast and crews and to be ambitious in what they seek to achieve.

Continued on the next page

Hold on

Charlotte Scott-Wilson

‘People can experiment and find their own voices’

Charlotte Scott-Wilson’s Hold On, Best Narrative Short award winner at the TriBeCa Film Festival

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Import Ena Sendijarevic

‘It looks very simple but there are deeper layers underneath’

Import by Ena Sendijarevic

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...more short talent style. Import is markedly different from her previous short Fernweh which travelled widely on the festival circuit.

Ena Sendijarevic

Ena Sendijarevic arrived in the Netherlands from Bosnia as a seven-year old child in the early 1990s. Her parents had come to the country to escape the war back home. For two years, they were living in a small Dutch village where they were treated by the locals as if they were from Mars. “It was very strange because the war in Bosnia was still going on. My parents couldn’t have any contact with family members – and yet, at the same time, we were living in this place where nothing happened,” the director recalls. “People were very nice but there was this clash of cultures in a way.”

Their experiences inspired Import, which focuses on a single day in the life of a Bosnian family living in the Netherlands. It is an auto­ biographical film but one made with humour and gentle irony. “It is really well done,” Van de Pas enthuses. “It is a film that really stays with you. It looks very simple but there are deeper layers underneath.”

She adds that there is a sense of a director developing and refining a

For her part, Sendijarevic is happy that, as a former refugee turned Dutch filmmaker, she has now been selected for the world’s most prestigious film festival. “As a filmmaker, I am really honoured.

Cannes is like a dream,” she says.

“I’m happy I have gotten a lot of freedom in telling a personal story while experimenting with film language as well, trying things that I didn’t do before. It’s great that it paid off in this spectacular way.”

Charlotte Scott-Wilson’s Hold On (Houvast) is about a young cellist.

She feels intense pressure and frets that she won’t be able to maintain her position in the orchestra. The film was clearly made for cinema and has very high production values – with a full orchestra as part of the package.

The TriBeCa jurors enthused about the way Hold On dealt “simultaneously [with] the price of performance, and the entirely unique idea that the protagonist’s musical performance itself succeeds on the back of her own self-doubt, torture, and anxiety. We were also blown away by the remarkable performance of the lead actress in both her emotional depth combined with her musical proficiency.”

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Scott-Wilson is Scottish but is based in the Netherlands since she studies at the Netherlands Film Academy.

Her producer Trent, with whom she runs Oak Motion Pictures, praises the new short film initiative.

“What I also like is that there are no limitations for length. Three minutes is fine, and 30 minutes is also fine,” Trent reflects. “Sometimes we make shorts without budgets but it is impossible to do that every year.

You have to ask a lot of people and companies (for favours).” He also agrees that the scheme allows filmmakers a creative freedom that they are rarely given when they are making feature films.

With two films from its first slate chosen for major international festivals, the new shorts programme has set the bar very high. Van de Pas admits that she didn’t expect such success to be achieved so quickly and that there is no pressure on other filmmakers supported by the programme to match these achievements.

“It is more than rewarding,” she says of the pleasure that working on the programme gives her. “There is not so much at stake (because the budgets are not that big). There are no egos involved. You really feel you can add something to the development of new talents.”

Holland gets animated When they paint or draw they often use very dark backgrounds and exaggerated figures with striking colours that look very powerful. It is raw and has a lot of life in it.”

Yi Zhao

With the gaze of global animators firmly fixed on Dutch animation capital Utrecht in 2016 (renowned professional finance forum Cartoon Business rolled out there in March), the excellence of the country’s output is reflected in the selection of eight films for Annecy 2016.

Löss by Yi Zhao is a poignant and tragic tale of a woman illegally trafficked into marriage to a violent farmer in China’s Löss Plateau.

Childless and lonely, she finds respite only in the vibrant red clay pots she creates from the barren earth. “Within Chinese society you can see the most intense social dramas and for many years I often encountered this type of news story within Chinese media,” points out Zhao of the film’s subject.

The film is 2D but the lines of each character are constantly presented in a state of flux, and the form of each protagonist is inflated and placed against black backgrounds upon which scratched lines indicate a ploughed field or a bare hut. “I borrowed a lot from the local folk art in that area created by the farmers.

The film, supported by the Nether­ lands Film Fund and screening out of competition, took Zhao three and a half years to complete. “I have done nothing in-between, it has been a continuous process,” he continues. What’s more, the sense of gratitude he feels towards Annecy is considerable. “People said it was too long (28 minutes) and that nobody would programme it. You hardly ever come across short films with this running length in festivals, let alone animation films. Accepting this film meant the festival had to forsake four other films (the average length is less than 6 minutes). Thus most festivals will have to reject it.”

Dutch animation outfit Studio Smack’s Branded Dreams is unam­big­uous in its critique of brand advertising and its insidious tendency to pervade our sub­ conscious. In the 3D animated film, insects and plants adopt the colours and markings of the best known cola brand. “This animation [film] has been designed to provoke a debate about the position of technology and advertising,” comments Studio Smack’s Ton Meijdam. “To make people think about if they want brain science and technology to advance in such a way that images and maybe even ideas can be put into our

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heads. To ask ourselves if we are we willing to allow advertisers in our subconscious. And if the answer is no, how come we know all the logos, tunes and imagery of famous brands by heart? Maybe they’ve been in our subconscious for a long time without us even knowing.” Studio Smack’s video for the song Witch Doctor by Dutch band De Staat is selected for Commis­sioned Films competition.

Also out of competition is the Film Fund-supported Parade by Digna van de Put, in which six flute players explore the landscape of their uniform, a journey from which nobody emerges unscathed.

Three Dutch animated shorts are selected for the Graduation Film section. Wiep Teeuwisse’s Depart at 22 uses paper cut-outs to reflect on the onset of age and the loss of beauty. Renske Cuijpers’ Just A Biopic provides an indictment of the way our society deals with the lives of the many through its examination of one individual. Saturday Symphony (Iris Frankhuizen) is a short animation about the atmosphere and excitement of a sunny Saturday in the city, building up symphonically from serenity to fanfare.

In the Competition for TV Films is Puberdagboek - Alma Mathijsen by Samantha Williams, created for submarinechannel.com and VPRO and illustrating the inner, intensely private, workings of a teenager’s head. Nick Cunningham

Annecy Int’l Animation Festival

Dutch selections

‘I borrowed a lot from the local folk art’

Löss Script: Yi Zhao Production: Armadillo Film (NL)

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Heddy Honingmann Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Award 2016

‘If you don’t have a goal, you become very quickly old’

Heddy Honigmann’s Metal and Melancholy

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Heddy days Heddy Honigmann

Heddy Honigmann discovered that she had won the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Award (one of the biggest prizes in the Dutch cultural sector) in a very roundabout way, she explains to Geoffrey Macnab.

She was invited by EYE to attend a lunch for “Women Only,” a new initiative of EYE. She and actress Johanna Ter Steege were to be the main guests. Honigmann accepted, then received a message in advance of the lunch, telling her and Ter Steege to “dress a little bit nice because of an arranged photo shoot.” Before the meal began, however, they went into a screening room with EYE director Sandra den Hamer to be shown a piece of film in which Honigmann was informed directly that she had won the Prince Bernhard Cultuurfonds award - and the 150,000 euros that came with it.

“It was a perfect set-up,” she admits.

As one of the most distinguished documentary makers working in Europe, Honigmann wasn’t a surprising choice for such an honour. Her films like Metal and Melancholy and Forever are

acknowledged classics. Now in her mid 60s, Honigmann isn’t anywhere near the end of her career and she is currently battling to pull together the financing for what promises to be a typically intriguing, lyrical and offbeat new film.

Before The Fall is about a group of very colourful women and men aged 100 years or over. One is a sex therapist in New York. Another is a brilliant comedian. One has worked for over 70 years in the same laundrette. What unites them - and Honigmann believes keeps them living for so long - is that they still have goals. Like Honigmann herself, they’re not the types to retire and fade away quietly. “If you don’t have a goal, you become very quickly old. Many people who have a pension and stop working are at first very happy - but then they start getting bored and depressed. Many lose their mind very quickly. These people (in the film) are active.”

As her subjects are so old, she is worried that if she doesn’t start filming soon then some of them may die. That is why she is pressing her potential backers to commit to the project quickly. As she makes clear, she is not the type to script her documentaries to the last detail.

Often, the most magical moments are discovered in the process of actually making the film. One of the key parts of the process on her documentaries is “casting,” which she takes as seriously as any director

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working on a dramatic film. She is on the lookout for “great characters.” Once she has found her subjects, she wants to be given the chance to spend time with them and see what might happen. For example, when she was making Metal and Melancholy, about middle-class professionals in Peru trying to make ends meet as taxi drivers, the film’s richness lay in its freewheeling, observational style, such as when she discovered how the drivers kept thieves at bay by removing the gear stick very night.

This was something she would never have been able to know would be part of her story when she was conceiving the film.

It is typical of Honigmann that she is continuing to fight to complete the film in spite of being rebuffed by financiers when she first tried to secure funding. She now has new producers on board (Dutch Mountain Film) and she remains as dogged and determined as ever.

For several years now, Honigmann has suffered from MS, but when she works (and especially when actually filming), her energy invariably comes flooding back. Colleagues talk about seeing her running like a child. “I have this stupid MS but it is the same as with these people (the subjects of the doc). They have a goal. I’m sure if I continue making films, all the pain I have every morning, all the problems I have walking will go away. I need to continue!”

EYE on a Dutch Master Robby Müller is a legendary figure among cinematographers, a Dutch DOP who shot many of the greatest independent films of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. His credits range from Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas to Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. His brilliant work is to be celebrated this summer in Robby Müller: Master Of Light, a three month exhibition at EYE. Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions at EYE, acknowledges that having an exhibition focused on a cinematographer is a challenge. It is far more usual for a director like Stanley Kubrick or Federico Fellini to be showcased at a museum. But the fact that Robby Müller is such an astonishing cinematographer, and has been working in the Major League of DOPs, and above all is Dutch as well, makes him a natural candidate for the new exhibition.”

There is a natural tendency among filmgoers to regard movies as being the work of their directors. Müller is a chameleon-like figure who worked on many different kinds of films, and whose filmography stretches to more than 90 titles. One of Guldemond’s solutions to this challenge has been to concentrate on some of the cinematographer’s best known collaborations, notably those with Wenders, Lars von Trier and Jarmusch. The exhibition curators talked with these filmmakers, recording interviews in

which they talked about their working relationships with Müller.

“We talked with them about what they liked about Robby Müller, why they chose to work with him and what his particular qualities were.”

They also asked these directors to discuss specific scenes which they felt best highlighted Müller’s brilliance. Wenders chose to discuss his work with the cinematographer on The Goalkeeper’s Fear Of The Penalty (1972), for example. The scenes the directors chose are highlighted in the exhibition.

One characteristic of Müller’s work is that there is always movement. He uses a lot of tracking shots. Even when the camera is static, there will be action within the frame: cars moving, trains passing or the landscape changing. He also used light in an ingenious and very distinctive fashion - and he loved to shoot at “magic hour,” dawn or dusk.

Müller was one of the best-known cinematographers in the world but he never worked just for the money.

His most distinctive work was done with European auteurs or with Americans like Jarmusch who had an independent and freewheeling approach to their craft.

Müller collaborated with Steve McQueen early in the director’s career (a long time before 12 Years A Slave) on the installation Caribs’ Leap, shot in the Caribbean.

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McQueen already had a strong reputation as a visual artist who used film in an ingenious fashion but, in cinema terms, he was a novice. That didn’t stop Müller from working with him. The DOP chose his projects on the basis of people he liked and who were ‘soul mates’.

“I wanted to include this in the installation to bring to life this attitude of Robby – to show that he dared to take risks and that he was prepared to work with artists and filmmakers who were unknown,” stresses Guldemond.

The exhibition also includes hundreds of hours of the cinematographer’s video diaries as well as items from his extraordinary polaroids. Next to this the exhibition will show personal documents like storyboards, letters and scripts.

Müller is in poor health with a neuro­­­­­­­­­logi­cal condition which prevents him talking or writing, and keeps him wheel­­chair-bound. Yet he is delighted to have this exhibition organised in his honour.

Guldemond, who is a near neighbour, has visited him several times. “It is sometimes difficult to communicate,” Guldemond says.

“But he understands what we are doing. I explain to him what we are planning to do… I know also his wife, who knows exactly his reactions. She says he really likes the idea of this EYE exhibition.” Geoffrey Macnab

EYE Exhibition

Robby Müller: Master Of Light Robby Müller: Master Of Light

‘He dared to take risks’

Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986), lensed by Robby Müller

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Dutch industry news

Short Cuts

Commission on a mission A key episode of the new series of Netflix sci-fi hit Sense8 will shoot in The Netherlands in Summer 2016, Film Commissioner Bas van der Ree told See NL. Van der Ree also confirmed that The Hitman’s Bodyguard (US), starring Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson, will also shoot in The Netherlands in May/June 2016.

Sense 8 was created by renowned filmmakers Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix) together with J. Michael Straczynski (Thor) and is directed by, among others, Tom Twyker and James McTeigue. In the series, eight strangers around the globe are linked by their ability to connect their thoughts and actions.

“The first contact for Sense 8 started exactly a year ago at the AFCI Locations and Global Finance show 2015,” commented Van der Ree. “My job is about building trust and being reliable on all aspects of shooting film in The Netherlands. The Film Fund and the Film Commission understand very well the financial and production challenges that filmmakers meet. We are here to make films happen.”

VR Amani in Cannes NEXT The 360°short virtual reality film Amani, produced by Amsterdam-based production outfit Revolver, has been selected for the NEXT programme of Cannes Marché 2016. The film was produced for the charity Terre des Hommes and was directed by Dutch directors Joris Weerts and Eelko Ferwerda and shows the exploitation of 12-year-old Amani by a Kenyan middle class family, and the life of physical violence, harassment and sexual abuse that she suffers.

“With Amani we produced one of the first narrative Virtual Reality films in the Netherlands and being selected for the NEXT program of the Cannes Film Festival is obviously a big honour. It shows that virtual reality is a serious

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new tool for cinematic storytelling and that combining film and virtual reality offers tremendous opportunities for filmmakers, producers and advertisers,” stresses Revolver’s Raymond van der Kaaij.

“At Cannes NEXT (the innovators’ hub of the Cannes Marché) our film will be part of an amazing line-up of VR projects and we truly hope this will inspire filmmakers, both fiction and documentary, to explore the possibilities of cinematic virtual reality.

For Revolver Amsterdam it of course offers an amazing platform to show our film and hopefully this will help us with the other projects we’re working on at the moment.”

Eurimages to Amsterdam To acknowledge the Dutch Presidency of the EC during the first half of 2016, the board of Eurimages will hold its 143rd general meeting in Amsterdam June 20-24. Previous Eurimages meetings took place there in 1993 and 2008.

Over the past eight years the Dutch film industry has completely changed its focus from domestic to international.

The new policies of the Film Fund have contributed to Dutch producers being much more active in the international

marketplace and at festivals across the world. It has also resulted in many more successful applications to Eurimages for fiction, children’s, animation and documen­tary co-productions with numerous countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Romania, Belgium and France.

The five days will involve co-pro meetings as well as exhibition, distribution and promotion meetings, and the gender group will organise a

Video installation More Sweetly Play the

Photo: studiohanswilschut 46

Dance (2015)

Kentridge EYE donation A year on from EYE’s William Kentridge: If We Ever Get To Heaven exhibition, which attracted an audience of 72,000 visitors, the South African artist has donated ten major artworks to EYE Film Museum. The donation includes all ten films for Drawings for Projections, the series that brought Kentridge to fame in the 1990s.

An important and recurring theme in Kentridge’s work is the troubled past of his native country South Africa. By erasing and

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special program for Dutch professionals. There will be a screening of a Dutch film supported by Eurimages and many networking events.

“The Film Fund and the Ministry is very happy to host Eurimages in the Netherlands and I am personally very much looking forward to meet my European family in my hometown Amsterdam!,” enthuses Dorien van de Pas, head of New Screen NL at the Fund, and Netherlands representative on the Eurimages board.

reworking charcoal drawings to create animated films and using simple pre-cinema techniques, Kentridge manages to visualize this conflict in all its complexity, exposing a world torn by social conflict.

This was very much in evidence in his EYE exhibition.

“Working with EYE was a great pleasure on three levels,” Kentridge explains. “The projections and the sound have set a standard which other installations of this artwork have yet to equal. Secondly there was the film programme that was organized in support of the exhibition, which introduced me to numerous juxtapositions of film and music that were new to me. Thirdly is the collection housed in the museum.

Only rarely does the installation of a work at the same time offer the raw material which then becomes the start of a subsequent work.”

“EYE is delighted to receive this enormously generous donation,” Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions affirmed. “Kentridge’s work perfectly suits EYE’s collection and exhibition policy, which aims to explore the interface between film and other arts.”

Since Janneke Doolaard cofounded production company KeyDocs in 2009, her production credits have included local box-office hit Erbarme Dich – Matthew Passion Stories by Ramon Gieling, international awardwinning Alice Cares by Sander Burger and the minority-produced (and critically-acclaimed) Becoming

Zlatan by the Swedish Gertten brothers. A graduate of EAVE, Janneke sits on the Advisory Board of the Documentary Institute Amsterdam.

“From the beginning my business has gone hand in hand with the fiction department (KeyFilm),” comments Janneke. “So there is

a cross pollination of fiction and documentary in my work. It formed me as a producer. I am interested in these hybrid projects, not just to cross genre borders, but I believe that every story has its own, unique form: anything goes if it works. In Cannes I am looking for partners to bring my projects to a higher international level.”

Photo: Bob Bronshoff

Janneke Doolaard