See NL 26 by Netherlands Film Fund

Sundance nod to I Dream in Another Language The Wound scores Sundance, IFFR and Berlin Bero Beyer on Planet IFFR Owls & Mice in Berlin Daan Bakker debut Quality Time in Tiger competition Hannah Hoekstra Shooting Star

Issue #26 January 2017 Sundance, IFFR, Berlin issue Download the free app for iPad and Android

Index 4-5 Taking the plunge Jonas And The Sea by animator Marlies van der Wel selected for Sundance 6-7 Ritual and taboo The Wound, selected for Sundance and Tiger comp and set to open Berlin Panorama, explores male sexuality within the indigenous Xhosa population of South Africa 8-9 The power of speech Sundance World Cinema Competition entry I Dream in Another Language concerns a linguist’s journey into the Mexican jungle to save a dying indigenous language 10-11 On another planet Director Bero Beyer on the current trajectory of IFFR, arguably the world’s leading festival for experimental and world cinema 12-13 Rey of light Circe Films’ Stienette Bosklopper is minority co-producer on Niles Atallah’s gloriously idiosyncratic Rey, screening in IFFR Tiger competition 14-15 Quality of life Producer Iris Otten talks about Quality Time, the eagerly anticipated feature debut of Dutch filmmaker Daan Bakker 16-17 Music for the EYE The career of experimental filmmaker Joost Rekveld is being celebrated at IFFR in a Deep Focus Programme, presented in association with the EYE Film Museum 18-19 Co-pro queen Prix Eurimages winner Leontine Petit talks to SeeNL about the business of co-production

22-23 Dune dudes Manuel Muñoz’s The Sea Stares At Us From Afar premieres in Berlin Forum. The director and Dutch co-producer Rosan Boersma talk to See NL 24-25 Tale of a horse thief Kyrgyz director Aktan Arym Kubat is in Berlin Panorama with the equine-themed Centaur, co-produced by Volya Films 26-27 Funky Dutch shorts Dutch short films in selection at Clermont Ferrand 28-29 Obstacle to love Dutch producer Raymond van der Kaaij talks about Dutch involvement in Sundance/Berlin selection Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! 30-31 ACE is high European producer body ACE relocated to Amsterdam on January 1 2017, with former CineMart manager Jacobine van der Vloed installed as new director 32-35 Funding innovation Netherlands Film Fund consultant Renée van der Grinten talks about the Fund’s dedication to new, brave and innovative forms of storytelling 36-37 Desmet in DC The collection of legendary Dutch cinema entrepreneur Jean Desmet is headed for Washington’s National Gallery of Art 38-39 Short Cuts News from the Dutch film industry 40 EFA Shooting Star Netherlands actress Hannah Hoekstra

20-21 Feather versus fur Simone van Dusseldorp’s Cinekid 2016 opener Owls & Mice is now selected for Berlin Generation Kplus

Ashes to Ashes

Submarine Channel See page 32

Co-pro convention to be signed at IFFR COLOPHON

The Netherlands is both delighted and proud to host the signing of the Council of Europe Convention on Cinematographic Co-production (revised) during the 46th Inter national Film Festival Rotterdam. It provides a framework for international co-productions in a global market. It aims to promote the development of multilateral cinematographic co-production, to safeguard creation and freedom of expression and defend diversity in film. Through the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive that offers a 30% cash rebate on Dutch production spend we welcome the international production community to work within our borders and to use our highly skilled creative and technical personnel, as well as let our myriad and diverse locations inspire your production decisions. The outstanding growth in production output since the Incentive’s launch in 2014, both international and local, is testament to our belief in, and dedication to, international co-production.

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, Melanie Goodfellow Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper Circulation: 2150 copies © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International 2017 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 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

Cover still: I Dream in Another Language Ernesto Contreras See pages 8-9

Taking the plunge

Marlies van der Wel

Dutch animator Marlies van der Wel explains to Melanie Goodfellow how the quest of the inventor-protagonist in her animated short Jonas And The Sea mirrored her own creative process. Illustrator and animator Marlies van der Wel’s Jonas And The Sea has been captivating festival audiences and clinching prizes worldwide over the past year, including best animated short at TIFF Kids last spring. Its festival run is set to continue into 2017 with its recent inclusion in the Sundance Film Festival’s short film selection. “I thought we were all done, but now it’s been programmed at Sundance there has been another wave of interest from festivals. It’s a gift,” says Van der Wel. The 12-minute work – produced by Amsterdam-based Halal Productions and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund – revolves around the life-long quest of a man called Jonas to be at one with the sea, charting his experimentation with a series of increasingly elaborate contraptions constructed from the objects he finds washed up on the shore.

Intriguingly, van der Wel reveals she is not keen on swimming in the sea or going underwater. “I actually find going underwater water quite scary. I don’t even really like swimming,” she says. “Jonas’s quest to get underwater and get to a place he feels should be home is a metaphor.” “My main goal when I started writing was to capture a whole life over the course of one film and a character who is trying to understand their purpose in life as well as connect with their inner nature,” she explains. “What I liked about the concept is that Jonas needs all the stuff that washes on the shore over the course of his life to reach his goal.” In the background, the project also had a personal resonance. “I was trying to figure out where I wanted to be and how to get there and making this film was part of the process of working that out,” she says. The work, made over a five-year period, consists of hand-drawn sketches combined with photo graphs and digital animation inspired by objects Van der Wel beach-combed on the Netherlands’ northern coastline. “It was a technique I developed myself. With a photographer friend, I went beach-combing. We collected objects we found washed up on the shore – old shoes, bits of wood – and photographed them,” she explains. “Back in the studio, I digitised the images in Photoshop,

combined them and started drawing over them.” Van der Wel studied at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht where she made the award-winning 2006 student film BWAP! about a girl who is ostracised because she makes a different sound from her peers. She cites her graphic designer grandfather and father as well as the Dutch animators Michael Dudok de Wit and Paul Driessen as sources of inspiration for her decision to work in animation. Driessen, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2000 for his short 3 Misses, was a mentor on the project while Van der Wel says she was heavily influenced by Dudok de Wit’s Academy Award winning Father And Daughter as a student. Since completing Jonas And The Sea, Van der Wel has also made Sabuku, selected for Berlin Generation Kplus about a bird who is looking for a new best-friend after his long-time companion, the buffalo, passes away. “It’s a shorter work, something I did for fun after working on Jonas And The Sea for so long,” she explains. Current projects include an illustrated Jonas And The Sea book which will be launched in March 2017. She is also developing a second longer animated short called Emily about a flower-seller, who cultivates and sells flowers for others her whole life but never has a loved-one who will send her flowers herself. The film will premiere at the 2017 Netherlands Film Festival.

Jonas And The Sea

Sundance Animated Short Films

Marlies van der Wel

‘My main goal was to capture a whole life over the course of one film’ Director: Marlies van der Wel Script: Ruben Picavet, Marlies van der Wel Production: Halal (NL) Sales: SND Films Festival distribution: KLIK! Distribution Service

Berlin Panorama, Sundance Competition, IFFR Tiger

The Wound

John Trengove

‘A way of speaking about the range of experience that is possible within the company of men…’

Director: John Trengove Script: John Trengove, Thando Mgqolozana, Malusi Bengu Production: Urucu Media (SA) Co-production: OAK Motion Pictures (NL), Riva Film (DE), ZDF/ARTE (DE), Edition Salzgever (DE), Cool Take Pictures (SA), Deuxième Ligne Films (FR), Sampek Productions (FR) Sales: Pyramide Films 6

Photo: Dean Hutton

Ritual and taboo

John Trengove

It’s very rare that a film is selected for Sundance and IFFR competition, as well as Berlin Panorama (opening film). The Wound sets out to address the narrow depiction of black masculinity in South African cinema, director John Trengove tells Nick Cunningham. Set in the rural areas of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, The Wound is a taboo-breaking film that was a long time in gestation. Financed, by and large, outside of its country of origin, and using an exclusively male cast, the film explores male sexuality within the indigenous Xhosa population. The film revolves around a traditional circumcision ceremony undertaken by male adolescents, and the subsequent care they receive by the older men within the community, the ‘caregivers’. Against this tense backdrop Trengove tells a complex, sometimes violent, tale of desire and disaffection among three protagonists, the caregivers Xolani and Vija, and the initiate Kwanda. The film is supported by the HBF+NFF co-pro scheme. “What is being depicted in the film is a taboo ritual,” comments

Trengove. “There is a lot of politics around the representation of it, with many traditionalists believing it shouldn’t be shown at all… These days the initiation is frequently criticised for reasons of safety and relevance. Be that as it may, it’s still considered a cornerstone of the culture and within the culture you are not considered a man unless you have been through this initiation.” The controversial subject meant that the process of compiling a cast was very time-consuming, given that many actors from the Xhosa community would be wary of aligning themselves with the project. “So we had a very long casting that lasted for more than a year where we explored all sorts of community theatre groups,” Trengove explains. “The casting director went on Facebook, hung out in shopping malls. We literally put hundreds of young men on camera, so it was quite an unconventional process and it came down to anchoring certain important roles with experienced actors and allowing for a more free-flow situation where non-professional actors could react [to the drama] in any way that seemed right to them.” Trengove elicits moving and delicately nuanced performances from his leads. The young Kwanda understands the sexual undertow within the long established friend ship between Xolani and Vija, as well as their frustrations at living unfulfilled lives on the mountain. Whatever solace Kwanda decides to

offer them however is tempered by his parallel drive to exploit the situation, all of which leads to a shocking climax. “We rehearsed for about two weeks before we shot,” explains Trengove. “Nakhane Touré who plays Xolani, Niza Jay Ncoyini (Kwanda) and Bongile Mantsai who plays Vija are truly exceptional people. I deliberately wrote their characters quite close to their own personalities and I encouraged as much of their own intuitive responses to come out in their performances. They were exceptional looking and they were individualistic in a way that I thought could be very interesting on camera.” The decision to feature no female characters was “no coincidence”, Trengove underlines, given the film’s subject. The challenge of telling the story entirely and exclusively within a community of men became an absorbing way to speak about patriarchy and the nature of mascul inity. “Really, it was an opportunity to look at the way in which men organize themselves outside the codes of their everyday lives, which I think reveals something about their nature,” he comments. “But it was also a way of speaking about the range of experience that is possible within the company of men. There are obviously things like power play and violence – things that are more familiar to us – and then there are the range of experiences that are more hidden or not often spoken about, the intimacy that can happen between men, their sexual exchanges.”

The power of speech “I just thought it was a great premise for a film,” says Van der Kaaij whose recent credits also include the award-winning hybrid drama Bodkin Ras and co-producer on the US indie hit Love And Friendship. Raymond van der Kaaij

Dutch producer Raymond van der Kaaij recounts how the foundations for Mexico-set Sundance entry I Dream in Another Language were laid over tequilas in Thessaloniki, writes Melanie Goodfellow. On the face of it, Sundance World Cinema Competition entry I Dream in Another Language, about a linguist’s journey into the Mexican jungle to save a dying indigenous language, appears to be a production driven out of Mexico. Wholly financed out of the country, it was shot in the rain forest near the port city of Veracruz and the nearby coastline. Ernesto Contreras, one of Mexico’s most buzzed about rising filmmakers, directs a Mexican cast from a screenplay by his writer brother Carlos. But behind the scenes, it was Dutch producer Raymond van der Kaaij at Revolver Amsterdam who conceived and developed the project long before any Mexican partners came on board. Inspiration came from a newspaper article about the case of an indigenous language on the verge of dying out because its last two speakers had fallen out.

Screenwriter Carlo Contreras’s involvement came about through a chance meeting with current EYE International chief Marten Rabarts at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival some six years ago. Rabarts, who was artistic director of the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam at the time, was en route to a Mexican party. “I’d just read the article and showed it to Marten,” recalls Van der Kaaij. “He said, ‘Listen why don’t you come with me to the party. I’ll introduce you to a Mexican writer who is attending the Binger’. I went along and met Carlos.” Contreras’s first feature screenplay Blue Eyelids – also directed by brother Ernesto – had just won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and he was developing a second script, The Obscure Spring, at the Binger. Over tequilas, the pair agreed to work together. Revolver developed the script and project with the support of MEDIA, the Binger, the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, where it won the main award, and the Jerusalem Film Lab. “The idea that a whole language depended on the mood of two old men got me excited and I became immediately curious about the reasons why they had a fight and

why they were not talking to each other,” recalls writer Contreras. He credits Rabarts with helping him get to grips with the source material. “I used to write ‘only from what I felt’ and not from ‘what the story needed’; Marten was the first one who made me notice that unless I evolved as storyteller, I would not succeed in finding the right structure,” he says. Revolver producer Dijana Olcay-Hot also played an important role, working closely with Carlos, even accompanying him at the Binger. A decisive moment in the develop ment was opting to work with a Mexican director, having first mulled whether to make the film as a European co-pro. Brother Ernesto Contreras was an obvious choice. He brought with him long-time producer Luis Albores. Amores Perros producer Monica Lozano also boarded. Between them, they pulled in state and private Mexican backing. Van der Kaaij says the film is an example of the sort of international project Revolver wants to focus on in the future. “We are Dutch producers who developed and produced a film which ended up being in Spanish and an indigenous language and financed and shot in Mexico,” he says. “Part of our job as producers is to think out of the box and to decide what a script and story really needs and if that means we need to step out of our comfort zones and finance the film completely differently, we need to pursue that.”

Sundance World Cinema Competition

I Dream in Another Language Ernesto Contreras

‘The idea that a whole language depended on the mood of two old men got me excited Director & script: Ernesto Contreras Production: Revolver Amsterdam (NL), Agencia SHA (MX), Alebrija Cine y Video (MX) 9

Planet IFFR

International Film Festival Rotterdam

On another planet through society these days,” while Bright Future, which heralds brilliant emerging talent will again be “as daring and as far out as can be.”

Bero Beyer

Director Bero Beyer discusses the evolution of Planet IFFR, and how matters radical are as much part of the festival’s future as of its past. “What we are looking to continue at Rotterdam is the ground-breaking, anarchistic spirit of innovation and discovery that has been the key factor of what has made the festival special throughout all of its decades of being,” states IFFR chief Bero Beyer ahead of the 46th edition of what is arguably the world’s leading event for both experimental and world cinema. In 2016 Beyer radically re-shaped the overall programme into four specific and outspoken themed strands, those of Bright Future, Voices, Deep Focus and Perspectives, in order to provide context and clarity for visitors to the festival, enabling them “to better decide how they want to be surprised, entertained or challenged.” That structure will remain in place for 2017. The reflective Perspectives section combines IFFR’s themed programmes and will again “delve into what we feel are the fault lines of inclusion and exclusion that run

Beyer also underlines his festival’s commitment to reaching the widest possible audiences – outside Rotterdam and after the curtains close on the final screening. “The continuation of IFFR Live [which involves simultaneous screening of films across numerous venues worldwide] is a very tangible experiment in continuously enabling these films to be seen by more people – we want to be a bigger part of that,” Beyer underlines. “The Big Screen competition [which offers €15,000 to the director and €15,000 towards the winner’s Dutch release] is also a way to say, you know what, if you launch your film here, we will find a way to make sure this stuff gets seen even more, on TV, in distribution, by an audience.” “We don’t just show those films and then retreat to our little viewing rooms,” Beyer continues. “No, it is important that we continually present those films and play a role in having them reach an audience further on. And to combine that with the cutting edge spirit of ‘please be daring and don’t give us any middle of the road stuff’, is typical Rotterdam.” The spirit of reinvention, evolution and curiosity does not end at the selection of films. IFFR 2017 sees

the launch of the Propellor initiative, co-presented with CPH:DOX, Berlin’s European Film Market and innovation studio Cinemathon, and described as ‘a one-of-a-kind film tech hub for the development of new business models for production, distribution and experience of films.’ “It is that kind of out-of-the box thinking that we want to be a part of, to help build an infrastructure for using the platforms that festivals can provide, and basically serving as the research and development department for the film world,” comments Beyer. IFFR 2017 also presents the second iteration of the Boost NL co-production initiative, after its launch at the Holland Film Meeting in Utrecht in 2016. Beyer further underlines that the value of the Rotterdam offer lies in giving equal weight to audience and professional considerations. “They are both part of the IFFR planet, both part of the same thing. A film does not exist without an audience, it does not exist without being seen, so the combination of a big audience – 300,000+ admissions is quite a lot – together with an industry component that deals with free spirits, great projects and a strong financial sense, is what makes it unique. You cannot have one without the other. They are not just co-dependent. They are creating the magic together.”

Rey of light “What attracted me very much to the story was the approach by Niles and how he worked with all these different kinds of elements – live action, animation, people dressed up in costumes and masks, and a lot of archive material.” Stienette Bosklopper

Geoffrey Macnab talks to Dutch co-producer Stienette Bosklopper about Rey, competing in IFFR Tiger Competition. Circe Films boss Stienette Bosklopper first encountered Chilean director Niles Atallah’s wondrously outlandish project Rey in 2011. At that point the project was being developed by Atallah and his producer Lucie Kalmar of Paris-based Mômerade at the Binger Filmlab. “It was a project that gestated for quite some time,” Bosklopper remembers. She was a strong fan of Atallah’s debut feature Lucia (2010) and relished the chance to work with him as Dutch minority co-producer. Rey was an equally intriguing proposition. This was a story about a 35 year-old French lawyer in South America in 1860 who manages to have himself proclaimed King of Araucania and Patagonia, bringing together two warring tribes and introducing a brand new justice system in the process. The Chilean Court of Justice doesn’t approve of this new monarch in its midst, and the lawyer ends up being slung in jail and sentenced to death on charges of plotting against the Chilean government.

The project had backing from the HBF+NFF co-pro scheme, and much of the archive material in the film comes from the EYE collection in Amsterdam – another reason why it made sense for the filmmakers to be working with a Dutch partner like Bosklopper. Atallah was making use of EYE’s “orphan footage” – that’s to say material for which the owners can’t be found and mainly part of the film museum’s Bits and Pieces collection. Unusually, EYE actually came on board as a co-producer too. The director had a novel way of achieving the look he wanted from the material. It would be delivered to him digitally but he would have it printed out on film stock – and then he’d bury it in the ground to let it deteriorate. The director’s ingenious, freewheeling approach to archive reminded Bosklopper of some of the early films of Dutch auteur Peter Delpeut, in particular his celebrated collage movie Lyrical Nitrate (1991), which used decaying clips from old films taken from the Jean Desmet collection at the Netherlands Film Museum, now EYE. As well as using archive footage, Atallah also commissioned some special costumes and masks,

using maze and bits of old pottery in their design. He tried to depict the visions and dreams of his main character.

Rey has taken a small eternity to reach completion, passing through not only Binger but also the Cannes Atelier, the Torino Film Lab, the CPH:FORUM and CineMart on its way to production. The film was shot in Chile but then required a considerable time for the postproduction work, which was done in the Netherlands and France. For Bosklopper though, the effort has clearly been worthwhile. She was heavily involved right from the script stage. “The more eclectic a story, the more difficult to assemble it because you don’t have the usual dramatic and emotional lines,” she observes. Although Bosklopper wasn’t in Chile for the shooting, she was kept very much in the loop with new cuts of the material placed on Vimeo. There were also French, German and Chilean partners involved in the production. “It was quite a smooth collaboration,” she suggests, adding that the real strains during the film’s five year journey toward financing and completion were felt by Kalmar and Atallah. “I really like the film a lot,” Bosklopper declares of an experimental movie which she believes has both charm and obvious crossover appeal. “Now it is in the Tiger competition in Rotterdam and we are very happy with that!”

Rey

IFFR Tiger Competition

Niles Atallah

For Bosklopper, Rey was an intriguing proposition Director & script: Niles Atallah Production: MÃ´merade (FR) Co-production: Diluvio (CL), unafilm (DE), Circe Films (NL) 13

Quality of life

Iris Otten of Pupkin Film points out to Geoffrey Macnab that Daan Bakker’s IFFR Tiger competition Quality Time is not at all a typical debut feature. Many in the Netherlands had realised that Daan Bakker was a highly original and idiosyncratic new talent after seeing his 2009 student short Jacco’s Film. “It had so much energy!” producer Iris Otten recalls of this funny but very poignant yarn about a 10 year-old kid living with his bickering parents and keeping reality at bay through his daydreaming imagination. However, in the intervening six years, Bakker had stopped making films. He had worked as a script consultant and had written for kids’ film and TV. Then, three years ago, he attended IFFR as a member of the public and had a moment of epiphany, deciding he wanted to direct his own feature. “Daan felt that day that he wanted to contribute to the world of film as well. Realizing he truly wanted to create his own film. And he knew he would use humor, even as it tackled serious subjects.” says Otten.

“Bakker has an ingenious creative mind… but he also changes everything – all the time!” Otten expresses of the mix of admiration, affection and (slight) exasperation that the producers at Pupkin felt toward the brilliant young filmmaker. They stuck with him simply because he was so talented. He’d continually have one good idea – but then replace it with a better one. For example, he suddenly decided that he wanted to shoot one part of the film from the air, using drones and cranes. Part of the film was shot in Belgium and there was even an episode filmed in Norway. Understandably, not having worked on a film set for several years, Bakker was a little apprehensive when production began. He soon got over his nerves, though. The actors loved working with him because he encouraged them throughout to improvise and enjoy themselves. (Veteran actress Anneke Blok revealed to Otten how Quality Time was one of her most enjoyable

ever professional experiences.) Otten suggests that Bakker has a very Dutch sensibility – and a sense of humour that she feels will be appreciated by everyone, wherever they come from. “I would say this is a universal kind of humour but Daan is really a typical Dutch guy. The choices he makes for the locations, that’s a nostalgic feeling for what the Netherlands was when Daan was growing up.” The first part of Quality Time is a short animated film involving a red

He’d have one good idea – but then replace it with a better one screen with a white dot. (The dot represents one of the five men.) Also included is a black and white interlude about a boy abducted by aliens who returns to earth and then explodes. All that is left of him is “a living ball of flesh that talks a bit and sings.” Even in advance of its Rotterdam premiere, the film has stirred considerable interest. German sales outfit M-Appeal has come on board to handle international rights while September Film will be distributing the film in the Netherlands. “For me, Daan really is the main character of the film… he is the film,” Otten says of the director who looks to be one of the most idiosyncratic talents to have emerged in Dutch cinema in recent years.

Photo: Robbie van Brussel

Daan Bakker

Pupkin agreed to produce Bakker’s debut, which was made through the Netherlands Film Fund’s Oversteek system that supports new talent. “We’ve now been shooting a fivepart film but when we applied for the first round of Oversteek, it was a 90-minute feature film with one specific story,” Otten explains. The basic theme, however, always stayed the same. Quality Time is about men in their 30s, struggling to adjust to the realities of grown up life.

Quality Time

IFFR Tiger Competition

Daan Bakker

Director & script: Daan Bakker Production: Pupkin Film (NL) Co-production: Leader Films (NL), VPROÂ (NL) 15

Photo: Patrick Rafferty

Music for the EYE

Joost Rekveld

Joost Rekveld is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in the Netherlands, renowned for his playful and provocative abstract movies which he has described as “visual music for the eye”. His career is being celebrated at IFFR in a Deep Focus Programme, presented in association with the EYE Film Museum. This will showcase both his most recent work and several of his older pieces. His works will also go on tour in the US in March. “There are many artists who are now straddling the world of visual art and the world of cinema and experimental film,” Rekveld says, but points out that most of his own work is made primarily to be seen in cinemas, not in galleries. “For me, film festivals – and film venues – are the most important place where I show my work.” Rotterdam, he adds, is renowned for paying attention to experimental cinema. There is considerable science and academic research behind Rekveld’s films. A typical example is installation #61 (a world premiere in IFFR’s exhibition Nuts and Bolts,

curated by Edwin Carels.) The film works both as an aesthetic experience and as a study of optical phenomena. It is partly inspired by experiments carried out by early 19th Century Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinje, who was fascinated by the physiognomy of the eye and by visual sensations that do not correspond to “anything outside of the body.” “What I find really interesting in science is these people who’ve done amazing work which has opened up all these fields – but the people have been more or less forgotten,” Rekveld says. “Purkinje was a great scientist who has contributed to many fields… his writing is very accessible, very literary, not too technical. It has beautiful descriptions of the (optical) phenomena themselves and also he made great drawings of them.” Rekveld’s films are about much more than imagery. He pays careful attention to sound and music too and often collaborates very closely with composers. One of the showpieces of the Rotterdam programme is the performance of his film Ursae Minoris, for which he will be joined by Dario Calderone on double bass and composer Claudio Baroni, who will oversee the live electronics. The piece was inspired by the travels of Ciriaco d’Ancona, the 14th century Italian explorer, academic and “father of archaeology” who navigated his way across the Mediterranean guided by the stars.

Ask the director where his love of cinema comes from and he points to his teenage years, growing up in Gouda (“where the cheese comes from.”) A big fan of the mystical Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, he worked as a projectionist at the local film club. When he was 16 or 17, the club organised an animation festival and he was exposed to the work of abstract filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson. For most of his career, Rekveld has combined his filmmaking with teaching at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague but in recent years has cut down on the teaching in order to concentrate on his work. He is an inventor as well as a director, building his own tools in his studio which, he says, looks like an electronics lab. His current obsession is the technology and aesthetics of analogue video. “What I find really interesting in there is that you find the same kind of algorithms which I had been using in the software I wrote, but these algorithms are really embodied in the machine,” he says, lapsing into jargon that is well over the head of his interviewer. There is, though, a more practical and down to earth reason why he is tinkering with old video equipment. “I had become really sick of sitting behind a keyboard, watching a screen and tying in code. Soldering and building devices is much more fun!” Geoffrey Macnab

IFFR Deep Focus

Joost Rekveld

‘Film festivals are the most important place where I show my work’

Joost Rekveld

Co-pro queen In December 2016 Dutch producer Leontine Petit, founder of Lemming Film, attended the European Film Awards to receive the European Co-Pro Award – Prix Eurimages. She talks to Geoffrey Macnab. Thie Prix Eurimages Co-production Award is one of the most prestigious awards that an independent European producer can win and it underlines Leontine Petit’s position at the heart of the European film industry. “It was extremely important for me,” she declares. Look through the films that Lemming has (co)produced, titles such as In The Fog, Heli, The Lobster and Vivas Las Antipodas, and you’ll see Mexican, Russian and Scandinavian films alongside her many Dutch titles. Petit is clearly drawn to working with strongminded auteurs like Amit Escalante, Yorgos Lanthimos, Victor Kossakovsky and Sergei Loznitsa. Petit’s career in the film industry started in the 1990s when she worked as a production manager and line producer. She hadn’t been to film school – there were no courses for producers – but had studied philosophy and history. Her early jobs included stints with Dutch outfits IDTV, Bos Bros and Egmond. She began, as she puts it, ”at the bottom” but she knew from the outset that she wanted to be producing fiction. Her moment of epiphany came when she attended an EAVE producers workshop in 1995.

“That for me was really a lifechanging moment,” she says. For the first time, she was receiving practical education about what it takes to co-produce a European movie. EAVE was also an extra ordinary networking opportunity. Her tutors at EAVE included Parisbased Jacques Bidou and legendary German producer Karl Baumgartner.

‘As Petit puts it, you’ve got to discover if you get along with your partners and if you have similar ways of working’ They helped her come up with an identity as a producer – a sense of the kind of films she wanted to make. Her fellow students, many of whom became close friends and collaborators, included German producer Jens Meurer of Egoli Tossell, Heino Deckert of Deckert Distribution, and director/producer Peter Brosens, all of whom were then at similar stages in their career. The secret to co-producing isn’t, perhaps, so complicated. As Petit puts it, you’ve got to discover if you get along with your partners and if you have similar ways of working. If the bond between you is strong enough, you should be able to cope when problems do arise. “You need each other in many more ways than just ‘can you give me a bag of money’ and I will give you a bag of money back.”

When Lemming is co-producing, Petit is looking for more than just a financial partner – she is looking for a creative contribution too. She suggests that good co-producers need too be both curious and very flexible. She is equally adept both at being the majority producer, leading a project, and minority co-producer on a film that originated elsewhere. As a Dutch-based producer, Petit works very closely with the Film Fund and pays tribute to its director Doreen Boonekamp. “If the Fund hadn’t increased its money for minority co-productions, I wouldn’t have done so many,” the Lemming boss says. One of her current projects is fostering closer relations between European producers and their Chinese counterparts. She is a founding partner of Bridging The Dragon, a network pursuing this goal, and she is currently putting together David Verbeek’s long gestating Dutch/Chinese vampire movie Dead And Beautiful. When Petit went up on stage to collect her award at the EFAs, she made a heartfelt speech emphasising how European she has always felt. “That’s true,” she says, expressing a sentiment she knows may not be popular in an era of increasing nationalism and tension within the EU. “I’ve always felt more European than Dutch.”

European Co-Pro Award â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Prix Eurimages

Leontine Petit

Leontine Petit receiving her European Co-production Award in December 2016

Feather versus fur

Simone van Dusseldorp describes her new film Owls & Mice (selected for Berlin Generation Kplus) 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.

Owls & Mice, which opened Cinekid 2016 (where Simone van Dusseldorp picked up a Lifetime Achievement Award) is described by the writerdirector 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

“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 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

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

Photo: Victor Arnolds

Simone van Dusseldorp

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.

Owls and Mice

Berlin Generation Kplus

Simone van Dusseldorp

Director: Simone van Dusseldorp Script: Simone van Dusseldorp Production: Lemming Film (NL) Sales: Attraction Distribution 21

Berlinale Forum

The Sea Stares At Us From Afar Manuel Muñoz

CTM’s involvement was ‘decisive’ for the project Director & script: Manuel Muñoz Production: Azhar Media (ES) Co-production: CTM Docs (NL) El Viaje Films (ES). 59 en conserva (ES) 22

Dune dudes walking on that beach and I’ve always been curious about the collection of huts and the men who live in them.”

Manuel Muñoz

Spanish director Manuel Muñoz and Dutch producer Rosan Boersma at CTM Docs discuss their collaboration on the documentary The Sea Stares At Us From Afar, which premieres in Berlin Forum. Spanish filmmaker Manuel Muñoz’s creative documentary The Sea Stares At Us From Afar follows the lives of a group of men living outside of mainstream society in makeshift shacks on a beach in Southern Spain. At first it seems their strange solitary lives – spent fishing and contemplating the sea – are unfolding in the middle of nowhere, but as the film proceeds it emerges the men are living just a stone’s throw away from a popular tourist beach. “Their cabins are actually built on an undeveloped beach which is part of a national park next door to the resort my family goes to every summer,” explains Muñoz, who studied media at University of Seville, before moving to London and then Cuba where he developed his work as a film editor. “Since I was a child, I’ve loved

One day, the filmmaker plucked up the courage to knock on one of the doors and introduce himself. “They were not very talkative in the beginning. I think this is partly because they spend so much time on their own but also because they live under constant threat of being evicted because their cabins are illegal. This makes them suspicious of strangers,” says Muñoz. “It took many visits, many glasses of wine and evenings spent together to bring their guard down and for them to trust me. I spent nearly two years, maybe even three, visiting them whenever I could,” he continues. Muñoz shot the work over an eightweek period, broken up over the course of a year to capture the passage of time on the beach as it filled up with holiday-makers in the summer and then emptied out in the autumn. “At first, I was tempted not to show the holiday-makers and to present the beach where the men live as a place of complete isolation,” explains Muñoz. “But then I decided that their proximity to the resort actually created an interesting dialectic.” “It enabled me to bring a sense of the passage of time to the work and explore the idea of the men belonging to a different frame but

witnessing the seasonal transformation around them.” The result is an immersive, contemplative work which invites the spectator to slow down to the pace of the men in the film and enter their world. “You dive into the peaceful retirement of these men in the dunes and go with the flow of their lives… I’m maybe envious of the life they are leading,” says producer Rosan Boersma at Dutch company CTM Docs. The Hilversum-based company – which is part of the umbrella CTM Entertainment group – was a minority co-producer on the project, securing a €40,000 Netherlands Film Fund grant which was spent on post-production work carried out by Amsterdam-based company Amator. Aside from securing the finance, Boersma also gave support and advice at the rough-cut stage and liaised with the fund’s documentary consultant Suzanne van Voorst for her input too. The production’s lead producer José Rodriguez, founding chief of Seville-based Azhar Media said CTM’s involvement was “decisive” for the project. “Not only because the money invested was completely necessary to close the financing plan but also because it allowed us to work with a very qualified group of professionals that we would never have had access to otherwise,” he explains. Melanie Goodfellow

Tale of a horse thief Kyrgyz director Aktan Arym Kubat may hail from a country whose film industry is still developing but he already has experience of big international festivals. The Light Thief (2010) was Kyrgyzstan’s submission for the Foreign Language Academy Award, after screening in the Quinzaine at Cannes. Now, his latest feature, Centaur (sold by Match Factory, and co-produced by Volya Films and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund) is Berlin-bound. “I’ve heard a lot about the Berlinale as a very creative and business festival. I am glad Centaur’s world premiere is in Panorama as it is said that the programme comprises films that deal with controversial subjects and that are intended to provoke discussion,” says Kubat.

Centaur is about a former horse thief, retired and now leading a quiet life, who is called on one last time to steal the horse of a very famous man. It’s a film steeped in old Kyrgyz myth. According to the old legends of the nomads, horses were divine animals that carried away the souls of the dead to heaven. Nowadays, the director suggests, the old traditions have been forgotten and perverted, and horses are seen as status symbols through which people can show off their power and wealth. Kubat is one of his country’s most respected filmmakers. Not that his route into the business was easy.

After graduating from art school, he was looking for a job and came to the Kyrgyz Film Studio. He worked there first as a decoration manager and then as a production designer. “Filmmaking began to attract me with its possibilities,” he remembers. “In painting, you have only canvas or a paper, but in cinema you have the possibility to embody your ideas

‘In cinema you can embody your ideas through moving pictures’ through moving pictures. One day I had the idea that I could make my own film.” This was the Soviet era and there was little chance to study filmmaking in Kyrgyzstan. Kubat tried on several occasions to gain admission to the VGIK (the prestigious Russian film school in Moscow.) He wasn’t successful. During Perestroika in the late 1980s, he made the doc The Dog Was Running (1990). Working on it was the equivalent of being at film school, he says. Kubat’s own experiences have led him to become very active in film education in Kyrgyzstan. He is one of the founders of a cinema development fund and notes with pride that there is now a film school and workshops at which young Kyrgyz directors have the chance to learn their craft. They also have the chance to study abroad, whether at

the VGIK or at the New York Film School or in South Korea. The director pays tribute to the many European co-producers who’ve helped him over the years. First, there was Cedomir Kolar, with whom he made The Adopted Son. Then, among others, came Karl Baumgartner, Thanassis Karathanos, Denis Vaslin and Yuji Sadai. “I’m always joking that every time I have more and more producers, but it becomes more and more difficult to find money for my projects,” he reflects. Kubat reckons Centaur will be given a very fiery reception when it is shown in his homeland. “I think it will provoke bipolar opinions and will cause a riot of emotions in my country,” the director suggests. The “bitter truth,” he adds, is that he is regarded as a “scandalous film director” who sometimes shows Kyrgyzstan in a bad light. The new film looks at the Kyrgyz people’s ambiguous relationship with Islam – another reason why it may prove controversial. “In one of my letters to Cedomir, I wrote that I live in a country of Centaur. Obviously, the collapse of the USSR brought spiritual impoverishment, when the ideology of communism appeared to be a bluff, and our national identity was almost destroyed. And we are now as half-animals and half-humans – and I hardly find any understanding in my country.” Geoffrey Macnab

Centaur

Berlin Panorama

Aktan Arym Kubat

Director: Aktan Arym Kubat Script: Aktan Arym Kubat, Ernest Abdyjaparov Production: ASAP Films (FR Co-production: Volya Films (NL), Oy Art, Pallas Films (DE) Sales: The Match Factory

Funky Dutch shorts Green Screen Gringo

Dutch filmmakers are out in force at leading shorts fest Clermont Ferrand with seven films, four of which screen in competition. Nick Cunningham reports. Clermont Ferrand’s influential Lab competition may host the highly talented Douwe Dijkstra’s 16-minute Green Screen Gringo, in which a foreigner journeys through an enchanting (if somewhat turbulent) Brazil, but it is the International Competition where Dutch filmmakers have come up trumps. In Yassine El Idrissi’s Honey and Old Cheese Hassan (17) prepares to leave his mountain village in Morocco to join his father in the Netherlands. “I fell in love with the village that I visited for the first time when I was doing volunteer work,

Douwe Dijkstra

and we made some videography workshops for the teens [there],” comments El Idrissi. “The village looks amazing and the energy of the inhabitants is positive, so I decided to make a film and make my students play in it. Then I got an email from the Rotterdam Film Festival proposing if I would like to make a short film about immigration to the Netherlands. I wrote the script and they liked it.” The title is metaphorical, she adds. “Honey is a symbol of the nice, good

Honey and Old Cheese Yassine El Idrissi

days in a person’s life, sweet memories and the healthy life. The old cheese with time becomes more and more strong and valuable as the village tradition are old and deep in culture.” Also in International competition is Greetings from Kropsdam, the graduation film of Netherlands Film Academy student Joren Molter. In the film, a man suffers the stifling effect of a community that already has chosen its scapegoat. “For me, Greetings from Kropsdam is about the human mechanism of a big group turning against one person,” Molter underlines. “And what fascinates me is that people will cross their limits more quickly [collectively] than they will individually. It’s a universal thing that is happening within every layer of our community. That’s why

Greetings from Kropsdam Joren Molter

I chose to tell this story in plan séquence (long single takes). From an objective view you see how this mechanism works. Those total shots capture the simplicity and the peace in the village. But underneath that mask is growing an oppressive power that the daylight cannot handle.

International Short Film Festival

Clermont Ferrand

A Sunny Day

The third film in International Competition is Liang Ying’s A Sunny Day. The 25-minute short details how a woman from Hong Kong planning to join the umbrella protests goes to visit her father, who is moving to an old folks’ home. In the Young Audience programme is Daan Velsink & Joost Lieuwma’s 3-minute animation Golden Oldies. In a 1950s-style diner a gangly teenager tries to rock’n’roll with the prettiest girl on the dancefloor, but is thwarted by an annoyingly

Liang Ying

persistent cool dude and a stammer ing jukebox. The filmmakers used a technique called pixillation for the film, “which is a non-explanatory term for stop-motion with live actors,” the filmmakers collectively explain. “So it’s like Wallace & Gromit but instead of miniature clay puppets we use actual actors on a live action sized set. We combined this technique with a cartoony animation style. We created broad snappy movements with extreme poses and did stuff like using fake arms and legs to do wavy animation

on limbs. For our story we looked for a setting that would suit this style. Dance was a good fit. When we considered fifties-style rock’n’roll, we found the theme of our story, which served as a good base to flesh out the plot.” Arthur van Merwijk’s Snapshot, about a couple of well-meaning daytrippers who miss all the animal activity that takes place right under their noses in an idyllic forest clearing, is selected for the Ciné

Snapshot

Arthur van Merwijk

Pommes Frites

Golden Oldies

Daan Velsink and Joost Lieuwma

Balder Westein

Piscine programme. Meanwhile, Balder Westein’s animated Pommes Frites, produced by leading animation house il Luster Films, is selected for Panorama – Humour noir. On a cold and windy night, three trick-or-treaters decide to ‘treat’ the one kindly soul they encounter to a truly horrific sight…

Sundance World Cinema Comp, Berlin Generation 14plus

Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! Felipe Bragança ‘It’s just very cool and unique, with a magical feel…’

Director & script: Felipe Bragança Production: Duas Mariola Filmes (BR) Co-production: Revolver Amsterdam (NL), Damned Films (FR), Zazen Films (BR) 28

Obstacle to love

Felipe Bragança

Sundance and Berlinale title, the Brazilian Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! found part of its finance in the Netherlands – but Dutch support went beyond money. Melanie Goodfellow reports. Felipe Bragança’s Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl!, revolves around Brazilian teenager Joca, who falls in love with a Paraguayan indigenous girl living on the opposite side of the river that acts as a natural border between the two countries. Prejudice and a history of conflict put obstacles in the way of the relationship, but Joca will stop at nothing to win Basano’s heart. The screenplay is based loosely on the writings of contemporary Brazilian writer and poet Joca Reiners Terroon. Big screen debutants Eduardo Macedo and Adeli Benitez play Joca and Basano in a cast that also includes Brazilian film and TV star Cauã Reymond and popular singer Ney Matogrosso. It is the Brazilian filmmaker’s first solo feature after two joint works with Marina Meliande: The Escape Of The Monkey Women and The

Joy, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2010. This time around, Meliande is producing under their Rio-based company Duas Mariola Filmes with support from compatriots Globo Filmes, Canal Bresil and Mutuca Filmes, as well as the Netherlands’ Revolver Amsterdam and Paris-based Damned Films. Dutch involvement came about through a meeting between Meliande and Revolver producer Dijana OlcayHot at IFFR 2013, where the former was presenting another project. “She told us about the idea for Alligator. We knew of Felipe’s work and of his style and talent and we thought it sounded interesting,” says Revolver’s Raymond van der Kaaij. “After a couple of meetings with Felipe it was clear that his ambition went beyond making a purely local film. It’s just very cool and unique, with a magical feel… As the elements of the film came together, it became an absolute passion project for us. Even though we’re a minority co-producer, because of the funding structures we’ve been involved almost on a daily basis.” Revolver boarded the project and pitched for the support of IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund, securing finance under its HBF+NFF scheme aimed at Dutch producers working on projects from developing countries. “We’ve been incredibly involved in the whole process and all the choices, working extremely closely with the Brazilian and French

co-producers as a team to really build the film and get the right partners on board,” says Van der Kaaij. Through Revolver’s involvement, Dutch composer and musician Baris Akardere (also known as Sotu the Traveller) wrote the score, and sound post-production was also carried out in the Netherlands. In the background, Van der Kaaij reveals he and the other producers lobbied hard for the film to be accepted at Sundance and then Berlinale, and also helped secure an international sales deal for the title with Mundial, the joint sales operation between US sales powerhouse IM Global and Mexico’s Canana – the joint film company of Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna and Pablo Cruz. “We didn’t go to the shoot because it wouldn’t have made sense. We don’t speak Portuguese and we’d have just got in the way. The money we would have spent on travel expenses was better spent elsewhere. Our involvement was more before and after shooting,” says Van der Kaaij. He hopes the project marks the beginning of long-term relationship with Bragança and his producing partner Meliande. “We’re already discussing another project together – a very cool tech thriller set in a nearby future set in Europe and Latin America. It’s in the early days of development.”

ACE is high European producer body ACE began a new chapter in its 23-year history as of January 1 2017. The institution relocated from Paris to its new home in Amsterdam with former CineMart and Rotterdam Lab manager Jacobine van der Vloed at the helm as its new director. She replaces former ACE chief Ronan Girre, who has left to develop a cinema consultancy called Save The Film, as well as work on directorial projects of his own. Van der Vloed will be joined by former CineMart colleague Maegene Fabias as ACE’s head of events, replacing Emmanuelle Döry who was unable to move to Amsterdam for personal reasons. Current financial controller Alice Cubadda is transferring to Amsterdam. Former ACE staffer Al Williams will also be joining the team from the UK. “It was important for me that we assemble an international team. I didn’t want it to be just Dutch. That wouldn’t be in the spirit of a body like ACE,” said Van der Vloed who also took up her new role on Jan 1. The team recognises the new set-up as an opportunity for renewal and is already looking to up the ante in terms of the institution’s training programmes. It is holding debut networking sessions at Rotterdam and Berlin and its first event in

Amsterdam will be the third workshop for the 26 ACE producers on April 4-6 of this year. Dutch ACE board member Marleen Slot of Amsterdam-based Viking Film explains how the move has been prompted by rising costs in Paris combined with the offer of additional funding from the Netherlands Film Fund (NFF). ACE president Simon Perry has been busy over the last 12 months looking for new sources of income, and a new

‘The Netherlands is a country which has always been outward-looking’ location and Amsterdam, she said, ended up being the best option. Slot also notes how NFF director Doreen Boonekamp played a key role in ACE’s decision to move to Amsterdam by green-lighting a funding line for the body. ACE’s arrival in the Netherlands comes at a time when the territory is becoming an increasingly big player on the international co-production scene following the introduction of a 30% cash rebate scheme in May 2014. “Co-productions have become much more important in the Netherlands in recent years and I think the Netherlands Film Fund really saw an opportunity,” she said. Beyond the recent developments, Van der Vloed notes that the

Netherlands film industry has a long tradition of looking beyond its borders for partners and projects. “From the Binger to the CineMart co-production market and the Hubert Bals Fund, the Netherlands is a country which has always been outward-looking,” she said. Van der Vloed has worked with several festivals having started at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2005, where she worked with CineMart, the Rotterdam Lab and the Hubert Bals Fund. She is also a co-founder of the Art:Film initiative aimed at fostering connections between the film and art world alongside Tobias Pausinger. She will continue to act as an advisor on the initiative with Pausinger assuming full curation and organisation duties. ACE was created in 1993 by a group of European producers, led by René Cleitman and David Puttnam, as a networking, development and support body for independent European producers. It currently has some 200 members from across the EU as well as a number of non-EU territories including Canada, Israel, Australia and Brazil. Every year it invites another 16 producers to join. The 2016 intake, announced last September, included Claire Gadéa of Paris-based MPM Film, Simone Gattoni of Italian production house Kavac Film, Junyoung Jang from the UK’s February Film, as well as Denis Vaslin of Volya Films from the Netherlands.

Photo: Jacques van Gerven

European producers body ACE has moved to a new home in Amsterdam. Melanie Goodfellow reports.

‘It was important for me that we assemble an international team’

New ACE director Jacobine van der Vloed

Backing the bold Renée van der Grinten

Netherlands Film Fund consul tant Renée van der Grinten, who oversees the experimental and innovation department until Feb 1 2017 (at which point Dick Tuinder takes over), tells Nick Cunningham about the Fund’s dedication to new, brave and innovative forms of storytelling. Just to be clear, Renée van der Grinten is keen to underline that everybody at the Netherlands Film Fund, working across all departments, is keen to foster and stimulate artistic innovation, whether in finding and developing new talent, discovering brilliant new projects or applying imaginative means of financing. But by embracing the bold, the marginal and the truly experimental, Van der Grinten takes the envelope and pushes it as far as it can go. One stipulation: the projects she promotes must have a cinematic component. Her employer is, after all, the Film Fund. “In the department – experimental film – we especially look for cinematic projects that really explore the boundaries of cinema, but we always try to keep it open-

minded, because we feel that new and innovative things can come from all different corners of the cinematic field,” she stresses. She outlines the type of projects that she welcomes. “There are fine artists who work with film and have their own film language who are approaching cinema from a totally different angle and have interesting ways of working with cinema, but there are also people who experiment physically with film itself, working in analogue and making their own processes using 16 or 35 mm film, making their own colours and doing their own development. And then there is also something like virtual reality which is a totally different kind of filmmaking, in terms of storytelling and how you engage your user.” Submarine chief Bruno Felix sees this department within the Fund as one of the few remaining bastions of funding for creative and innovative projects, since the “slaughtering” of the Media Fund as of January 2017. The department has backed three of his projects to date, the VR Ashes to Ashes and the multimedia documentaries Refugee Republic and Bistro In Vitro. “The only thing the Fund requires of the maker or producer is to try to be aware how to position what you do in relation to the film sector – as long as you can make a strong argument then they are very open to follow that,” Felix stresses. “In other words they follow the vision of the

author more than they have a preassumed idea of what innovative storytelling is, which is great because a fund should not do that. The people who work there are of course very smart but it is good that they are there to fund things that they didn’t think of the day before, and this scheme is quite capable of doing this. They are very open and have proven to be very flexible.” Artist and filmmaker Barbara Visser, who will be Artistic Director at IDFA 2017, questions (on a conceptual level) the need for a separate depart ment at the fund for innovative projects, as she believes all forms of filmmaking to be part of the same

‘Experimentation is not always in the visual language, it can also be in the way you approach the subject’ continuum. That said, she welcomes the support that Van Grinten and her team have given for her art film The End of Fear, currently in production. Fifty years after the unveiling of Barnett Newman’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III’, Visser seeks to question again the meaning of art, all within the context of this seminal work. Visser had been working on the film plan for a year before she sent it to Dutch production company De Familie Film & TV for their opinion and feedback.

Netherlands Film Fund

Funding innovation and experimental

Deletion

Esther Ursul

Backing the bold

‘A very important part of the Film Fund, where we can all jointly discover what is the future of cinema’

Submarine’s Bistro in Vitro

Continued from page 30

The company was very enthusiastic and suggested that she should start immediately on the project, and that all further research could be incorporated into the film. “They knew about this experimental department at the Film Fund and said why not approach them. I always worked in the visual arts so there was a certain logic in going there. The funny thing is that now that we are in the process of making the film, we joke on the set as to whether it is experimental enough! “One always strives to be under stood/communicate/tell a comprehensible story in one form or another, so there are some rules to follow, especially in this case as it is quite a complicated story. First of all you want to tell a great story, and the existing conventions aren’t always so bad. The truth is that in my work and that of other artists, the experiment is in the approach to storytelling and intervening with the characters rather than in the visual language itself.” Van der Grinten is keen to team up with other funds, both Dutch and international, in allowing cinematic innovation to thrive. “A lot of fascinating things happen at the point where different disciplines meet,” she stresses. Together with the Mondriaan Fund, she oversees the Verbeelding scheme which offers the opportunity for established artists to make an art feature. A recent and highly noteworthy example was Fiona Tan’s History’s Future which premiered at

IFFR 2015. The Fund is also a partner of the UK/Italy-based Feature Expanded programme, whereby one Dutch artist per year can develop a feature film project. “We stimulate these innovative projects by artists and encourage them to walk the bridge between film and art.” Rotterdam-based Esther Urlus considers herself to be “an artist who works with film”, and is fascinated by the technology of film and its “alchemist logic”. Her Deletion plays in 2017 IFFR Tiger Short Competition. “I consider digital and analogue as two different media, like painting and drawing, and often I use in my work techniques based on things that are already done, sometimes forgotten, or just abandoned,” she comments. For Deletion, which she refers to as a film about perception filmed in areas where murders have been committed, she made her own emulsion “just like the ones the pioneers made”. (She also sought to replicated the Lumiere brothers’ Autochrome process by adding colour with a layer of potato starch, but while it looked amazing it wasn’t the effect she was seeking.) “Without the Fund it would have been very hard to do this,” she points out. “By giving me this project funding I could do the research and try out a lot. It gave me time because the work I do is very time-consuming. I can basically make one film per year. It isn’t just the research but all the other steps,

such as inventing things myself and documenting everything so others can make further steps in the future.” While the innovation department’s budget comes in at €700,000, they are able to offer production support to many “brilliant, surprising and innovative” projects. For an outspoken producer such as Bruno Felix, however, this sum should be increased tenfold. Innovation, he believes, is to be discovered at the margins of art. “This funding department is one of the last places you can go to make stuff that is not completely affected by audience ratings, commercial concerns or the difficulties of distribution. It is exploring all the new ways to make new film stories and how to engage with them, and in that sense it is a very important part of the Film Fund, where we can all jointly discover what is the future of cinema,” he says. “That is what is so wonderful about all these projects I think. They say something about you as a professional, and constantly ask what it is to be a producer or a distributor or a viewer – all these questions are great to play around with. It might result in a little bit of brain damage, but most of the time it results in great projects that are fun to make, but also make beautiful end results. I am very proud of all the stuff we made with this little Film Fund scheme of ours.”

EYE Collection

Desmet in DC Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory is the film programme being held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC during January 2017 that offers American audiences the chance to sample some of the many extraordinary films in the collection assembled by Dutch movie impresario Jean Desmet. Geoffrey Macnab reports. It’s easy to understand why Margaret Parsons, Head of Film Department at the National Gallery, became so intrigued by Desmet after visiting an exhibition devoted to him at EYE in Amsterdam two years ago. Desmet’s is one of the more extraordinary stories in early film history. This Dutch travelling fairground showman, cinema owner and businessman was one of the first real distributors. The Desmet collection consists of 922 films, many of which would have been lost to posterity if he hadn’t preserved them. They include every kind of film imaginable – westerns, comedies, dramas – and many titles from renowned directors like D.W. Griffith or Ralph Ince. In the early 1900s, Desmet used to travel to Germany and France to buy films. Back home in the Netherlands, he would rent them out to cinemas. “He would go to wholesale events, like a fair, where he would buy films. At that point, you were not buying copyright, you were buying the physical film print,” Elif Rongen (Curator at EYE)

explains. “That’s how he started. He realised that other exhibitors would pay to hire the films.” Desmet stopped distributing in 1916 – but safeguarded his films. There were practical reasons why Desmet stopped buying films from abroad. It was the middle of the First World War. All of a sudden, the films on which he depended became harder and harder to acquire. On his trips to Germany, he had always been able to buy plenty of Italian movies – but during the War, the Italians stopped their agencies from operating in Germany. “He recycled. If you look at his programmes from 1916, he is actually re-cycling films from 1913/1914.” As Desmet withdrew from the distribution arena, he concentrated on his cinema interests (he owned venues all over the country) and on his real estate dealings. This meant

The collection includes every kind of film imaginable – westerns, comedies, dramas – and many titles from renowned directors like D.W. Griffith his film collection lay gathering dust in an attic above a cinema. In those days, it wasn’t at all uncommon for nitrate film to catch fire. As academic Ivo Blom wrote in his book Jean Desmet And The Early

Dutch Film Trade, “Desmet realised that he was keeping a bomb in his loft… Desmet made an arrangement to store his film in a garage… which was already being used as a film vault. From 1938 until at least 1952 he rented this ‘little vault’ for ƒ240 a year. This is how the films survived World War Two.” The Jean Desmet programme in Washington consists of six separate themed compilations. The programme will travel to other venues in the US, among them Bard College Centre for Moving Image Arts in New York. Desmet died in 1956. A year later, the films (and all the associated posters, stills, publicity materials and business documents) were donated by his family to the Netherlands Film Museum. In 2011, the collection was made part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. What is so startling about its holdings is that this provincial Dutch hustler preserved so many films that would otherwise have been lost. He seems to have been an inveterate hoarder. He kept almost everything, including postcards from his nephew and thousands of old posters. There were times when he sold some of the longer, better known films in his possession but he was clearly very attached to the films. Either that or, as a businessman, he guessed that how valuable the collection would eventually become.

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory

L’ obsession d’or, part of the Desmet Collection

Dutch industry news

Short Cuts

Djingle Django

The Rosenberg Trio

Brilliant Dutch jazz combo The Rosenberg Trio provides the soundtrack for the Berlinale 2017 opener Django, the story of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt. “We were surprised, astonished and honoured when we were asked to play the music for the new film,” comments the band’s bassist Nonnie Rosenberg. “Surprised because we did not see it coming and astonished because there are so many good Hot Club de France/Jazz Manouche musicians in France.” Adds lead guitarist Stochelo: “And of course we are honored that we, Dutch Sinti,

may respond to the music of our idol Django Reinhardt.” Work on the soundtrack stalled when Stochelo broke his finger but Nonnie and rhythm guitarist Nous’che laid down the rhythms parts. “They tried to turn to another guitarist, but they missed the sound of Stochelo. So after his finger Stochelo was back to normal he returned to do the solos.” The world premiere in Berlin may well be accompanied by a live performance at the opening night party. “We notice now that our calendar is getting very full!” adds Stochelo.

Berlin Talents

Producers are Erik Glijnis, who started working for the prolific Lemming Film in August 2016, and Aydin Dehzad of Kaliber Film, whose Mnk Boy has also been selected for the Talent Project Market, a collaboration with the Berlinale Co-Production Market. In the film, when troubled 12-year-old

comic book enthusiast Zeki moves from the ghettos of Rotterdam to the gated communities of Istanbul he is eventually left with no choice other than to become a superhero. “It makes me proud and humble to know that not only I have been nominated as one of the talents of this year but also Mnk Boy has been selected for the Talent Project Market as the only Dutch film project/ production. It means that we at Kaliber Film are on the right track with our passion to make original authordriven narrative productions,” comments Dehzad. “We have several objectives during the market, but our most important ones are attaching one or two co-producers (besides Turkish Radio and Television Corporation), another European broadcaster and to

Photo: Nicholas Karakatsani

Two Dutch directors and two Dutch producers have been selected for Berlinale Talents, the annual summit and networking platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for 250 out standing creatives from the fields of film and drama series. The directors are Daan Bol, whose short film Rocknrollers won the Best Children’s Doc award at IDFA 2016, and Kaweh Modiri who directed Bodkin Ras (2016) which picked up the Fipresci prizes at IFFR and Viennale.

MnkBoy

Dir. Mete Gümürhan

secure an international sales agent to help package and close the financing for Mnk Boy.”

EYE Experimental EYE International’s experimental specialist Edith van der Heijde will be busy during IFFR banging the drum for recent Dutch short, experimental and artistic films, from both emerging talents and established names. EYE Experimental is part of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, which manages the national film heritage of the Netherlands and maintains a collection that now includes more than 40,000 films, next to an extended collection of film related objects like stills, film posters and sheet music.

“The preservation, restoration and presentation of this collection is a main goal of EYE,” Van der Heijde underlines, “and results in not only presenting and promoting new Dutch experimental film in the EYE experimental catalogue, but also a focus on newly restored experimental works from our own archives, for example the two new curated and restored Joost Rekveld programs.” (see page 16). “EYE Experimental distributes and aims to find an audience for independent, experimental Dutch films,” she continues. “Experimental

Edith van der Heijde

in the widest sense of the word, encapsulating work that is inspired by the classic avant-garde or work that explores the relationship between film and other art forms. Films that are so confusing, beautiful, harsh or absurd that they are difficult to forget.”

1Minute in Berlin Five episodes of Katinka Baehr & Stefanie Visjager’s 1Minute doc series have been selected for Berlin’s Generation Kplus competition. 1Minute is a series of 24 short animated documentaries for children and grown-ups, the central theme being how children see and experience nature. The episodes are Beetle, Birds of Prey, Kitten, Crayfish and Feeling Like a Cavemen. The series started in 2008 as a radio production, and audio remains “the point of departure” as the stories derive from actual interviews, yet are presented to seem like fiction. In the films, objects photographed from daily life form a 3D background for a world in which the 2D animated characters live. “We started out as radio

Crayfish

producers but have acquired a way of building stories with a fairytale feeling in 1Minute,” underlines Visjager. “Children and adults seem to enjoy and relate to them.” “1Minute encourages children to reflect on the world around them, in the hopes that they will see it differently afterwards,” the directors add.

Katinka Baehr, Stefanie Visjager

Originally, the festival wanted to screen seven of the 1Minute films but as that would mean them running back to back, the directors thought that it would be too long. “But we are so honoured and happy,” underlines Visjager. “It is quite a victory for radio producers to be invited to the grand Berlin Film Festival!!”

A graduate of the Amsterdam Theater School, Hannah received a Best Actress Golden Calf (the Netherlands’ top film award) in 2012 for her lead role in Sascha Polak’s multi award-winning Hemel. Subsequently she appeared in App, directed by Bobby Boermans, and in the Irish film The Canal (Ivan Kavanagh). In 2016 Hannah starred in The Fury (Andre van Duren), receiving the Best Actress award at the Montreal International Film Festival and her second Golden Calf at the Netherlands Film Festival. “I am really blessed that I got to play so many wonderful

roles before my 29th birthday,” she says. “Last summer we recorded the film Kleine IJstijd (Little Ice Age) with director Paula van der Oest (Tonio) and 10 top actors – all within ten days. With director Danyael Sugawara I just filmed the series Odds, about two professional gamblers who help the police solve crime cases. And on top of that, I get to make beautiful performances with the National Theatre. I’m really spoiled, and yes I am happy. Working in such a pressurised environment brings out the best in me, but it equally means that I have to maintain 100% concentration at all times.”

Photo: Gwendolyn Keasberry

Hannah Hoekstra