EYE Film Institute Netherlands

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.

An archival fiction feature about the eternal battle of the sexes, in which two star-crossed lovers trapped in a kingdom of shadows fight to keep their love alive as they gradually fall in hate. Their names are Forever Man and Forever Woman. They are embodied by actors and actresses from long-gone eras, but also by cartoon characters and puppet animations. Together they narrate the story of the euphoric ups and tragic downs of human existence. When Forever Dies, a virtuoso collage of film fragments from the Eye Filmmuseum archive, is an epic ode to largely unseen cinema anchored in the polarizing world of today.

In the 1940s, Alima decides to flee from an arranged marriage to work as a nanny for a Dutch family. Through all her new impressions and thoughts, she looks critically at colonial society and her own position.

The insecure genderqueer Jae wants to make their mother proud by including her in their life. When their mother attempts to keep contact to a minimum, Jae confronts her in vain.

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

Documentary about the tempestuous music scene of Amsterdam during the late ’70s and early ’80s, consisting of never-before-seen recordings of Herman Brood songs as well as the chaotic shoots for the film Cha Cha (1979), starring Herman Brood and Nina Hagen. Also features recordings of bands such as White Honey and The Streetbeats (with Jan Rot), The Meteors, and many others.

A young boy plays an accordion in a shopping mall. Béla Tarr picks up the camera one more time to shoot his very last scene. It is his anger about how refugees are treated in Europe, and especially in Hungary, that drove him to make a statement.

An actress and an actor overhear parts of the play "Three Travelers Watch Sunrise" by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The dialogues of the three [Chinese] travelers and the girl [Anna] are spoken as a monologue by the actress. The actor just listens but occasionally he gives her instructions.

Eleven thousand photos, six miles of footage, three hundred books and eighteen volumes of Indië Oud en Nieuw: this is the historical legacy of Hendrik Tillema, who was born in Friesland and worked his way up to a successful producer of carbonated drinks in the Netherlands East-Indies early last century. He used his accumulated wealth to improve the life of the orang tekil (the common man) in Indonesia. For example, he published his own book about the lack of a sewer system and he saw to it that the local population was vaccinated ('one vaccinator does more for the pacification of Indonesia than an army of soldiers'). By means of a staggering amount of self-shot and collected material, this `one-man Third World movement' qualified the limited, positive image of our former colony that persisted until the forties.

A project making innovative use of existing archive images of Willy Mullens’ silent film Haarlem (1922). The original film shows the city in straightforward shots and camera movements. Due to deterioration these images changed in a dramatic way. In the adaption Karel Doing zooms in on these effects with the aid of digital techniques like optical flow and morphing. Michal Osowski collaborated on the project with sound that is directely linked to the image, he used the changes in density of the film to control complex filters and distortion effects.

Drifting between data and images and hovering amidst seemingly incompatible moods: Tarkovsky’s cinematic dreams on the one hand and Zonnestraal’s utopian architecture on the other. Sanatorium Zonnestraal (1928): Famous symbol of enlightened rational thinking par excellence: transparency, light, air, tranquillity and space. ‘One of modern architecture's most important buildings’ (Wikipedia). The contrast with the sick person in need of healing could hardly be greater. Van Bakel has scanned the sanatorium building and converted it to 'point clouds’ that turn into models where you seem to move in between - or rather: seem to fly through - as in a dream. He combines these ghostly, whimsical images with the fragmented dream images of buildings, land…

Short film compilation arranged by Paul for Moskwood & the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 4:3 | Colour | DD2.0

Video essay on the work of Jia Zhangke by Kevin B. Lee, specially commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum and IFFR as a response to the installation Close-Up.

Slide of Life was created by Thomas Bruinsma, Fleur Sophie de Boer, Jeroen Koelewijn from Utrecht School of Arts in a collaborative project of A Million Pictures. The short film used digital images of lantern slides from the collections of our partners Utrecht University Museum, Museum Sonnenborgh and EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

From a sea full of icebergs tinkling rising green hills. Winding roads and a forest of scaffolding overgrow the virgin landscape. There stands the city, dark and unapproachable. But when night falls and the lights turn on, the water returns. Manufacturability is overtaken by transformation.