A full century after publication, The Waste Land considers T. S. Eliot's namesake poem alongside our present, assuredly asserting that the words continue to resonate and to fuel our imagination. Filmmaker Chris Teerink offers no analysis of the poem, but instead seeks parallels. With a soundtrack by Dutch singer-songewriter Blaudzun, and using photographs and stills instead of moving images, he creates a slideshow that mirrors the fragmentary core of Eliot's language.
‘Where I am, I don’t want to stay. I want to stay where I’ve never been.’ Filmmaker Rosemarie Blank was born in Berlin, but has lived in various other places in the world. After returning to her native city, she wondered what it’s like for other people to live outside their motherland. In this diary, she interviews people whom she literally met in the street: her Kurdish newsvendor, who apart from his busy trade has a second job with the German railways, a Lebanese hairdresser, a Turkish furniture seller. They talk about melancholy, longing, the struggle for existence and against discrimination and they show how they lead their daily life. The encounters are larded with observing shots of multicultural Berlin, particularly where diversity is most visible: the subway.
A sensitive, intimate and intriguing glimpse into the final days of the director's life companion. Rosemarie Blank follows her life companion very closely as, together, they make a film of his last days. In cinematographically fascinating scenes she manages to touch life in its most naked and pure form and delivers a tribute to a man who continued to fight for his life until the end, until his final decision to die of his own will.
When you look at a river, what do you see? Remembering Holland by Jan Wouter van Reijen carries the viewer through the basin of the River Waal, past painters, sculptors and poets. Van Reijen follows the entire course of the river, from the German border to the North Sea, and creates portraits of various artists who have taken the riverine landscape as their theme. Each and every one of them sings the river’s praises in his or her own way, from extremely realistic to abstract. At every spot along the way, and each day anew, the river landscape changes: we see the water dark and colorful, glistening in late and early light, in morning dew and by moonlight, in clouds of mist and the snows of winter. Yet the water brings more than beauty alone. The flooding of the forelands and the reinforcement of the dykes in 1995 remind us of the eternal struggle of the Dutch against the rising water. See it and be borne along on a voyage of the imagination.
People who create explore, and get to know themselves and others better. In this cinematographic essay, Rolf Orthel looks for the meaning of creating, with reality or the memory of it as a starting point and a train journey as a meandering ribbon through the film. We see the first musical steps of primary school children and youngsters at Jeugdtheaterschool Zuid-Oost. We see what talent does to you when a conservatory student practices for his graduation, when someone paints a remarkable self-portrait or when Konvooi creates a thrilling play. This is high-level creation which makes you wonder how on earth it is possible that you can suddenly be enchanted and moved. The conclusion of Orthel’s search? Creating things is the best.
