David Kleijwegt

VPRO icon Wim Brands died on April 4, 2016. He was known to the general public as a presenter of the VPRO Boeken program and also closer, with six collections of poetry to his name. This documentary about his life and work, built entirely from archive material, pays tribute to this television personality. A portrait in which attention is also paid to his complicated relationship with death. With a.o. Karl Ove Knausgård, David Sedaris, Ellen Deckwitz and Pieter Boskma. Brands' work merges with his rich inner life and that he chose death at the age of 56 casts a shadow over everything.

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The legendary American soul singer Donny Hathaway has been seen as an inspiration and a genius by many. When he had his biggest success, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. How did he balance his madness and genius?

In almost fifteen years, Low became an institution on the indie and alternative scenes. Famous for their quiet, beautiful slow songs, and fascinating harmonies, as well as their religious background (core members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker are Mormons). For this documentary, a film crew followed Alan and Mimi on tour, at home in Duluth, MN, in their church community, and as parents. It's more than an on-the-road or behind-the-scenes video. It shows Sparhawk as the ambivalent main character in an intriguing movie about religion, violence, conscience, and madness. It can also be seen as a touching love story.

Since he was two years old, modern-day troubadour and singer-songwriter Otto Wichers has spent all his summers on the island of Vlieland in the north of the Netherlands. That was also where he performed as Lucky Fonz III for the first time. He returns to the island for a performance at Into the Great Wide Open Festival. "Lucky Fonz, that's just me without all the boring stuff and with the fun stuff in Technicolor. That's how I see it." This contemporary troubadour addresses the joy of singing and what fame means to him: "Sometimes people ask me whether being famous has bothered me. I tell them I've actually been suffering from a lack of fame for the past 26 years."

The Owl In Daylight (Philip K. Dick is here) looks closer at the intellectual heritage of one the most legendary science fiction writers that ever lived: Philip K. Dick (1928 1982). Among the people who still admire him, nearly thirty years after his death, are designer Philippe Starck, writer Jonathan Lethem, robot builder David Hanson and director Paul Verhoeven. And all of them can testify that the world is getting more and more like a Philip K. Dick novel. The documentary mirrors the sometimes bizar story of the last years of his life with the often visionary thoughts he displayed in his work.