Marjoleine Boonstra

Ready for a new perspective? Ammodo Docs presents artistic shorts about original minds. In 15-minute films, renowned Dutch filmmakers challenge you to see the world through the eyes of pioneers in the arts and sciences. Ammodo Docs. Forward-thinking films.

Nocturnal life in the partly deserted dock area of Amsterdam. Director Marjoleine Boonstra encounters lone wolves, leading secluded lives in makeshift shelters, and people that work as pilots, night watchmen or skippers. According to a young pilot `it was actually like a dream', working by the IJ river at night. And this is what it looks like: a dream world. Between interviews, Boonstra makes her camera glide through the area, along the quay, across the water, along cranes, containers and sea-going vessels. A world of lamps, reflections and shadows. In this landscape of stone and metal, an extraordinary group of individuals lives and works. For example, an English woman cleans up a submarine for a party, a refugee from former Yugoslavia has created a place for himself and a night watchman has to `see to it that that boat stays where it is'. Peaceful music emphasises the relative quiet, in which the interviewees reflect on their lives and the harbour.

A journey based on tales of the wind, about life and death, through the land of the kuraï (tumbleweed), where nothing is as it seems. A withered, thorny, uprooted bush rolls over the bare steppe. It's a kurai, a tumbleweed. It appears dead. But in this land nothing is what it seems. An old woman tells how she can still be surprised by the kurai. Like a young man, it leaves its seed on the plain. It brings messages from far away. It has been everywhere, and everywhere keeps its ear to the ground. It has taken much, and has left much behind.

A documentary about the passionate translators of the book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who fight for the preservation of their endangered languages.

Deeply moving documentary about a group of Dutch army veterans with PTSD, who found a shelter at The Home Base. Honest and vulnerable, they talk about their demons and their struggle to connect with society. Beautifully serene, Marjoleine Boonstra captures their intense experience.

An exploration of painter Mark Rothko, best known for imposing canvasses that eschew representation to express fundamental human emotions through pure color.

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In the vast desert of Nevada, two raw and unpolished worlds come together. With the rugged mountains and vivid colors in the background, wild men and horses are vulnerably facing off. Chris, Dean, Gilbert, Charles, Steven, Bo and Mike are all young inmates at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, in the last phase of lengthy prison sentences. Before returning to society, they are participating in a special project that allows them to capture, tame and train wild horses for periodic auctions. Filmmaker Marjoleine Boonstra follows the detainees over the course of three months of intensive training, during which time the men see themselves reflected in the eyes of their horses. The men learn to win the trust of another living being once again, a skill that has slipped away during their time on the inside. Horses are incredibly perceptive creatures: they take the men as they are, without a history, without a record, but only if the men are just as open and vulnerable as they are.

Under the toughest of living conditions, four poets have had to employ their imaginations in order to survive. Marjoleine Boonstra choose to focus on the sensory perception during their captivity. Personal stories about physical contact, sound, taste and smell gives intriguing view about the emotional years being in prison. At the age of eighteen, Nizametdin Achmetov went to jail a virgin, and twenty years later he emerged, still a virgin. The Cuban Maria Elena Cruz Varela was all by herself in a prison environment where anybody could betray her, while the Russian Irina Ratoesjinkaja found that her fellow prisoners could be indispensable allies. But during the first days after her release, her eyes could not stand the vivid colours of freedom.