Jan Wouter van Reijen

Unrelenting pessimism dominates this slow-paced, dark film, the debut feature from director Digna Sinke dedicated to an archetypal born loser named Marian (Josee Ruiter). Marian is a journalist who has been working in Latin America and who arrives home just after her father dies to find out that the man she had married for purely political reasons might be deported because the authorities found out he was not living with her. Meanwhile, Marian is upset that her mother and sister are keeping her mentally handicapped brother in an institution, and she goes there to get him released into her custody -- a mistake it turns out. He is actually worse off with her, and vice-versa. On top of everything, Marian cannot break away from the depression she feels over a tragic incident that happened while she was in Latin America -- and anything she does is colored by that moment from the past. These burdens become almost too much to bear, both for Marian and the viewers.

A Dutch couple is confronted with the husband's rapid onset of senility during a snowy winter in North Eastern Canada.

The importance of the Atelier as a meeting and working-place for independent or beginning filmmakers is highlighted in Last days of Studio Frans van de Staak a necrology of his films by Kees Hin (2002), which focuses mainly on Van de Staak's non-naturalistic style of directing actors.

Two very different friends who share an apartment in Amsterdam have reached a dead end in their lives. The arrival of a parcel looks like an opportunity for a change.

Residents of the same street in Haarlem, and acquaintances and relatives of Kees Hin, together tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, each in fifteen words.

One morning, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen awoke from a dream that told him to take to the sky. Stockhausen envisioned four helicopters swirling in the clouds, with each of a quartet’s members tucked inside his own chopper, communicating through headsets, stringing away in sync to the rotor-blade motors. He immediately set forth to make that dream a reality. In 1995, Dutch film director Scheffer followed Stockhausen in the days leading up to the premiere performance of his Helicopter String Quartet in Amsterdam. The resulting film offers a rare glimpse of Stockhausen as he patiently dictates every agonizingly detailed measure to the Arditti Quartet.

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.

A fascinating study of merging form with content, broken into four shorts, each complete with opening title and closing credits: "19 Questions," "Fourteen," "Paying Attention," and "Overpopulation and Art."

The film documents a personal memory. In 1988 I met a quietly eccentric man, who lived in the occupied Conradstreet in Amsterdam. More than 100 squatters lived there, mostly artists. Job was in my eyes the most authentic of them all. After the Conradstreet was dramatically cleared by the police the squatters left. Only Job stayed behind as if nothing had happened. After the buildings were pulled down he survived under the most bizarre conditions, apparently oblivious to time and space, but Job seemed to see something in stones and wood splinters that no-one else could see. One day he left and was never seen again.

During the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002, Leo Hannewijk (festival director Film by the Sea) approached filmmaker and producer Digna Sinke with the idea of asking several film makers to make short films based on poems about the province of Zeeland. It would offer an opportunity to investigate the limits of the medium film and, just like poetry, not to focus on the story but to tackle universal and grander themes through mood and form. In the end, eight short films were realized, by eight different filmmakers. The films are connected by intermezzi, aerial shots of the Zeeland coasts. Poems of the Sea is a stirring and surprising portrayal of Zeeland. Filled with desires and passion.

Documentary on Rotterdam artist Co Westerik, who died in September 2018. In this film, Jan Wouter van Reijen explicitly rejects the traditional form of the artist portrait. Instead he searches for a different, creative way of illuminating the motivations, themes and emotions underlying Westerik’s paintings.

No description available.

Impressionistic, nightmarish images of a traveller in the Danube delta who looks for 'the man in the house behind the swamp' from the story of the same name by Dutch author A. Alberts. When he moors at an island with a house on it that used to be the executed dictator Ceausescu's country cottage, reality and imagination converge at this remarkable place. The occupant is disturbed by the unwanted guest. When it gets dark, he disappears into the house. He is watched through the slightly open door. In the end, he sits down to dinner and it turns out the table has been set for three. The invisible third person is the host's imaginary lover. Loneliness and booze prevail. When the traveller's delirium is at its height, the swamp becomes the dominant factor.

A fifteen-minute impression of apartment buildings somewhere in the Netherlands. The cadence is indicated in sound and image; form and content. The result is a surprising look at our everyday environment.