Douwe Dijkstra

From the perspectives of a dozen diverse viewers, this short explores the peculiar ritual of watching film. How is the medium experienced by people with sensory impairments, strong religious beliefs, or lovesickness? A story about moving images and their audience.

How can you understand a violent past? Somali-born Abdi is furniture designer and support worker. He reenacts his life, marked by war and criminality, with the help of his neighbor and filmmaker Douwe. By means of playful reconstructions in a special effects studio, Abdi and Douwe embark on a candid and investigative journey through a painful history, focusing on the creative process throughout.

While staying in Switzerland, a Dutch director is overcome with a numismatic passion at the sight of the one-franc coin. This coin, which has hardly changed in appearance in decades, bears national symbols that remain obscure to him and the Swiss people he encounters. The director weaves all these life stories and symbols into a hilarious investigation.

In Démontable, our domestic space turns into a world reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels, invaded by miniature projections of the outside world. “A funny, playful film on the absurd relationship between daily life and global news. The level of media saturation we’re bombarded with creates an absurd distortion and distance between our daily routine and current affairs. Démontable explores this bizarre melange of realities by throwing the two worlds together: attack helicopters shred a newspaper, while a dinner plate suffers a drone strike. They’re a series of attempts to try and understand our world better by playing with its violent protagonists

Six people show their most priced possession.

In a multi screen collage of visual experiments a longing for tribal habits is explored. Rituals We Wish We Had is a film about being homesick for a place you have never been.

A short film in which filmmaker Douwe Dijkstra shows the public what a working day for him in Barcelona looks like.

Behind a green screen, a foreigner finds his way in an enchanting - and yet turbulent - Brazil. Where the streets are a stage for politics, art and affection, a gringo can only watch. The result is a mixtape-portrait on modern day Brazil seen through the eyes of the visitor

A short animated film with a lamp and spiders.

At first, singer Ferry Heijne dances among a group of women, but soon he literally loses his grip on the situation. Via an open-plan office - full of mindlessly typing men and musicians in a conference room - he finds himself in a photocopier and ends up as a black-and-white illustration in a book.