Rolf Orthel

A biography of Isabelle de Charrière and her friendship with Benjamin Constant.

The work of Leiden professor Bastiaans on dealing with the trauma of war victims attracts the attention of filmmaker Louis van Gasteren. He decides to make a film about the psychotherapeutic treatment with LSD of a former concentration camp prisoner in the clinic of Bastiaans. Patient Joop is arrested in September 1941 and begins a long hellish journey through various camps, until he is liberated by the Russians. When he returns to his wife, he has become a completely different man. Joop suffers from nightmares and is incapable of normal human contact. With two cameras, Van Gasteren records approximately six and a half hours of the first treatment that Joop undergoes with Bastiaans (four more will follow later). Special attention is paid to details: Joop's hands, the sweat on his forehead, a tear running slowly down his cheek. Van Gasteren reduces the recordings to more than an hour.

A boy from the desert tries to sell a sand rose in the big city.

"Looking for Horses" is a film about a friendship between the filmmaker and a fisherman, who lost his hearing during the Bosnian civil war and retreated to a lake to live in solitude. The filmmaker, son of Bosnian parents, struggles to communicate as he lost his mother-tongue due to a heavy stutter. Despite their speech and hearing limitations, a bond develops between the young man and the veteran, as he shares his world of the lake: full of large catfish, wild horses, wide silences, and dangerous thunderstorms. Where for the fisherman the lake stands for a withdrawal from a fractured country, a land of war; for the filmmaker it precisely means the return to that broken place, the land of his parents. They look for ways to communicate, while the camera mediates their growing bond. Taking the shape of a gentle western, "Looking for Horses" is a poetic documentary on trauma, survival, and connection.

Marion Bloem attempts to connect with the origins of her Indo-European family through conversations about the colonial era, the Indonesian struggle for independence, and the adaptation to the cold Netherlands.

In his essay film Shadow of a Doubt, Rolf Orthel – who married into a Jewish family, his mother-in-law survived the camps – probes what this means to him, as he goes in search of the past. “I tried to imagine how it was for those people, both prisoners and guards," he said in a 1975 interview with the NRC Handelsblad newspaper. To comprehend how on earth someone could participate in unprecedented mass murder, Orthel enters into candid discussions with SS veterans who were in Auschwitz during the war. These are not the top-level war criminals, but ‘ordinary’ men who often ended up there, rather than choosing this path.

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.