Moondocs

For her extraordinary film essay, Living the Light, Director and Director of Photography Claire Pijman had access to the thousands of Hi8 video diaries, pictures and Polaroids that Müller photographed while he was at work on one of the more than 70 features he shot throughout his career; often with long term collaborators such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier. The film intertwines these images with excerpts of his oeuvre, thus creating a fluid and cinematic continuum. In his score for Living the Light Jim Jarmusch gives this wide raging scale of life and art an additional musical voice.

In this documentary, director Nathalie Faber approaches the troubled relationship between humans and nature as a relationship crisis. Four people with different relationships to nature, in a unique setting, present their perspectives to psychiatrist and relationship therapist Dirk De Wachter. The documentary explores how imagination can help us reassess nature and reconnect with it, because separation is not an option. Can we still overcome this relationship crisis?

From the translucent golden eggs of the Tibetan bearded vulture to those of the British guillemot with their Jackson Pollock-like splashes, German ornithologist Max Schönwetter (1874-1961) collected them all. He devoted his life to oology, the study of birds’ eggs. But while Schönwetter created order in his world of eggs, chaos broke out in the world around him on the eve of the Second World War.

In Metamorphosis, filmmaker and media artist Pim Zwier chooses a highly original form to depict the life and work of the German artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), whose study of insects laid the foundations of entomology. Her most important work revolved around the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies: she recorded the process in beautiful prints and engravings and was the first to draw the insects in combination with the plant on which they live.

The life of filmmaker Matthijs Vuijk's grandmother Coby is turned upside down when the community church she has attended all her life in the small Zeelandic village Kortgene is forced to close. Fortunately, preacher and entrepreneur Ruben van Zwieten, buys the church and aims to transform the faith community to be ready for the 21st Century, by attracting young people, but with all bills paid. Church of Glass explores the confrontation between the small aging faith community of Kortgene and the slick neo-theological entrepreneurship of Ruben van Zwieten transformational vision.

Documentary filmmaker Silvia Bromet is fascinated by the woman who, despite the setbacks in her life, keeps standing tall time and again. What lies behind that radiant smile? What drives her to still perform so much? By whom is she herself comforted?

Lots of villages in the Frisian area of the Wadden Sea have to deal with population decline. In Holwerd, a town that is known for the ferry terminal to Ameland, a bottom-up approach towards this problem is carried out right now, in order to find a solution for the population decline using the landscape, history, culture and ecological values of the area. In 2013 a group of people from the small town of Holwerd stood up to fight for the future of their hometown, and started a project. The project is called “Holwerd aan zee” (Holwerd at sea) and aims at bridging nature and culture by means of landscape art.