A confused old man, Henry, lives on his own in an old empty building that is reminiscent of a deserted palace. Henry hasn't been outside for years. The camera follows a day in his life - his simple daily chores and his eccentric rituals. Henry looks like a European from a good family, but has many Asian habits. The second protagonist is the building in which Henry is staying: the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It is one of the best preserved examples of chinoise architecture and furnishing in the world. Neither the client nor the architect had ever set foot in Asia. In a monologue, a parallel narrative unfolds in a game with reality and fiction. Word and image, fiction and documentary become intertwined with each other and point across the frontiers of ‘East’ versus ‘West’.
Feb 2007
During World War II, around 1944, people from Margraten, a small parish in Limburg, discovered that their fields had been expropriated by the American army. The forces used them to bury their fallen soldiers. Because the flood of corpses soon became unmanageable, young villagers were asked to help inter the war victims. Nobody could envisage that eventually twenty thousand crosses would be planted in the Limburg mud. '
Sep 2010
The landscape in which we live has been around longer than we have. And it will still be there after our death. Not that the landscape always remains the same: every generation wipes out the traces of previous generations, and itself leaves new traces behind. This process has been followed for seven years with great detail, craftsmanship and without misplaced nostalgia on Super16 by Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. On the banks of the Netherrhine River, between the dike and the river itself, is a stretch of water meadow, Loowaard. In the derelict farmstead lives the last farmer who had cows here, there are remains of a brick factory that no longer has a function, and in the ground, remains have been found of an old Roman encampment. Until recently, the march of progress apparently had left this piece of land untouched. But now the meadows have to make way for the development of new nature.
Feb 2005
Winner of multiple international awards, hilarious and grotesque, inventive and imaginative, this truly unique and extraordinary Dutch film by Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings is nothing less than a brilliant comment on human nature. It portrays the relationship between people and birds. Hoarse from shouting, tired from running, man eventually thought that the invention of the scarecrow would demonstrate his domination over birds. But the scare soon turned sour and the rag doll became little more than a symbol of the battle between man and bird. Geese in the meadow, sparrows in a glass house, pigeons in the city, starlings on an airport runway - the birds are everywhere. This grotesque story of too many birds and too many people competing for space and resources in a small country makes for a brilliant and very funny film.
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