EYE Film Institute Netherlands

An actress and an actor overhear parts of the play "Three Travelers Watch Sunrise" by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The dialogues of the three [Chinese] travelers and the girl [Anna] are spoken as a monologue by the actress. The actor just listens but occasionally he gives her instructions.

The insecure genderqueer Jae wants to make their mother proud by including her in their life. When their mother attempts to keep contact to a minimum, Jae confronts her in vain.

Documentary about the tempestuous music scene of Amsterdam during the late ’70s and early ’80s, consisting of never-before-seen recordings of Herman Brood songs as well as the chaotic shoots for the film Cha Cha (1979), starring Herman Brood and Nina Hagen. Also features recordings of bands such as White Honey and The Streetbeats (with Jan Rot), The Meteors, and many others.

In the 1940s, Alima decides to flee from an arranged marriage to work as a nanny for a Dutch family. Through all her new impressions and thoughts, she looks critically at colonial society and her own position.

Third part of a triptych by filmmaker Kees Hin about the late Frans van de Staak.

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is plenty of hope. An infinite amount of hope. But not for us.” These words hang like a dark cloud over this found footage documentary, which creates a collective portrait of people in 20th century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies.

A young boy plays an accordion in a shopping mall. Béla Tarr picks up the camera one more time to shoot his very last scene. It is his anger about how refugees are treated in Europe, and especially in Hungary, that drove him to make a statement.

Short film compilation arranged by Paul for Moskwood & the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 4:3 | Colour | DD2.0

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.

Fantastic Flowers is a compilation of short silent films produced between 1906 and 1920, displaying amazing colours that were applied to each frame using the Pathécolor process, or other similar stencilling techniques. Bonsoir – La Fée aux fleurs (1906) / [Bloemenvelden Haarlem] (1909) / Les Chrysanthèmes (1907) / Le Chrysanthème, roi de l’automne (1914) / [Les Tulipes] (1907) / Les Fleurs dans les jardins (1914) / L’Après-midi d’une japonaise (1920) / The Beauty Thief ([1920]) / La Fée printemps (1906) / [Het schoonste uit de natuur] (1912?) / La Culture du dahlia (1911) / [Hollandse Tulpen en Klompen] (1920?) / Fabrication des fleurs artificielles (1911) / [Bonsoir tableau] (1906)

Video essay on the work of Jia Zhangke by Kevin B. Lee, specially commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum and IFFR as a response to the installation Close-Up.

Eleven thousand photos, six miles of footage, three hundred books and eighteen volumes of Indië Oud en Nieuw: this is the historical legacy of Hendrik Tillema, who was born in Friesland and worked his way up to a successful producer of carbonated drinks in the Netherlands East-Indies early last century. He used his accumulated wealth to improve the life of the orang tekil (the common man) in Indonesia. For example, he published his own book about the lack of a sewer system and he saw to it that the local population was vaccinated ('one vaccinator does more for the pacification of Indonesia than an army of soldiers'). By means of a staggering amount of self-shot and collected material, this `one-man Third World movement' qualified the limited, positive image of our former colony that persisted until the forties.

An archival fiction feature about the eternal battle of the sexes, in which two star-crossed lovers trapped in a kingdom of shadows fight to keep their love alive as they gradually fall in hate. Their names are Forever Man and Forever Woman. They are embodied by actors and actresses from long-gone eras, but also by cartoon characters and puppet animations. Together they narrate the story of the euphoric ups and tragic downs of human existence. When Forever Dies, a virtuoso collage of film fragments from the Eye Filmmuseum archive, is an epic ode to largely unseen cinema anchored in the polarizing world of today.

A project making innovative use of existing archive images of Willy Mullens’ silent film Haarlem (1922). The original film shows the city in straightforward shots and camera movements. Due to deterioration these images changed in a dramatic way. In the adaption Karel Doing zooms in on these effects with the aid of digital techniques like optical flow and morphing. Michal Osowski collaborated on the project with sound that is directely linked to the image, he used the changes in density of the film to control complex filters and distortion effects.

The Netherlands officially abolished slavery across its colonies on 1 July 1863. Yet in Sumatra’s plantation belt, Dutch authorities created a legal structure that granted plantation owners sweeping control over racialized migrant workers. Through the Coolie Ordinance and Penal Sanction, labourers could be imprisoned, fined, or subjected to corporal punishment. Planters relied on debt, coercion, and deception to recruit workers, while private police forces hunted down runaways and crushed resistance. European overseers were discouraged from bringing European women to the colonies, making Javanese women central to the domestic, reproductive, and sexual labour sustaining plantation life. This hidden structure of dependence remained largely absent from official colonial imagery. Combining archival propaganda footage, fragments of correspondence, and contemporary images, this two-channel installation reflects on the enduring violence and silences of Dutch colonialism.

From a sea full of icebergs tinkling rising green hills. Winding roads and a forest of scaffolding overgrow the virgin landscape. There stands the city, dark and unapproachable. But when night falls and the lights turn on, the water returns. Manufacturability is overtaken by transformation.

Jameisha Prescod’s exploration of the legacies of medical colonialism in Suriname and its attempts to classify and control black bodies centres the experiences of Afro-Surinamese and Maroon communities living in the Netherlands, including the voice of poet Carina Fernandes. Foregrounding personal responses to illness, spirituality, and medicine, Prescod reclaims health as a practice of memory and care where survival alone is understood as a radical inheritance.

Scenes from 1920s Izmir, Turkey, presumably taken before 1925.

A travelogue of Turkey