25 years Highlights of the Lowlands
In My Father’s House In het huis van mijn vader Fatima Jebli Ouazzani
The Netherlands, 1997 video, color, 70 min
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani: Sinned Again (2000)
Director: Fatima Jebli Ouazzani Photography: Maarten Kramer Screenplay: Fatima Jebli Ouazzani Editing: Jan Hendriks Sound: Piotr van Dijk, Ben Zijlstra Narration: Fatima Jebli Ouazzani Narrator: Fatima Jebli Ouazzani Production: Marty de Jong & Joost Verhey for MM Filmprodukties Screening Copy: Doc.Eye Film Involved TV Channel: NPS
At the age of 11, journalist and TV producer Fatima Jebli Ouazzani and her parents emigrated from Morocco to the Netherlands. Seven years later, her father left her mother and married a 17-year-old Moroccan girl. Fatima knew one thing for sure: she would not allow herself to be married off like her mother and grandmother, so she broke with Moroccan tradition and moved out of her family’s home. In this film, the director, unmarried and childless, wonders whether she has made the right choices. She places her own history against the background of traditional Moroccan marriage. That is what Naima, a Moroccan girl who was born in Holland, has opted for. On her wedding night, Naima has to prove she is still a virgin. By tradition, the in-laws wait outside the bedroom to see the bloodstained sheets.
The Long Holiday De grote vakantie Johan van der Keuken
The Netherlands, 2000 video, color, 145 min Director: Johan van der Keuken Photography: Johan van der Keuken Screenplay: Johan van der Keuken Editing: Menno Boerema Sound: Noshka van der Lely Music: Ab Baars Production: Pieter van Huystee for Pieter van Huystee Film World Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film Screening Copy: Pieter van Huystee Film
Johan van der Keuken:
Dagboek (1972), Het witte kasteel (1973), De beeldenstorm (fiction, 1982), De tijd (1983), I Love Dollars (fiction, 1986), The Eye Above the Well (1988), Face Value (1991), Brass Unbound (1993), Lucebert, Time and Farewell (1994), Amsterdam Global Village (1996), Amsterdam Afterbeat (1997), a.o.
Awards: Best Documentary Film It’s All True Sao Paulo, Grand Prix Vision de Réel Nyon, Special Jury Award National Dutch Film Festival, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Berlin International Film Festival, a.o.
Alternating between personal and more reflective elements is characteristic of Johan van der Keuken’s films. At the beginning of The Long Holiday, his doctor tells him that he does not have long to live due to prostate cancer. For the filmmaker and his wife Nosh van der Lely, this news is a stimulus to travel the world, as they have been doing all their lives. Van der Keuken spends the rest of his precious time looking and listening, and filming on both a small digital video camera and on 35mm film. He visits meditating monks in Bhutan, he goes to the Sahel to film children, and wanders around among the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil. He intersperses these travel scenes with still lives of objects he has collected over the course of his life. In his poetic voice-over, Van der Keuken talks about himself and about life. He will keep on filming until the end, “because as long as I can make an image, I’m alive.” The result is a powerful “road-air-movie,” and an ode to life on earth.
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