Artist Present 14-18 and 20-22 hours

25-11-11 | Heaven Sent Experimental filmmaker Jeanette Groenendaal, whose Reformation has been pulling in the IDFA punters this year, will be looking to the stars for her next film.

Her project Dramayama (working title), to be developed with European and Indian space agencies and animators, will examine our planetary system from the perspective of ancient mythology. A recent recipient of Netherlands Film Fund script support, Groenendaal is looking to start production on the film in late 2012.

“It’s about Inner Space, so it’s the visualisation of the heavens from very ancient times, 3,000 years ago, and into the future”, she explains. “It’s a kind of Indiana Jane – or Indiana Jeanette. It’s coming from the ritual basis of mythology – the therapeutic aspect of my movie-making is very much connected to that. The earth is a spaceship, and through the ancients there is beautiful knowledge that is attached to it. Now, through technology, we can start to understand this knowledge. The film will be like a Harry Potter master class. I think the audience is ready for this information.”

Speaking after the second screening of her personal and painful Paradocs selection Reformation, Groenendaal says: “At half past ten there were still 180 people there and afterwards I received poetry that made me cry, as a reaction to my movie. I really enjoyed seeing a movie I only finished last week up there on the big screen.”

Which is why she intends to carry on banging the drum for the type of films she makes, convinced that there is an increasingly strong market for them. “As a producer of my own movies I feel like I have to take a stand, defend and protect experimental films. I have to explain this all the time to all these festival directors. Audiences are always looking for new forms.
There are audiences for all these experimental films,” she underlines.


By Nick Cunningham Publication date: November 25, 2011 Contact | Advertising

Tuschinski 3 Thu 24-11 12:45
Tuschinski 2 Sun 27-11 14:15

Laatste colom onderaan: "Gelukkig zijner op hetIDFA ook filmsdie ingeen enkelecategorie  passen. Jeanette Groenendael maak-te met Re f o r m a t i o n een verleidelijk en woest beeldessay over een dorp in de   Bommelerwaard, vol stugge calvinis-ten en seks bij mens en dier." Raymond van den Boogaard

“Reformation is a research on the scapegoat mechanism”, explains experimental filmmaker Jeannette Groenendaal about her vividly personal 2011 Paradocs selection. “How does one group of people who think that they know the truth, what is right and wrong, how do they decide if somebody else is going to hell?”

Groenendaal’s film is autobiographical – an account of the sexual abuse she suffered in the Dutch Bible Belt village of her youth more than 40 years ago. But her approach to the story’s telling is far from narrative; instead she turns to lyricism and metaphor to describe a trauma that she feels cannot be expressed in words.

“I was driving through the countryside where I grew up and there were ghost movies screaming out of the quagmire of this Dutch river landscape”, she explains. But those memories were exactly that – ghostly and rendered abstract by the passage of time. Therefore, in order to portray her initial arrival as a seven year-old stranger into her adopted village, Groenendaal returns with a cast of ‘strangers’ who explore aspects of the director’s past, under the bemused gaze of the contemporary villagers.

One couple dances an elaborate tango before tumbling into an erotic and exhausted clinch, all performed before the village children. A pre-pubescent child stands silently as a village farmer jokes about the people he knows who have had sex with farm animals. “When I remember my neighbour who was fucking his cow, I went there with this performer/dancer who was totally ready to try it – but we never got there”, Groenendaal explains. “It is very difficult to film what really happened, and actually that is the problem. The images of absence are, I think, very present in the movie. It is very hard to film things that you cannot even talk about. These are taboo memories on misuse.”

The latter parts of Groenendaal’s experimental film introduce us to a vital and ‘lusty’ nature populated by women who draw comfort from their landscape. We see a naked woman who rides a pig in order to recreate the Hieronymus Bosch tableau from his painting Paradise, while a white witch trains her white owl to swoop in the woods. Meanwhile, a Korean woman screams her pain to the non-judgmental trees and birds. It is, argues Groenendaal, a countryside in which ‘fucking’ happens continually, but when removed from the “male gaze” of the Christian fundamentalist, this fucking is pure and vital, rather than sinful and secretive.

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interview in SEE.NL


SEE NL 05

Op 16 november 2011, de openingsdag van de 24ste editie van het International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is het vijfde nummer van het nieuwe blad SEE NL gepubliceerd.

Deze Documentaire -editie is voornamelijk gewijd aan de Nederlandse documentaire. In andere nummers komen Nederlandse filmmakers, speelfilms, animatiefilms, korte films en experimentele films aan bod, evenals achtergrondinformatie, statistieken en nieuws uit de Nederlandse filmindustrie.

SEE NL wordt verspreid op internationale filmfestivals en markten om Nederlandse films onder de aandacht te brengen van buitenlandse filmprofessionals. De volgende editie kan worden verwacht tijdens het Internationaal Film Festival van Berlijn in februari 2012.

SEE NL kunt u hier lezen:

Synopsis
The final installment of the trilogy Archival Fields, in which experimental filmmaker and researcher Zoot Derks questions the use of technological timelines in a philosophical and artistic way. What kind of consequences does the use of such programmed timelines have, which place video images in a historical context and in doing so create an instant past, or "pastness"? Derks invites the audience to participate in his performative video installation, which will stretch out through the staircases, hallways and side rooms of the Flemish art center De Brakke Grond, questioning the editing of video images. The filmmaker will use the material he shot for the first two parts of the trilogy, PolderPiece and Timeline Criticism, as well as new material shot during IDFA. He will discuss his subjects with specially invited guests and random passersby. Central to the discussions will be the concept of "suture," which can mean the same thing as "editing" but can also be translated more literally as "sewing," or more theoretically as "a break in the prevailing discourse." Together with the audience, Derks will walk the tightrope between these various meanings and the dividing line between word and image.

Credits
Director Zoot Derks
Photography Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal
Editing Jeanette Groenendaal, Zoot Derks
Production Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal for G-netwerk
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IDFA PAGINA ZOOT DERKS