The Netherlands

Director: Koert DAVIDSE

12 min. 2007, Colour,
with dialogue, Dutch, English subtitled

Distributor: seriousFilm

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Producer: Marc Thelosen

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Screenplay: Koert Davidse

Cinematographer: E

Music: Esteve Molero

Editor: Luce van de Weg

Cast:
Erik Fens

 

 A sequence of images / a collage of photographs of chairs put out with the garbage. One after the other. There seems to be no end to them; kitchen chairs, easy chairs, chairs with one leg missing, two plastic bucket seats stacked on top of each other. The photos of the garbage chairs are followed by photos of small benches. A bench on the heath, or in a park. Again, dozens of images follow, one after the other, all photographs cut from magazines and newspapers.
In the Teylers Museum (Haarlem) Erik Fens walks through the rooms. They are filled with displays of natural history objects. Beautiful wooden display cases with rocks, shells and fossils. A few steps lead to the gallery. Cast-iron railings, bookcases along the walls. In the spacious reading room of the museum browns and greens dominate the interior. The walls are lined with bookcases, alternated with prints. A huge, massive reading table takes up the centre of the room.
Erik Fens leafs through his album with photographs of people with halos: George Bush with a lamp behind his head, Dutch prime minister Balkenende with behind him stars on a wall. And it goes on and on. It is almost unbelievable that so many of these photographs have appeared in papers and magazines, all archetypical images. Off-screen we hear Erik Fens say: ‘To collect is to write history. Everything you don't throw away, becomes part of the collection. So you can think of the world as one enormous collection.’

 

Major screenings, presentations:
- 18th Sao Paulo ISFF – September ‘07
- Dutch Filmfestival Utrecht – October ‘07
- Interfilm Berlin - November ‘07
- Short Cuts Cologne - December '07
- FIPA Biarrits - January '08

Koert Davidse (1959) studied photography and visual arts at the St. Joost Academy in Breda. After this study he worked as scriptwriter for as well fiction as documentaries. After a couple of years he started to make documentaries himself. Since 2004 he has in cooperation with Yan Ting Yuen and Marc Thelosen his own production company seriousFilm (www.seriousfilm.nl ).
His most important work of the last years:

2004 – ‘Sybold van Ravesteyn – architect for eternity’. (52 min. /Digital betacam) Portrait of one of the most remarkable and most obstinate architects of the Netherlands.
Premiere IFFR.

2003 – ‘1835 + 1’ – interactive monument for the victims of the flood in 1953 (www.deramp.nl)

2002 – ‘The flood’ – documentary (80 min. / 35 mm) about the flood which struck a part of Holland in 1953 and the influence of this disaster on the life’s of the victims.
Premiere Dutch Film Festival Utrecht; shown on television and theatre release.

2002 – ‘Telling eyes’ – documentary (50 min./Betacam) about a man who can’t speak and can’t move. He has only control over his eyes and therewith he has contact with the people around him. Shown on Dutch Television, ZDF and Arte.

2001 – ‘The fall’ – short fiction (7 min. / 35 mm) about a man who as a kid survived a fall from a tower. Premiere IFFR

2000 - ‘The day I decided’ – Short documentary (15 min./ 16mm) about a kid who made a radical decision in his life.

1999 - ‘James Avati, a life in paperbacks’. Documentary (55 min./16mm) about this famous American paperback cover illustrator. Released on video in America and Canada. Shown at the Art Film Festival of Bratislava.

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