Joke Meerman

Filmmaker Louis van Gasteren reconstructs the life of Amsterdam poet, composer and actor Hans van Sweeden, who took his own life at the age of twenty-four in 1963. Through interviews with friends, relatives and contemporaries, alongside archival material, the film becomes both an intimate portrait of Van Sweeden and a broader account of a young generation searching for freedom, identity and new ways of living in Amsterdam during the 1950s and 1960s.

The work of Leiden professor Bastiaans on dealing with the trauma of war victims attracts the attention of filmmaker Louis van Gasteren. He decides to make a film about the psychotherapeutic treatment with LSD of a former concentration camp prisoner in the clinic of Bastiaans. Patient Joop is arrested in September 1941 and begins a long hellish journey through various camps, until he is liberated by the Russians. When he returns to his wife, he has become a completely different man. Joop suffers from nightmares and is incapable of normal human contact. With two cameras, Van Gasteren records approximately six and a half hours of the first treatment that Joop undergoes with Bastiaans (four more will follow later). Special attention is paid to details: Joop's hands, the sweat on his forehead, a tear running slowly down his cheek. Van Gasteren reduces the recordings to more than an hour.

More than thirty years ago, Louis van Gasteren made the documentary BEGRIJPT U NU WAAROM IK HUIL? about a therapeutic LSD session that professor Jan Bastiaans did with a traumatised ex-prisoner of German concentration camps. The patient died in late 2000 at the age of 81. He left a wife and three children. Poignant conversations with the widow and youngest son, and excerpts from letters from the other two children reveal that a concentration camp syndrome can also inflict deep wounds in those who have not personally experienced it.

A personal portrait of farmer and politician Sicco Mansholt (1908-1995) by his good friend Louis van Gasteren and his wife Joke Meerman. Unique archival material and interviews with family, colleagues and former politicians including Max Kohnstamm, Jan Pronk and Hans van Mierlo give a nuanced impression of this passionate social democrat and influential, visionary politician.

A retrospective of events in director Louis van Gasteren’s life from 1964 to 1969, filmed by him in that period and reflected on from his vantage point over 40 years later at the age of 90.

Fifty years after making A New Village on New Land (1960), Van Gasteren and co-director Joke Meerman return to Nagele. What has Nagele become? He interviews residents and local officials and sees that over the course of fifty years, this model village has changed dramatically. The world turned out not to be as makeable as previously thought, and adjustments have had to be made on all fronts. The homes were too small, social cohesiveness is under strain and the original ideas, based on ideals, seem outdated. Van Gasteren also gets architects such as Umberto Barbieri and architectural historian Ed Taverne to speak, looking back at the work and ideals of their predecessors.