Shadowland

Kees Hin’s acclaimed depiction of Berlin in the 1930s. On the basis of recollections recorded on video, Kees Hin and K. Schippers created a ‘theatre of memory’ where former residents of Berlin look back on the downfall of that bustling metropolis and the rise of Nazism, which led to them fleeing.

A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered between human and animal. Particularly the manner in which human and ape are confronted with each other, is significant. The images speak for themselves, human voices or commentary is absent. The ironic music of Pim Jacobs does add an extra dimension to the whole. With regards to human and animal Haanstra limits himself for the time being to this short film, recorded with a hidden camera. Later on, in several big films, he would return to this subject.

Residents of the same street in Haarlem, and acquaintances and relatives of Kees Hin, together tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, each in fifteen words.

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

After a stroke, the Amsterdam artist Aat Veldhoen is not able to use his right drawing hand anymore. Because of his natural urge to draw he starts using his left hand to depict the people around him during rehabilitation. His wife, the feminist and politician Hedy d'Ancona, shows his drawings and talks with admiration about the sketches he made.

During the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002, Leo Hannewijk (festival director Film by the Sea) approached filmmaker and producer Digna Sinke with the idea of asking several film makers to make short films based on poems about the province of Zeeland. It would offer an opportunity to investigate the limits of the medium film and, just like poetry, not to focus on the story but to tackle universal and grander themes through mood and form. In the end, eight short films were realized, by eight different filmmakers. The films are connected by intermezzi, aerial shots of the Zeeland coasts. Poems of the Sea is a stirring and surprising portrayal of Zeeland. Filled with desires and passion.

The importance of the Atelier as a meeting and working-place for independent or beginning filmmakers is highlighted in Last days of Studio Frans van de Staak a necrology of his films by Kees Hin (2002), which focuses mainly on Van de Staak's non-naturalistic style of directing actors.

Personal document in which celebrated film veteran Kees Hin is portrayed in the final phase of life by his former apprentice and good friend Diego Gutiérrez. Their collaboration results in this compilation of seven short films, in which Gutiérrez invites the viewer to witness the gifted mind of 83-year-old Hin trying to stay active, creative and sane, as he fights against ageing and Parkinson's disease.

In a Dutch village, an eighty-year-old widow is murdered. The perverted modus operandi turns the crime into a national media event. It made the authorities decide to set up one of the first large-scale DNA investigations in the country. The men who were interrogated and investigated by the police are interrogated once again for the film and have to describe the dramatic events and try to put their feelings into words.

He was always busy making the absolute painting, one of Jaap Hillenius' sons says about his father. The artist who was killed in a car accident in 1999 steadily built, averse to conventions and trends, an autonomous oeuvre, indefatigably looking for the ultimate beauty. In daily life, he did so too; the artist wore out a throng of girlfriends, although in a sense he stayed faithful to both his wife and his only muse. He did not have the time to be a real father. 'With my father in the train with a Nuts bar', is the best childhood memory his sons have of him. Kees Hin tries to get closer to this complex man, who imputed a profoundly melancholic soul to himself, like the writer Marcel Proust, whom he admired so deeply. In three films, that play on the screen alongside each other and alternately appear in the foreground, via interviews - with people like his wife, his muse and his sons - and archive footage, we get to know more about his daily (emotional) life, his work and ideas.

The Sensitive Plate consists of 1250 filmed black-and-white photo portraits made between 1913-1969 by the Amsterdam photo studio Merkelbach, ran by father and daughter Jakobus and Mies Merkelbach. The sequence of faces is interrupted only by the year in which the photos were taken. In this chronology, each year consists of one minute of film time. Each photo is displayed for two seconds; 57 years are displayed in 57 minutes.