The Price of Survival

All Rebels paints a picture of the young people who congregated around Amsterdam’s Leidseplein square in the days before wider protest movements broke out in the late ’60s and the ’70s. They kicked against the powers that be through wild parties, jazz music, unconventional clothing, long hair, smoking marihuana, uninhibited dancing and free love.

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.

In a fragmented, non-chronological series of images, a grand villa in Bloemendaal becomes the silent witness to the lives of two generations between 1900 and its demolition in 1950. Without dialogue, the film moves through moments of birth, love, adultery, violence and death, allowing the history of the house and its inhabitants to emerge through memory-like fragments.

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.

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.

In Rotterdam, Baas (Lex Goudsmit) sells a batch of fake diamonds to a gang of international con-men. They pay in dollars: a suitcase full of banknotes is sent on a ship from Rotterdam to Hamburg. The wife of one of the gang members (played by Josephine van Gasteren – sister of director Louis) accompanies it to keep an eye on things. But the ship strands off the island of Terschelling and a race ensues between Baas, the gang, the shipowner and the insurer to get to the ship first and secure the case of money.

On 19 March 1966, a photo exhibition about the police intervention during the wedding of Beatrix and Claus opened in Amsterdam. After the opening, filmmaker Louis van Gasteren filmed how, in the distance, policemen began beating up a young man, seemingly without any provocation. This footage was shown that same evening on television. Van Gasteren interviewed the victim, a 22-year-old student, who declared that he was walking in that direction because his ‘bicycle was there’. That became the title of this short film, in which Van Gasteren used slow motion to analyse the objectionable actions taken by the police.

Short documentary about the construction of tramlines in the centre of Amsterdam

Short documentary where a student of medicine describes an experiment for which he drilled a small hole in his forehead in order to achieve a higher state of being

This movie, made in 1969, documents the shattering story of a concentration camp survivor and his severe traumatisation, treated by Jan Bastiaans M.D. and his method of LSD psychotherapy.

The municipality of Nagele came about entirely on the drawing board and is an international symbol for the makeability of the Netherlands. Van Gasteren became fascinated by the Nagele project, and followed it from the drawing board and models to the construction of this new community. The final result is the film A New Village on New Land from 1960 – the year in which the first residents moved into their new, modern homes. Among the early pioneers in Nagele were many farmers who were to cultivate the newly reclaimed land.

On 22 May 1962, Warffum in the Dutch province of Groningen became the last place in the Netherlands to be connected to the fully automated telephone network. Combining documentary footage with staged scenes, the film follows people in different parts of the country and shows how the telephone had become woven into everyday life, while marking the completion of a major national technological project.

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.

Short film documenting a performance by poet Ted Jones in combination with music by the Peter Kuiters Modern Jazz Group.

This short essayistic documentary by Louis van Gasteren is an argument for the industrialised building of homes, in the typically optimistic tone of the post-war reconstruction period. In this film, Van Gasteren makes use of elements of Soviet cinema and the French nouvelle vague. In the ’50s, Rotterdam-based contractor Dura built a factory in the Eemhaven district where prefab components for whole blocks of residential buildings could be produced. Together with architect Ernest Groosman, a proponent of reconstruction architecture, Dura built homes at various locations in the Rotterdam area. The building of these ‘Groosman flats’ is shown at a construction site in Rotterdam’s Lombardijen district, accompanied by cheerful jazz music.

Footage of a sunny village square in Sardinia leads to humorous, philosophical reflections on reality and the role of the ‘objectively recording’ documentary maker. Van Gasteren sees the square as a backdrop in his film, and the chance passers-by as extras. Then, as a ‘director of reality’, he gives an ironic commentary on what he sees. “For a moment I thought, from what source of information am I thinking up what I see. Or, did I just see exactly what I thought.”