Because My Bike Was There...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Through archival footage, interviews and computer animation, Louis van Gasteren explores a thousand years of Dutch water management. Guided by a fictional computer program called SPADE, the film traces how draining and reclaiming the land upset the balance between land and water, forcing the Netherlands into an ongoing struggle to control its environment through dikes, drainage systems and large-scale hydraulic engineering.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.