Ilse van Huisstede

De verloren stad

Whereas most filmmakers go to places where it is all happening, documentary director Britta Hosman went to a place where nothing happens. For one year, she captured life in the Bosnian town of Bosanska Grahavo, which was forgotten during the reconstruction and where only the supermarket and ten pubs are still standing. When did the war end for them, the filmmaker wonders. Did it ever end? And which people stayed put? And why? The many conversations Hosman had with the inhabitants were converted to a narrative voice-over that wryly describes how everybody wakes up every day, gets dressed and proceeds to wait for nothing at all.

ASH World Wide Suicide

A boy posts a message on the Internet seeking a suicide partner. A girl reads it and flies to meet him one week later. Together they jump off a 600-meter cliff. They found each other on an Internet newsgroup called alt.suicide.holiday, or ASH. Internet newsgroups are virtual discussion forums amongst people with common interests. The subject of this one is suicide. You come across thousands of letters. The unknown leave behind their open hearted life stories for us to read. Who are these people and why are they seeking each other on the Internet? What lives lay hidden behind the blue light of the computers. In ASH worlwide suicide we meet four writers of this newsgroup.