Johan van der Keuken

Trying to Describe Oneself

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.

Last Words

Following in the footsteps of his uncle, this film documents the last days of Johan van der Keuken.

L'Entretien (avec Johan van der Keuken)

During the shooting of this film, four long interviews were recorded by Thierry Nouel, marking out the different stages of the life and work of the Dutch director. Johan van der Keuken analyzes the relationships between art and reality, morality and the political, gives his conception of exchanges and conflicts between interiority and the outside world. He explains with precision this research which goes at all to the intimate, and which did not progress without rejections and moments of doubt. Shortly before his death, he had reviewed this document and wanted it to be shown as such, in its unedited state.

The Last Documentary

Documentary by Jan Sebening and Daniel Sponsel.

Last Words: My Sister Yoka

Last Words: My Sister Yoka (1998) is the director's tribute to his sister, who speaks to the camera just days before she dies of cancer.

Filmmaker's Holiday

The film is put together as a collection of autonomous images which, once combined, make up van der Keuken's mental universe: family happiness, fragments of some of his earlier films, a homage to the saxophonist Ben Webster, two poems by the great contemporary poets Remco Campert and Lucebert, a portrait of the director's grandfather, who taught him photography at the age of twelve... 
"One of those small masterpieces one encounters by surprise..." Jean-Paul Fargier, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1975