Wednesday April 15, 2009 at 8pm
Duration: 150 min.
Entrance: 3,000 LL
About the event
As a continuation of the theme developed in its first exhibition “Closer,” Beirut Art Center presents an homage to internationally celebrated Dutch filmmaker Johan van der Keuken. Van der Keuken’s documentaries are beautiful and complex constructions that explore the notion of intimacy and the boundaries of fiction. Whether in “The Filmmaker’s Holiday”, “My Sister Yoka” or “The Long Holiday”, in which he chooses to capture himself and his closest and most intimate environment, including his family, to reflect on life and death, or in “The Palestinians” and “The Eye Above the Well,” shot respectively in Lebanon and India, van der Keuken looks to understand and reach humanity in his uniquely poetic way.
THE LONG HOLIDAY
Documentary. 2000. 142′. Colour. Dutch with English subtitles
In October 1998 Johan van der Keuken called his radiologist at the Academic Hospital in Utrecht from Paris and heard that he only had a few years to live. Prostate cancer cells had taken hold in his body. Van der Keuken had travelled the world for years with his wife Nosh van der Lely. Together they decided to spend the rest of their precious time looking and listening. At Christmas time, they set off for Bhutan. They decided to take along a small digital Panasonic video camera as well as an Aäton film camera. Both “languages,” that of film and of video, have come together on 35mm film. Johan van der Keuken regarded the film they were embarking on as a chronicle of his own view of the world, made all the more urgent by his own mortality. Later in the film – and in his life – things take a turn for the better, when Johan van der Keuken finds a new medicine in the United States that drastically increases his chances of survival.
Living against all odds turns THE LONG HOLIDAY into a vital film, an ode to life on earth.
Robert Daudelin will introduce the work of Johan van der Keuken and give a short presentation on the movie.
Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) started experimenting with photography at the age of twelve. Five years later, in 1955, he published his first book of photographs Wij zijn 17 (We are 17). After studying at the Institute of Cinematography in Paris (IDHEC) van der Keuken started making films. Around the same time, his first writings about photos and films began to appear in Dutch magazines. From 1977 onwards, he wrote a column in the Dutch film magazine Skrien called Uit de wereld van een kleine zelfstandige (From the world of the self-employed). Van der Keuken made a large number of films, published several books of photographs, prepared many installations and exhibitions, and taught seminars in European and American film schools.
Robert Daudelin was the director of the Cinémathèque québécoise of Montreal from 1972 to 2000. Former Secretary General then President of the Fédération internationale des Archives du film, he is now a member of the editorial committee of the magazine 24 images.
Chief Editor of the Journal of Film Preservation, he is also in charge of the cinema section of the International Jazz Festival of Montreal.
Robert Daudelin is a visiting professor at the Université St-Joseph in Lebanon.
In 2006, he published L’œil au-dessus du puits, deux conversations avec Johan van der Keuken.
With the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Beirut
