Jan Wouter van Reijen
2021Gedichten uit zee
Jan Wouter van Reijen, Kees Hin
During the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2002, Leo Hannewijk (festival director Film by the Sea) approached filmmaker and producer Digna Sinke with the idea of asking several film makers to make short films based on poems about the province of Zeeland. It would offer an opportunity to investigate the limits of the medium film and, just like poetry, not to focus on the story but to tackle universal and grander themes through mood and form. In the end, eight short films were realized, by eight different filmmakers. The films are connected by intermezzi, aerial shots of the Zeeland coasts. Poems of the Sea is a stirring and surprising portrayal of Zeeland. Filled with desires and passion.
Poems from the Sea
Ik wil het niet zien, maar het moet
Jan Wouter van Reijen
Documentary on Rotterdam artist Co Westerik, who died in September 2018. In this film, Jan Wouter van Reijen explicitly rejects the traditional form of the artist portrait. Instead he searches for a different, creative way of illuminating the motivations, themes and emotions underlying Westerik’s paintings.
Ik wil het niet zien, maar het moet
Denkend aan Holland
Jan Wouter van Reijen
When you look at a river, what do you see? Remembering Holland by Jan Wouter van Reijen carries the viewer through the basin of the River Waal, past painters, sculptors and poets. Van Reijen follows the entire course of the river, from the German border to the North Sea, and creates portraits of various artists who have taken the riverine landscape as their theme. Each and every one of them sings the river’s praises in his or her own way, from extremely realistic to abstract. At every spot along the way, and each day anew, the river landscape changes: we see the water dark and colorful, glistening in late and early light, in morning dew and by moonlight, in clouds of mist and the snows of winter. Yet the water brings more than beauty alone. The flooding of the forelands and the reinforcement of the dykes in 1995 remind us of the eternal struggle of the Dutch against the rising water. See it and be borne along on a voyage of the imagination.
Remembering Holland