Johan van der Keuken film series

An indefatigable traveller, Van der Keuken built a cinema deeply linked to the places and people he encountered along the way. His gaze avoids distance: it approaches, listens and lets itself be affected. In his films, reality is not presented as something closed, but as a territory in constant negotiation between what is shown and how it is shown.

The retrospective allows us to discover work combining intuition and thought, where every shot is also a position taken. Far from claimed objectivity, his cinema embraces its own point of view and makes it part of the narrative. From this emerge pieces that dialogue with the political and the everyday without separating them.

For Van der Keuken, filming was a form of connection. A practice which, in his own words, is born of love and the need to share an experience. This series recovers that way of understanding cinema as a living relationship among the person who looks, the person filmed and the person who finally observes the image.