Quirino, 76, has lived all his life in the Cape Verdean ghost village of Ribeira Funda, which was deserted 40 years ago. In 1983, a man was killed by a rock that broke loose following heavy rainfall. As a result, all the villagers moved to nearby Estância de Brás—all except Quirino, that is.

Here in this deep and spectacular valley between the sea and the mighty mountains, Quirino spends his days alone, but for the company of a chicken and the radio that is his lifeline to the rest of the world. It is on this majestically shot rocky coastline that he reflects on his life and on life in general—on how brief our time is here, never knowing our destination. “Life in Cabo Verde is really hard. It doesn’t give any stability. It’s like a boat without a keel,” he says in this thoughtful and melancholy portrait.

Quirino notices that he is becoming increasingly stiff and forgetful. He faces a dilemma: should he stay or should he leave the only place he has ever known, to live out his last days elsewhere?

Q&A

After the screening, the filmmakers will join us on stage for a short Q&A with the audience.

Altijd als eerste op de hoogte van onze programmering, De Balie podcasts, Tv fragmenten en de nodige verdieping.

Through the creative use of archival material, these delicate films tap into memories of abuse, retrace personal trauma, and explore collective hope. This compilation program includes Between Delicate and Violent, Newsreel 242 – Sunny Railways and Our Special Little Secret.

After the screening the filmmakers will join us on stage for a short Q&A with the audience.

In 1968, the civil war in Nigeria was entering its second year. Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a young Nigerian drama student, flees to San Francisco. David Schickele wants to make a feature film about Okpokam’s experiences in his new home and casts him in the role of Gabriel. During his adventures, Gabriel encounters racism at every turn.

The motorcyclist who gives him a lift is a harbinger of the racist America that is later to be the actor’s undoing. Liberal America, represented by progressive intellectuals quoting Marshall McLuhan, also comes in for criticism. What starts as a fictional docudrama rich in subtle irony unexpectedly turns into a documentary when Okpokam is wrongly arrested during production after a strike at San Francisco State College.

“Truth was not stranger than fiction, just a little faster,” Schickele says to the camera. Schickele, originally a composer and violinist, taught English at the University of Nigeria. On his return to the US, he made Bushman, which won the Best First Feature Award at the 1971 Chicago International Film Festival. His rediscovered film has recently been restored.

With photos and videos taken by prisoners, this raw yet poetic debut film paints a rich picture of hitherto hidden life in a Chilean women’s prison. The focus is on mothers serving long sentences. They can keep their babies with them until they are two years old. Then the women lose control over who takes care of their children and whether they will be allowed to have contact with them at all.

The experiences of more than 20 mothers have been condensed into a collective memory, recounted through the voices of two women. They talk about powerlessness and longing. The prisoners themselves also give and receive affection and motherly love. The film opens with the cold rattle of a prison door and the warm sounds of a mother singing her child to sleep. A photo of a woman tenderly kissing her baby slowly emerges from the blackness.

As well as being extremely intimate and unique, the videos taken secretly with mobile phones are fragmented and imperfect. Yet, they are indispensable building blocks in telling this story.

Work hard and pay your taxes—it’s the duty of every law-abiding citizen. But this social contract is crumbling away, and now those who earn money with the least effort are also contributing the least to society. Instead, they funnel their capital into tax havens, empty oilfields at bargain prices, and wield their political power to earn yet more money.

In this sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful film, Fredrik Gertten (Push, Bikes vs Cars) takes stock of a decaying system to show that while corruption and social inequality are a growing problem worldwide, there are still plenty of people who want to reverse this trend. Scenes of activists in multiple countries living their everyday lives talk about what made them decide to resist, and what opposition they face.

These scenes alternate with reflections from Dutch historian Rutger Bregman (author of the bestseller Humankind: A Hopeful History) and US author Sarah Chayes, as they reflect on the question of whether global corruption will prevail or whether honesty and fairness will ultimately emerge victorious.

“We work far away from home. The old and young are still in the village. If the family can’t even spend New Year together, life would be pointless.” These are the words of one of the countless Chinese workers who make the heroic journey from the new industrial areas to their villages in the provinces each year. In a calm and observational style devoid of comment, Lixin Fan captures two years in the life of one of these families.

The father and mother left the poverty of the countryside 16 years ago, leaving their young daughter behind with her grandparents. Now they work long hours in one of the numerous gray factories that supply the West with cheap clothing. That said, the most toilsome endeavour is the New Year trip. The sight of the multitude gathered at the station is disconcerting, and the couple wait for a ticket for days. When a snowstorm arrives, the chaos is complete.

They still manage time and again, but will they also succeed in keeping the family together and ensuring an education for their children with the money they send home? Painful moments reveal that the patience the Chinese are known for has its limits.

The older generation sometimes disparagingly calls them “coconut heads” (or “brainless youth”), but the students at the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria, are anything but that. They follow up their visits to a campus film club with in-depth discussions about subjects such as feminism, migration, human rights, colonialism, and politics. The debate gets heated sometimes, but always stays focused on the subject.

Nigeria and its neighbouring countries face many issues. Unemployment and corruption are rife, freedom of expression is under threat, and student life is tough for many reasons. Alain Kassanda intercuts his observational shots of these passionate group discussions with atmospheric impressions of campus life full of commotion.

In the years that Kassanda films, from 2019 to 2021, students and their peers take to the barricades to resist police violence—there were even deaths at these protests in October 2020. This film, which shared the top prize at Cinéma du Réel, is a dynamic portrait of a generation of Nigerians using their intelligence and critical thinking to demand change.

Q&A

After the screening, the filmmakers will join us on stage for a short Q&A with the audience.

Altijd als eerste op de hoogte van onze programmering, De Balie podcasts, Tv fragmenten en de nodige verdieping.

Australian Jordan Bryon, an experienced journalist and filmmaker, had been in Afghanistan for five years when the Americans withdrew from the country in 2021 and the Taliban took power.

This transition more or less coincided with his own physical changes: as a trans man, he started taking testosterone injections and was awaiting surgery. For a report for The New York Times, Bryon gains access to a Taliban unit. While he films with them and is accepted as a man among men, he struggles with the moral implications of his choices.

If he were to reveal his trans identity, it would endanger him irrevocably. At the same time, not being honest about it feels like cheating. The Taliban’s acceptance of him is also confusing because it leads him to feel sympathy for them, when because of their ideas he should feel only hatred and fear. Transition is a film full of paradoxes that offers a glimpse into the exceptional life of a trans man.

After the screening, Jordan Bryon joins us on stage with the famous Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink to discuss the effects filming can have on the lives of people in sensitive positions who live in conflict-affected regions.

Speakers

Monica VillamizarCo-Director and journalist

Farzad FetratVideographer

Thomas ErdbrinkJournalist

Photo: Neil Brandvold

Altijd als eerste op de hoogte van onze programmering, De Balie podcasts, Tv fragmenten en de nodige verdieping.

Argentinian wedding videographer Leandro Koch has absolutely no interest in his Jewish background until he falls in love with clarinetist Paloma Schachmann. She specializes in klezmer music, the traditional Yiddish wedding music of Eastern Europe. They decide to make a documentary together, visiting the last European practitioners of this genre. Their wanderings through Ukraine, Romania, and Moldavia are mostly fruitless, with the Jewish presence limited to old photos and painful memories.

Koch and Schachmann intertwine their personal journey with a folktale about two lovers who defy Jewish traditions, and music historian Rob Cohen explains why after the Second World War the language of the klezmer tradition—Yiddish—gave way to Hebrew, the language of the Zionists. In this way, The Klezmer Project also becomes a requiem for a neglected language and a semi-forgotten culture.

Throughout the film, many local folk musicians incorporate elements of the klezmer tradition in their repertoire, but real Klezmer is almost not to be found. This is why we decided to complement this beautiful and warm cinematic journey into the lost history of Klezmer with a concert of genuine music in the genre, performed exclusively for De Balie audience by the Amsterdam Klezmer Band.

Line-up

Jasper de Beer – Double bass, guitar banjo, backing vocals
Job Chajes – Alto saxophone, Vocals
Alec Kopyt – Vocals, percussion
Gijs Levelt – Trumpet
Joop van der Linden – Trombone, percussion
Janfie van Strien – Clarinet, backing vocals
Theo van Tol – Accordion

Altijd als eerste op de hoogte van onze programmering, De Balie podcasts, Tv fragmenten en de nodige verdieping.

Gerlach van Beinum is one of the last old-school crop farmers in the Netherlands. Surrounded by the advancing exponents of modernity—distribution centers, highways, multinationals – he moves through the seasons at his own pace. We follow him for several years in his fields on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

With the help of his best friend Rinus, he grows potatoes, beetroot, grain, and strawberries, which he sells from his barn. In between these activities, his farmhouse proves to be a gathering spot for neighbors and friends, who share with him their dry wit and simple joy.

Meanwhile, the outside world imposes itself more and more blatantly, in the form of money-hungry entrepreneurs, the municipal government, aircraft noise, the neighboring McDonald’s and a failed harvest due to climate change. But Gerlach doggedly continues: with the help of his brothers, he conducts lawsuits—with occasional success—and sows new crops.

Aliona van der Horst and Luuk Bouwman portray the unflappable, stooped-over farmer with the same dedication and love with which he works his land, sometimes in close-up, sometimes in beautifully composed shots of the shadow he casts on his beloved field.

The screening is followed by an in-depth conversation with Aliona, Luuk and Gerlach himself about the possibility of conducting the “green transition” in a just way.