Albert Markus

In this electrifying journey filmmaker Vincent Boy Kars will try to understand in fiction how he became the person he is now, and who he wants to be in the future. The film challenges the very fabric of identity, eagerly pondering the possibilities of personal transformation. Can one truly break free from the weight of their own story?

Is our life a story? And if so, can we re-write it? In Drama Girl, director Vincent Boy Kars gets a young woman to act out a number of key scenes from her recent past. Perhaps, Kars thinks, this could help her come to terms with certain events. In the meantime, he also gains something: a film that probes how fiction and documentary can learn from one another.

There could hardly be a more telling contrast between the analog and digital eras than the beautifully blurry memories captured in a Polaroid picture and the thousands of pin-sharp photos on an iPhone. In this ambitious visual essay, Willem Baptist explores the visionary genius of Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Even today, all sorts of people are keeping his instant dream alive. Former Polaroid employee Stephen Herchen moved from the United States to Europe to work in a laboratory developing the 2.0 version of Polaroid. Christopher Bonanos, the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, tells us, "When I heard Polaroid would stop making film, it felt like a close friend had died." Artist Stefanie Schneider, who is working with the last of her stock of Polaroid film, is using the blurring that occurs with expired film as an additional aesthetic layer in her photographic work.

Why do you have to do what everyone else does and why does everyone have to look the same? Ninnoc struggles when she is in a group. She doesn't just want to adapt to the others, but she's also afraid of being excluded. Can you deviate in a group? Or will you then end up alone?

SWCHWRM is about a boy who wants to be writer and describes his experiences. He uses the pseudonym, V. Swchwrm, because he wants to remain unknown. He describes, among other things, the death of his grandfather and encounters with the queen. SWCHWRM is based on "Mijn avonturen door V. Swchwrm" by Toon Tellegen.

In a span of ninety minutes the film aims to show how the Netherlands administered its colony as a colonial enterprise and what the relations were like at the time. The usual commentary has been omitted and in its place poems and songs in Bahasa Indonesia have been included in a digital sound composition. In Mother Dao the Turtlelike, the viewer sees how the colonial machinery in the 1920s was implanted in a world so different from Western Europe.