past screenings and events

with an introduction by Sam Yang

"John Cassavetes' 'Faces' is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: 'Here!'"

a stunning entry into everybody's favourite genre of "middle-class white Americans shouting at each other about marital issues and much more," Cassavetes' Faces carries a loud bang. Sounds of clashing sensibilities, and of the teardown of foundational values of late 60s America. 

with an introduction by Marta Rudzynska

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors guides the viewer through an intricate story of loss, tragedy, love and the cycle of suffering. It gives an insight into the traditions and myths of Ukrainian culture, inviting us to accept magic as an undeniable part of reality. All of this, through the life of Ivan, a boy that witnessed a death of his brother, father, and later the love of his life, who was the daughter of the murderer. His path through the tragedy and salvation becomes the central theme of the story.

with an introduction by Lilly Henssge

We are going to start off our themed month with Christian Petzold's Undine (2020), a romantic tale starring Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, two of Germany's most exciting young actors. The film quietly explores the age-old myth of Undine, a water nymph who falls in love with a human but is doomed by an inescapable curse, in the context of present-day Berlin. By reimagining Undine as a historian in urban development, a nymph specialized in the land that traps her, Petzold reckons not only with Berlin's past and present but with what it means to maintain a sense of the fantastical amidst the disillusionment of modernity. 

with an introduction by Fien Limburg

Join us for a snowy last screening of the year… Daisies' (1966) director Věra Chytilová explores the 1980s teen-horror movie by mixing blistering political allegory with science fiction. In Wolf’s Hole, a group of teenagers takes part in a mysterious skiing workshop in the mountains but they soon realize that they are part of sadistic social experiment.

with an introduction by Martina Furlan

A less known gem from Tampopo’s director Juzo Itami, Supermarket Woman is a vibrant and charming comedy about two friends joining forces in order to save the local supermarket. The manager (Masahiko Tsugawa) of the failing family-owned Honest Mart hires his old classmate Hanako (Nobuko Miyamoto), an experienced housewife, to help him compete with a new rival grocery store. As soon as Hanako takes over, she uncovers a number of discrepancies which she tries to change but not without angering many chiefs of the sections. Itami puts together a cheerful blend of slap-stick farce mixed with humor and astute social observation. 

How do we hold on to memories – in archives, in the mind, in the landscape, on film? Visual artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan (born in 1966 in Indonesia) works with photography and moving images and creates spatial installations, investigating ways in which we record the world around us. This autumn, Eye Filmmuseum is pleased to present the work of Fiona Tan in the solo exhibition Mountains and Molehills. 

with an introduction by Floris Paalman

Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood is a poetic journey through the fragments and shadows of a 12 year old boy during World War II. In this jarring and unforgettable depiction of the impact of war on children, Tarkovsky moves back and forth between the trauma of war and peaceful moments of family life before the conflict. While other Soviet films of the period glorified the war experience, Ivan’s Childhood focuses on the importance of human life.

In the spirit of last year's screening of The Seashell and The Clergyman and Arabesque, our first excursion for this year will be at Muziekgebouw for the 1924 Soviet film Aelita: Queen of Mars accompanied by live music. It will take place on Wednesday, November 16th 2022 at 20:15; you can find more information about the evening by clicking here.

with an introduction by Marein van den Heuvel

Many recent audiovisual media deploy circular or cyclical movements as a guiding principle. Oftentimes the aesthetic project of such media is to either “break the loop” or to “close the cycle”. These approaches may in fact be two sides of the same coin: achieving a more sustainable mode of existence first requires the overcoming of destructive, habitual cycles. This becomes clear within so-called time travel paradoxes where characters are trapped in a cycle of time itself. Both La Jetée and World of Tomorrow employ the idea of time travel loops in different ways and with this screening we would like to discuss how these two connect to a grander theory of the loop.

The discussion will be accompanied by Toni Pape, UvA researcher and organizer of the ASCA research seminar Breaking the Loop, Closing the Cycle, a seminar that is closely connected to the themes of these films. 

with an introduction by Emiel Martens

The first film on Gambia’s fishmeal factories, offering a unique insight into untold drivers of migration. In the Gambia, the smallest country of mainland Africa, fish is now being powdered up by Chinese corporations and exported to Europe and China to feed animals in industrial farming. As a result, Gambians are being deprived of their primary source of protein, overfishing is depleting marine ecosystems. The film follows Abou, Mariama and Paul, three Gambians who share intimate stories of daily struggle, anger, hope and longing for their loved ones. There’s so much to worry about in the world but Stolen Fish is a 30 minute microcosm of what is wrong with it, eloquently put by those who take the brunt of the destruction caused by global capitalism. 

This screening will be in combination with Gifts from Babylon (Bas Ackermann, 2018).

with an introduction by Theo Du

A quiet explosion captured on film, coming from master filmmaker Edward Yang. This week we delve a bit into the fascinating world of Taiwanese New Wave with a lesser known work by the director of Yi Yi (2000) and A Brighter Summer Day (1991), with a cinematic jigsaw that packs a hell of a punch. A failing marriage intertwined with petty criminals all cruising through the streets of '80s Taipei. With police cars punctuating everything, whose only purpose seem be an unwilling participant of metropolitan cacophony. Modernity has never been dissected in such bombastic way, or understated way, all depending on how you interpret the ending. Join us for a fascinating slice of the cynical humanism beautifully composed on the big screen!

with an introduction by Lilly Henssge

Three years before The Matrix would leave its mark on the film industry and pop culture at large, sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski made their directorial debut with sensual neo-noir thriller Bound, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as two lovers scheming to con the Mafia. Far from the multi-million dollar production of a studio franchise, Bound was shot on a tighter budget with no major stars to its name. Despite its reduced scale, the film quickly became a cult favorite and a standout achievement in queer cinema, both making use of and cleverly subverting genre clichés. Filled with sex and violence, Bound – in typical Wachowski fashion – manages to explore the nuances of identity in a way that was clearly ahead of its time.

with an introduction by Fien Limburg and Aram Isaac

The alcoholic novelist Gerard (Jeroen Krabbé), prone to lugubrious premonitions of death begins an affair with the androgynous wealthy widow Christine (Renée Soutendijk) and develops a sexual fixation on her boyfriend Herman (Thom Hoffman). After discovering her three last husbands died in gruesome accidents, Gerard’s morbid hallucinations start to bleed into reality as he succumbs to the superstition that Christine might be a witch. Verhoeven’s final Dutch film before continuing his career in Hollywood is a stylishly lurid occult thriller, teeming with morbid catholic imagery and dripping with bisexual eroticism. Generously endowed with the typical Verhoevian flourish, this spellbinding mystery effortlessly alternates between the alluring and the repulsive, between the ridiculous and the profound.

with an introduction by Marein van den Heuvel

"The goal of the film," says producer Mark Magidson, "was to reach past language. nationality, religion and politics and speak to the inner viewer." Baraka explores the human condition by taking viewers on a photographic odyssey through time and space. For some, Baraka is the definition of  'pure cinema' as there is no dialogue throughout this striking documentary; it is only the soundtrack in combination with clever editing of its beautiful imagery in which meaning is created. This unique style cause cultures to intertwine, beauty and destruction to collide and shows how all around the world we experience this same abstract feeling which is known as the essence of life. Come and experience this unique journey at film club as this is a documentary you must see on a big screen with a good audio system!

with an introduction by Martina Furlan

A scream of revolt against every institution. The striking, cruel debut film of Marco Bellocchio rages with anger and desperation against family, Catholicism, and other cornerstones of the Italian bourgeoisie. Wild, sarcastic, autobiographical, shot in the countryside near Bobbio, the film exhibits a rebellious and antisocial protagonist. Bellocchio anticipates some of the moods of the protests of 1968 by balancing acceptance and detachment. Almost sixty years later, Fists in the Pocket still maintains its modernity and corrosive energy. 

An angry revolt from the inside of the bourgeois scope. It reminds me of Ginsberg's poetry: completely outside of every school of thought, political tendencies, ideologies that have characterized Italian cinema up to now. 

–  Pier Paolo Pasolini

with an introduction by Blandine Joret

“Wanting happiness is already happiness” – join us this Thursday for our first film of the year, Lola (1961) by Jacques Demy! We’re starting in a nouvelle vague romantic kind of way, with Demy’s feature debut which in several ways shaped the universe for so many of his future films and characters. 

Set in Demy’s hometown, the seaport city of Nantes, Lola tells the intertwined stories of young girls and single mothers, sailors and high school lovers – of coming and going, and arriving just in time. Lola is a cabaret singer awaiting the return of Michel, who left to the USA only to return a rich man. Will she resist the hopeless avances of her old lover Michel or the American sailor Frankie? 

Between the French new wave and Hollywood musicals, with the classic cinematography of Raoul Coutard and the charming performance of Anouk Aimee: come and experience this blend of everyday reality with longed-for fairy tales!

(part of our series Filmmaking Through Her Eyes)

with an introduction by Lilly Henssge

Director Kirsten Johnson puts together a collage of her life and career as a cinematographer in her autobiographical documentary Cameraperson. A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Johnson creates a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career. Through the juxtaposition of moments and situations that have personally affected her, she meditates about the relationship between filmmaker and their subjects, objectivity and the intervention of the camera. Johnson leads us on a personal journey about the craft of filmmaking and human connection. 

(part of our series Filmmaking Through Her Eyes)

with an introduction by Blandine Joret

After Paris Is Burning, we’re adding another classic in New Queer Cinema to our program! With her debut feature film The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye examines the historical caricature of the “mammy”: a black, often overweight older woman working and nursing in white households. As one of the most persisting racial stereotypes in general, the mammy has been for a long time the primary role performed by black women in mainstream film history. 

Cheryl, an aspiring black lesbian filmmaker working in a video store, is making a documentary about a black actress from the 1930s who was typecast, credited only as “the watermelon woman.” While uncovering the meaning of her life, Cheryl simultaneously experiences an upheaval on her own. 

Dunye’s work is characterized by a unique blend of fiction and documentary, addressing issues of LGBTQIA+ and racism in an often penetratingly humorous and intelligent manner. Not only is The Watermelon Woman a classic within the New Queer Cinema movement, it is also a pioneer of the mockumentary genre. 

(part of our series Filmmaking Through Her Eyes)

with an introduction by Fien Limburg 

Agnès Varda, seminal feminist filmmaker and innovator of the rive gauche of the French New Wave, paint an intimate and lovingly rendered portrait of the childhood of her husband and fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy. The film, released a year after the death of Demy, combines a recreation of the early years of the filmmaker in Occupied France and his passion for the art of cinema combined with documentary interludes of Demy himself and excerpts from his films. A reimagination of a loved one’s recollections, the film is an ode to filmmaking and falling in love with seventh art.

with an introduction by Grace Childs

The dazzling world of a glamorous Italian fashion house is slashed open when a masked killer begins to dispatch off the staff of models and designers. Now the dirty laundry of this cast of enigmatic characters is brought to light, but who is hiding the biggest secret; the identity of the murderer, and who will be their next ill-fated victim? Mario Bava’s brutal take on the Agatha Christie inspired murder mystery has become an essential Giallo classic, forever changing the visual aesthetics of the genre on film. With its shocking viciousness and its stunning colours, this early entry in the cinematic canon became a definitive sacred text of the genre that still holds up in its own right to this day.

An artist, cultural critic, filmmaker, writer and professor, Hito Steyerl is one of the most significant and influential figures in contemporary art. She operates on the boundary between film and visual art, working in genres ranging from documentary cinema to innovative multimedia installations. Her rigorously researched and visually stunning installations illuminate some of the most pressing issues of our time. So if you want to extend your experience on what visual arts could teach us, then this is an exhibition you really do not want to miss out on!

with an introduction by Martina Furlan

Known as the master of modern cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the seventh art by focusing more on the form and less on the narrative. With his famous trilogy of alienation L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962), he struck for stylistic perfection and came to be defined as “the eye that changed cinema”. Key to his cinematic achievements was his relationship with Monica Vitti – featured in all of the films of the trilogy – who embodied different encapsulations of discontent, estrangement and incommunicability. The last film of the trilogy, L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and initiates a doomed relationship with a vital young man (Alain Delon). The city of Rome and its architecture – a combination of classical Roman buildings and the modern EUR neighborhood – serve as a backdrop for the exploration of the decadence of modernity and its effects.

with an introduction by Aram Isaac

Amsterdam. The city famous for its beautiful canals. But be aware, there might be evil lurking underneath the water. At night he’ll search for his next victim and leave without a trace. Director Dick Maas popularized the so-called Nether-horror with his cult classic Amsterdamned. When a serial killer terrorizes the city, officer Eric Visser (Huub Stapel) is out to catch him. But what is he after? Is it even human? 

with an introduction by Fien Limburg 

Before the seminal Un Chien Andalou (1929) there was Germaine Dulac’s surrealist feat La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928): A hallucinatory voyage through the psyche of a clergyman, tormented by visions of death and lust as he grapples with his sexual fixation on the general’s wife. Reportedly met by a riot upon its release, the film is a pioneering example of early feminist avant-garde experimentation. The screening will be paired with Dulac’s short Arabesque (1929): a visual poem of kaleidoscopic imagery, laid bare in its abstracted beauty.

Both La Coquille et le Clergyman and Arabesque was accompanied by a live performance of an original electronic score provided by Hypochondriac Resonators.

with an introduction by Caitlyn van Doorn

The Full Monty is an uplifting British comedy about what it was like to live in Sheffield during the 90s amid a country-wide recession. The film centres around unemployed and divorced Gaz, played by Robert Carlyle, who needs to find money so he can keep seeing his son. As the real dad he is, he devises an outrageous plan to earn a lot of money with the help of a few mates. The rest is for you to find out so come experience the ludicrous lengths these men are willing to go to in order to make ends meet.

with an introduction by Riley Gold

George Kuchar (1942–2011), a prolific American underground filmmaker, spent over a decade visiting El Reno, Oklahoma during tornado season. He documents these trips in an eccentric series called the Weather Diaries. While Kuchar does experience multiple storms firsthand—as well as records how the storms are mediated across radio, television, and newspaper—he spends most of his time waiting around for something to happen. 

We screened Wild Night in El Reno (1977), a sort of Weather Diaries prologue shot on film, followed by the VHS experimentations of Weather Diary 3 (1988) and Weather Watch (1991).

with an introduction by Bogna Bochinska

What would you do, if one day an air conditioner fell on your head? This is a real struggle for citizens of Luanda in Fradique’s directorial debut Air Conditioner. In this magical realist tale, we follow Matacedo, a superintendent of an apartment complex, who embarks on a journey to retrieve his boss’s AC unit from a shady repair shop across the street. The mission is not easy as he not only has other duties to fulfill but also has to navigate this strange new world of falling ACs and post-war realities.

with an introduction by Lilly Henssge

Considered a pearl of 1960's South Korean cinema, The Housemaid eludes any simple genre classification. Gut-wrenching yet spellbinding, the film is about a man's affair with his family's housemaid which leads to dark consequences. What follows is a torrid tale of forbidden love, sexual aggression, blackmail, and, ultimately, murder. Ki-young handles this contorted plot with such assured brazenness—mixing social critique with elements of horror and grotesque—that it’s hard not see The Handmaid as a model for all Korean horror made since.

with an introduction by Aram Isaac

Things go badly for a hack director and film crew when shooting a low budget zombie movie in an abandoned WWII Japanese facility. 

The movie is fun and highly creative as it involves the personal lives of the real cast and crew of the One Cut of the Dead production as they prepare to make the one-shot take.

with an introduction by Patricia Pisters

15-year-old Mia is facing an overwhelming transformation which calls her entire existence into question. She questions whether she was adopted; she questions her body; she questions everything about her. Her body is changing radically, and despite desperate attempts to halt the process, she is soon forced to accept that nature is far more powerful than her. 

with an introduction by Aram Isaac

The film tells the story of a Schizophrenic young woman (Andersson) vacationing with her family on a remote island, during which time she experiences delusions about meeting God, who ultimately appears to her in the form of a monstrous spider. Her author father attempts to use her illness in his work, and her brother struggles with sexual frustration. In this film, we explore art, psychosis and sexuality altogether.

with an introduction by Martina Furlan and Marein van den Heuvel

Described by film critics as a helpful paradigm for Lynch's narrative sense, Six Men Getting Sick is a one-minute animation of a painting by David Lynch himself looped four times and accompanied by a soundtrack of a siren wailing. 

The Alphabet combines animation and live action and goes on for four minutes. It contains a simple narrative structure relating a symbolically rendered expression of a fear of learning.

In a similar way to The Alphabet, The Grandmother also combines live action and animation as the story revolves around a boy who grows a grandmother to escape neglect and abuse from his parents.

Premonition Following an Evil Deed is a bizarre, silent short film about what appears to be an abduction of a girl. 

Rabbits is a 2002 series of eight short horror web films and it depicts three humanoid rabbits in a living room, within a single box set. Their disjointed conversations evoke mystery and thoughts.

with an introduction by Fien Limburg 

Design for Living (Lubitsch, 1933) tells the story of a sophisticated albeit romantic relationship between three people starting on a train. Charming gal-of-fortune Gilda meets handsome playwright Tom Chambers and even more handsome artist George Curtis. The sparks between the three characters are both fun and silly! 

Gilda cannot decide between two men who love her, and the trio agree to try living together in a platonic friendly relationship. There are a lot of revolutionary ideas and details that make the film far ahead of the time. Don't you want to find out?

with an introduction by Theo Du

In this film, we follow a Korean-born man who finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his architect father is in a coma. The man meets a young woman who wants to stay in Columbus with her mother, a recovering addict, instead of pursuing her own dreams.

Casey decides to move on after a discovery of her mother being untrustworthy. Casey wants to pursue her dream as she stopped holding herself back from the reality and her mother's condition. This is a great break through from herself.

with an introduction by Patricia Pisters 

When Camiel, a gay dentist, and Simon, a carefree café owner, collide in a traffic accident, their lives become intrinsically entangled. When they bump into each other fourteen years later, Simon is severely ill. Camiel experiences at close range how Simon and those around him come to terms. 

Some consider this a modern Dutch cinema classic. “Propaganda,” Terstall admits: “propaganda for a progressive, liberal society.” 

with an introduction by Kseniia Bespalova

In the late-1990s squalid town of Nalchik, a poor young Jewish couple is kidnapped and a grievous ransom is demanded, as bitter resentments and cruel dilemmas come to light, magnifying the small community’s grave predicament.

with an introduction by Blandine Joret 

During the winter we paired two summertime short films by Erik Kerssen: Zomerjurk and Waterlichamen (both 2021) by Erik, alumnus of our programme, followed by Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991). A truly iconic documentary of drag nights among New York’s underclass. Queens are interviewed and observed preparing for and competing in many ‘balls’. The people, the clothes, and the whole environment are outlandish.

While critically acclaimed to this day, the film also raised eyebrows about the positions we take or are given when making or watching a film. We’ll have much to see and talk about, so join us for a discussion on lgbtq+ club and ball culture, the performative, spectacle and representation, identities and the gaze.

with an introduction by Blandine Joret

Chantal Akerman: pioneer of the female gaze, auteur of the intimate, director of the quotidian. In Je tu il elle (1974), dramatic tension builds gradually but systematically with each gesture, within and between each frame. 

Through her characteristic experiment with time and duration, Akerman gives us a coming-of-age performance film that, despite its realist style, defies literal readings. Today still, it’s an eye-opening icon of queer cinema: a must-see, an exercise in looking! 

with an introduction by Kirsten van der Holt

With film-theatre memories from last week fresh in our minds, we’re screening Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). In between meals at Le Hollandais, Georgina tricks her abusive husband with romantic escapes to the bathroom until gastronomy turns into murder.  

This is not for the faint of stomach: expect dark humor, profanity and violence, but also cinematic spectacle, aesthetic pleasure and political irony. Always provocative and controversial, you either love or hate Greenaway: so, let’s see what’s cooking!  

“All about theatre about film” is a celebration of the set, staging, the light, acting and scripting: a celebration of everything that ties the theatre to film, and vice versa. Known for their large-scale film-to-stage productions, Eye invited theatre/scenographer duo Ivo van Hove and Jan Versweyveld to stage their fall exhibition. The result is an all-encompassing experience that blends film form with unconventional theatre: come and immerse yourself in the sounds, the film fragments, the outtakes, the props and sets of this Amsterdam based and internationally acclaimed avant-garde theatre duo!

with an introduction by Bogna Bochinska

Innocent Sorcerers (1960) gives us the jazzy soundtrack and crisp imagery of “boy meets girl”, playing hard to get while taking the game of seduction quite literally! 

with an introduction by Blandine Joret 

A plunge into the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn in the seventies, the film bursts with colour, rhythm and life. Following Troy along her journey through the streets of her home, she's truly one of the most iconic children of the cinema! 

An exploration of cinema's manifestation in a different form, the filmmakers — Lucrecia Martel (South America), Leopold Emmen (Europe), Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (Africa), Carlos Reygadas (North America) and Jia Zhang-ke (Asia) — were each invited to make a work for the exhibition that exploits the three-dimensional gallery space rather than the two-dimensional cinema screen. For some of them, it was the first time they had created a cinematographic installation that explores the boundaries of their work and of the art of film in general.

Since we screened films by Lucrecia Martel and Jia Zhangke (also included in the expo) it’s going to be interesting to see how their work translates into the exhibition context.

with an introduction by Blandine Joret 

In the spirit of the French New Wave but firmly in the nineties, Leos Carax spirals around the complexities of a troubled love story shot in the streets of Paris.

with an introduction by Catherine Lord and Patricia Pisters

a uniquely cinematic adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, deemed “unmakable” at first. Tilda Swinton’s majestic performance takes us on a gender-bending time-travel through 4 centuries, an impressive visual spectacle that speaks to you directly.

with an introduction by Hemen Heidari

We’re back in the car, around Tehran this time, as we follow Mr. Badii around seeking a helping hand in his planned suicide. Characteristic of Kiarostami’s style, the film is a minimalist meditation on major political, philosophical and ethical themes.