1973: Eigen Haard is Goud Waard (short). 1974: Overloop is Sloop (short). 1975: Van Brood Alleen Kan een Mens Niet Leven (short). 1976: Een Schijntje Vrijheid (short). 1978: Het Bosplan (short). 1979: Politiewerk (short). 1980: Kakafonische Notities (short). 1982: Golven (The Waves) (+ scenarist/scriptwriter). 1983: Giovanni (+ scenarist/scriptwriter). 1984: Projekties. 1985: Ornithopter. 1988: Reis Zonder Einde. 1990: Krokodillen in Amsterdam (Crocodiles in Amsterdam) (+ co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1993: Naarden Vesting. 1994: Een Winter in Zuiderwoude (A Winter in Zuiderwoude) (documentary, short) (+ scenarist/scriptwriter, editor); Wakers en Dromers (Wakers and Dreamers) (documentary) (+ scenarist/scriptwriter, editor). 1996: Het is de Schraapzucht, Gentlemen (for TV) (+ scenarist/scriptwriter).
1995: Laagland (Entius?for TV) (scenario adviser).
1973?made first film, Eigen Haard is Goud Waard; 1973 to about 1980?made documentaries with the Amsterdam City Newsreel collective; 1982?gained recognition for her first full-length feature film, Golven; 1990?released best-known film, Krokodillen in Amsterdam.
The Netherlands, 1949.
Graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam, 1972.
Filmmaker Annette Apon is well known in the Netherlands, though her work is generally unknown in the United States. She has directed several low-budget, long and short films?both fiction and documentary, but is known primarily for her documentary work. In addition, she has written extensively on the subject of film and is a co-founder of the serious film journal Skrien, as well as a co-founder of the Amsterdam City Newsreel collective. In general, her films feature clever styles and structures that refuse familiar narrative conventions in favor of more personal, experimental approaches that combine realism and antirealism.
After spending seven years making documentaries with the Amsterdam City Newsreel collective, Apon garnered critical praise for her first full-length feature film, Golven, in which she returned to the experimental forms of her earlier short films. Adapted from Virginia Woolf?s novel The Waves, it was praised by critics who predicted that it heralded a promising career for Apon. Set in the 1920s, Golven is a decidedly low-key, yet fascinating, exploration of the thoughts and feelings of six people, on the verge of adulthood, as they prepare for and attend a farewell dinner party for the mysterious Percival, an important figure in each of their lives. Their varied personalities, lost hopes, insecurities, mixed emotions, and ambitions are conveyed via their thoughts, which are related in offscreen and on-screen monologues set in the present. The film?s performances are especially interesting, inasmuch as the acting is mostly confined to facial expression.
The central element of Apon?s absorbing second full-length feature film, Giovanni (funded in part by the Netherlands?s Film Fund), is a Rome hotel room, in which a fashion photographer is staying for work and to look for a man she once knew?Giovanni. The film?s clever conceit is that the camera remains trained on the hotel room even when the photographer is gone, thus revealing a motley assortment of events?from the room?s changing light and sounds, to the maid and valet who go through her things, and a trysting couple who briefly spend time there. Eventually, even Giovanni visits, but the photographer is destined to miss the note he leaves, as a man with a gun wound climbs into and out of her room, thus making the police suspicious about her and her untidy room. The film ends compellingly anticlimactically, with the photographer?s departure after less than 48 hours as the maid prepares the room for the next guests.
In the United States, Crocodiles in Amsterdam is Apon?s best-known feature film, in which she wittily crafts a distinctly fantastic world where it seems that crocodiles could indeed roam through Amsterdam. Critics were generally enthusiastic, appreciating in particular its wacky sense of fun and humor, as well as its crafty reworking of the conventions of the buddy movie so as to feature lesbians. One critic characterized the film as a ?whimsical allegory of lesbian desire.? It is indeed a quirky comedy, which follows an unlikely couple on a series of wild adventures. Politically committed Nina wants to attack a bomb factory but her plans are thwarted by Gino?s impetuous ideas. Consequently, their shaky relationship seems on the verge of an explosive dissolution.
Another noteworthy Apon film is A Winter in Zuiderwoude, a short black-and-white documentary that has been characterized as a study of the Dutch winter in variations of white, black, and gray. Entirely without interviews, voice-over narration, or dialogue, the film provides a fascinating portrait of a Dutch landscape throughout several cold winter months. Filmed with a static camera that shows a changing exterior of snow and freezing weather, as well as a collection of cows in their snug sheds waiting impatiently for spring.
Wakers and Dreamers is another documentary that focuses on the Dutch landscape, in this case, to explore the way that the Netherlands?s many dikes shape the landscape and enrich the Dutch language. The function of dikes to control water by keeping it in or keeping it out, serves as a metaphor for society?s unrelenting urge to likewise channel and regulate. Thus, people craft a set of fish stairs to accommodate fish that are unable to swim upstream, but they erect barriers against the ?flood? of foreign immigrants into the Netherlands. Indeed, as Apon?s film suggests, both protest and contradiction are essential parts of the urge to create.
Although her films are not as well-known as those of her contemporary, Marleen Gorris, Apon?s films have been screened internationally on the film festival circuit, including Berlin; Films de Femmes in Cr?teil, France; Montreal Women?s Film Festival; and New York and San Francisco?s International Lesbian and Gay film festivals.?