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 approa
Dutch director and screenwriter Marleen Gorris has several respected and commercially successful feature-film credits to her name?all of which express her abiding interest in women-centered stories and feminist issues. Her work treats themes of female identity, strength, and solidarity in the face of male oppression and exploitation, though she leavens them with sharp doses of wry, self-reflective humor. Interestingly, Gorris freely acknowledges her feminist perspective, ?both by temperament and intellect,? and that her films inevitably are influenced by that perspective, but she denies tha
There is a famous story recounted by Time magazine?s Richard Corliss in a 1980 essay on Robert Flaherty. Helen van Dongen, working as the editor of the filmmaker?s The Land, showed him a sequence she had cut together and he fervently disapproved. A few days later she screened the same sequence for him and he said ?Now you?ve got it.? Van Dongen proved ably up to the task of working with Flaherty, transmuting the director?s seemingly random and chaotic footage into, as Corliss writes, ?a brilliant ?as told to? autobiography. If [Flaherty?s] spirit informed their project, th
