7 May 2007

The Dutch filmmaker unites in her works the high formal standards of the trained photographer with an intensive and incisive interest in people who find themselves in precarious, often extreme situations. While her early work is more experimental, she turned to the documentary format after a brief interlude, the Pall Mall commercial Blue Highway.

Whether observing people living in a Bosnian-Croatian refugee camp who finally look at themselves in the mirror again after an entire year has passed, in her 1996 film Sa nule, or letting residents of the Sangatte refugee camp have the floor in Britanya (which won an award at Oberhausen in 2004), Boonstra always merges an extraordinary cinematic density with the concentrated scrutiny of the individual, leaving the protagonists their dignity while challenging her viewers to react.

The programme:

Realiteit-Surrealiteit, 1983, 5'

Kosmopolitana, 1985, 15'

Blue Highway, 1991, 5'

Sa Nule, 1996, 9'

Britanya, 2003, 35'

Gadzo, Gadze, 2004, 6'

7 May 2007 at the Lichtburg Filmpalast

Contact: Carsten Spicher