An exceptional film about the Dutch filmmaker Johan van der Keuken, some time before his death.

It isn’t easy to make a film about a filmmaker: the intention and the narrative must be equal to the subject, and when the subject is Johan van der Keuken, one can easily imagine the risk that Thierry Nouel took when embarking on this endeavour. In order to give himself every chance of success, Nouel opted for simplicity: to help us enter the special world of the Dutch filmmaker he conducted three long interviews in which van der Keuken talks very freely and also very simply about his forty years of professional activity; many film excerpts illustrate his words.

The portrait of an original artist, Nouel’s documentary is also a film about the cinema: Van der Keuken’s words reveal his personal “recipes”, but they are also a real lesson in cinema. They are all the more valuable since the filmmaker died not long afterwards, in 2001 (the film dates from 1999). An exceptional document on the work of a great artist.