SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER | 14:30 | SCREENING | CARTE BLANCHE TO WENDELIEN ...

For her carte blanche screening, Wendelien van Oldentgorh has chosen two of her recent films and will be in conversation with Julian Ross – Head of Film Programming & Distribution at Eye Filmmuseum –, offering the audience a unique insight on her film practice.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Obsada | Exp. documentary | 4k | colour | 0:34:23 | Netherlands / Japan | 2021

Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Reading Group | Exp. documentary | 4k | colour | 0:26:36 | Netherlands / Germany, USA | 2025

Runing time (screening and conversation): 1:50:00

Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Obsada | Exp. documentary | 4k | colour | 0:34:23 | Netherlands / Japan | 2021

The Polish word ‘obsada’ means ‘film cast’ but can also mean ‘working party’ - it connotes the distribution of work positions as well as placing of a plant in the ground. Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s obsada, is a collaboration with an all-female film crew, who are at the same time the film’s cast. It is an attempt to propose non-patriarchal narratives and methods of work. Involving a group of MA and PhD students from the Lodz Film School, the change they strive for does not consist simply in replacing men with women in film production; rather, the work develops in an open and improvised process – sensitive to the context of the place and the polyphony of the team. The women’s individual and collective experiences resonate with locations in the Film School and in Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Reading Group | Exp. documentary | 4k | colour | 0:26:36 | Netherlands / Germany, USA | 2025

The film Reading Group zooms into and interweaves three independent bookshops in Berlin and Honolulu - Hopscotch, Khan Aljanub, Native Books - each of which offers the nourishment for mind and spirit as well as a pu’uhonua (sanctuary, refuge or safe space) via a reading group and other forms of gathering for those whose practices move towards alternatives to the current colonial state structure of governance. Posing a question of ways in which revolution can take place and other ways of governing beyond statehood, the film also brings together activists and researchers from Palestine and Hawai'i, the places of different yet shared histories of colonial violence and oppression, for a potentially revolutionary reading group of transnational solidarity in the interchanging space of pō (darkness) and ao (light).

Biography Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. With these works, always shown in specially developed architectural settings, she shows widely in the art and museum context. Recent solo presentations include: Dance Floor as study Room 2024/25 at YCAM, Yamaguchi; unset on-set at Museum of Contemporary art Tokyo (MOT) 2022/23, tono lengua boca at CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Her work was recently included in Delinking and Relinking, collection presentation van Abbemuseum 2021-2026; Sonsbeek 20->24,, Arnhem 2021; of bread, wine, cars, security and peace… at Kunsthalle Wien, 2020; Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Singapore Biennial 2019. Her films Two Stones (2019), Hier. (2021), of girls (2023) and A Prelude (2025) premiered in the International Competition of FID Marseille.

Van Oldenborgh is a member of the (Dutch) Society for Arts and a recipient of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (2014).

Biography Julian Ross

Julian Ross is Head of Film Programming & Distribution at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2024, he was co-programmer (with Sophie Cavoulacos) of Doc Fortnight 2024 at The Museum of Modern Art, co-programmer (with May Adadol Ingawanij) of the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar at Thai Film Archive, co-curator of the group exhibition Community of Images at the Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, a member of the selection committee at Villa Medici Film Festival, and curator of the film programme for Engawa at Centro de Arte Moderna - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.