Still: Glass, My Unfulfilled Life - Rogier Kappers

At the age of 52, Rogier Kappers is having a mid-life crisis. He is at an age when he thinks all aspects of his life should now be in place. And in some ways they are. He has two lovely (if dryly critical) teenage sons. He has a place in the country (albeit built on uncertain ground) and he maintains close and loving relationships with his mum and dad, despite their being separated. 

But as is suggested in the film’s title, he is feeling unfulfilled. He is lacking both female company and a future pension. He seems to be quite smart but he is feeling burned out and lethargic, and eyeing up a very uncertain future without guaranteed income. He would like to own a cow, but he acknowledges this to be naïve as cows are herd animals and don’t function well on their own.

As Kappers tells SEE NL, the man in the film is an exaggerated version of himself, but also “everyman, we all have thoughts and crises,” and the whole thing is driven by the sentiments that appear on the poster for Taxi Driver.

“On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody. He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he's alive.” 

But there is hope. Rogier possesses a talent for music (he plays amateur piano and a bit of accordion) as well as a craftsman’s ability to create things from scratch, and so he sets out to build an instrument he has been obsessed with since his telly-watching youth. 

A glass organ is an array of vessels, connected to a hard board, filled with varying measures of water which determine the musical pitch when the player strokes his fingers across their rims. The resulting sound can be both eerie and mesmeric and, as we see in the film, lends itself equally to the music of Bach, ABBA and The Beatles.

So Rogier embarks upon an odyssey with his glass organ, which takes him to a Dubai street art festival, the squares of Amsterdam and eventually, a whole seven years later, to the possibility of a 12,000 seater arena gig with a 70-piece orchestra behind him.

Kappers explains the longstanding appeal of the instrument. “I liked the sound of it and also that it's so unexplored, that you can really discover things with it…It's also so nice to discover which music sounds nice on it…but I have to be honest, what I miss is the bass. It's a very high sound.” 

That said, the instrument’s limitations don’t stop him from playing The House of The Rising Sun (The Animals), Toccata in Fugue (Bach) and Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas. He is currently learning Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), the final song in Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle. “Basically, it's about a busker who's going around with a hurdy-gurdy instrument, traveling around and being lonely and living only for the music.  So I can identify quite well with that,” Kappers reflects.

The director is also an avowed fan of the revered Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose compositions play well on the glass organ. The genial Pärt appears in the film only to gently decline the director’s suggestion of a collaboration over the glasses. 

Was Kappers nervous playing in front of vast audiences with an orchestra behind him? “With 12,000 people, it's a very general connection you have with the audience. But with 30 people, it's very intimate and very different,” he responds. “But what I really liked about playing in a complete orchestra was being part of a collective, evaporating your own ego.”

Kappers’s most notable film to date might be Lomax the Songhunter, for which he won a Golden Calf in 2004 and an Emmy nomination, “but for me, personally, Glass, My Unfulfilled Life feels like me getting to the core of what I want tell in film,” he says. “In it, I really have said everything I would like to say about music, about being moved by it and the deep, deep fulfillment and drive I get from it.”

“The film is about all these existential questions we all have; love, how to be happy, how to be someone meaningful or what to do with your life, what to dream about, and what the purpose of life actually is,” Kappers continues. “My father says at the end of the film that it's art which makes life worth living. For me, this film is built on a lot of layers. It's a kind of fulfillment of what I would like to do, what I can say or how I feel about life, and all its difficulties. In my film, everything about life is there.”

“It is about a man in midlife crisis confronted with all these existential thoughts and feelings we all can have,” he further underlines. “The aim of our production company Zelovic Film is to make very personal films and get rid of this ugly term 'ego documentary.’ The more personal the story, the more universal it is in the end.”

IDFA takes place on November 8 - 19. For more information, click here.