_{The Treasures of the Crimea by Oeke Hoogendijk}

One, The Treasures Of The Crimea** (a world premiere in the festival’s Frontlight section) is another of her art-based documentaries, following on from the earlier masterworks, My Rembrandt** and The New Rijksmuseum*.

The new film chronicles a very strange, very vexed dispute between Crimea and Ukraine in which the Netherlands became the little piggy caught in the middle. A 2014 exhibition of Crimean art works had been taking place in Amsterdam at exactly the moment that Crimea was annexed by Russia under its leader Vladimir Putin. The Dutch had to decide where to return the works, a dilemma that ended up being resolved in court.

The second new film, Housewitz, in Envision Competition and which has been many years in the making, is a far more personal affair. This is Hoogendijk’s portrait of her mother, Lous Hoogendijk-de Jong (1926-2020), a Holocaust survivor who was an agoraphobic. In the film, she never ventures out of her apartment.

Using webcam footage as well as interviews, Hoogendijk shows her mother as an imperious but very vulnerable Robinson Crusoe-like figure, stranded for much of the time in her own little world with only her cat for company. Both films will be distributed by Mokum in the Netherlands.

Did the projects overlap? “That is easy to answer. I have been working for 15 years on Housewitz, the film of my mother. So there have been many overlaps. That is only logical. I have been working on the Crimea project since 2014 and the annexation by Putin.”

The director felt she could not complete Housewitz while her mother was still alive. Lous was a formidable personality with very strong opinions who would have made it clear to her daughter just how she wanted the film to turn out.

“I think my mother and I were very interwoven. Our relation was… co-dependency. I started [the documentary] because what I was experiencing in the relationship with her was very, very overwhelming. When I started looking at my mother as a character in a film, that sort of gave me more air.”

“I think she is a magnificent character for a film,” Hoogendijk adds. “As a mother, it is a different story! It [the film] was a wonderful way to make some space between us. I do not think she saw it, but for me it was like that.”

Lous was incarcerated both in Theresienstadt and Westerbork concentration camps. Hoogendijk was around 12 years old when she discovered what had happened to her mother during the war. “As in many families, she did not talk about it. But I remember precisely, we were sitting in the car - she was outside the house in that period - and she was driving. I started asking about grandparents. She broke down and cried while driving.”

The title is intended as a bit of a pun. One way her mother relaxed in her solitude was by listening to very trippy house music.

As for the editing, that came almost as a relief. She was free to cut the film in the way she wanted - and not to have her mother tell her what to. “My mother was a very intriguing but also dominant person. For once in my life [in the editing room], I had the experience I could make her do things instead of the other way round.”

Hoogendijk faced a complete different set of challenges in making a film as personal as Housewitz to those that confront her when she is dealing with the art world. “But you should not forget my first two films had the subject of the Holocaust (The Saved, 1998 and The Holocaust Experience, 2002). But, yes, of course, it is totally different when you make a film on your own mother. I was aware of that. But some things you make from an urge. From the moment I started filming her, there was some sort of release.”

The director makes many different kinds of films. It is a misconception, she insists, to think that she is obsessed only with art and the inner workings of museums. Nonetheless, she excels at unravelling the secret workings of big art institutions. In the case of the Crimean “gold" story, there were levels of complexity that may not have been apparent at first glance.

To most westerners, this seemed like a straightforward case. Putin and the Russians were the aggressors. For the Dutch to return the art works to the Crimean museums would be to overlook their belligerent behaviour. As Hoogendijk’s film shows, the situation was actually very complex both from a political and moral point of view.

The Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, the venue where the exhibition had taken place, did not want to collaborate with Hoogendijk. The Dutch museum staff were wary and defensive. The filmmaker therefore spent more time with the Crimeans and the Ukrainians.

Where did her own sympathies lie? “I think everybody who would have been in my shoes, if you had seen all of them, you could not be anything else but very sorry for the museum directors [in Crimea] who lose their collection. It is like one woman says in the film: ‘this is our life.’ Everybody is so involved in what they have in their collection. It is like we [in the Netherlands] are losing The Night Watch by Rembrandt. That is their life. On the other hand, when I spoke to Maarten Sanders, the lawyer representing Ukraine, he convinced me also in a way.”

Hoogendijk’s reference to Rembrandt is a reminder that she is working on another long-term art-related project, about the restoration of The Night Watch. She also has yet another film nearing completion, Light, about the staging of the epic opera ‘Licht’ by Karlheinz Stockhausen. This week, though, her attention will be on the two new IDFA world premieres. What is more, she will be competing against herself as both her films are eligible for the Best Dutch Film award.

Housewitz and The Treasures of the Crimea are produced by Discours Film and Zeppers Film respectively. 
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive