_{Bregtje van der Haak}

Bregtje van der Haak is 12 days into her new job as director of EYE Filmmuseum on the day she speaks to SEE NL - and she is delighted to be there.

“I love this place. I think it’s a wonderful institution. I think it’s unique in the world,” the journalist and documentary filmmaker enthuses of her new working life in the sleek, white modernist building that opened in 2012 on the northern bank of the river IJ, just opposite Amsterdam’s Centraal Station.

And, no, Van der Haak is not looking to make wholesale changes. She sees her task more as “building on and preserving” the legacy of her predecessor, Sandra den Hamer. “Maybe we can open it [the museum] up even more, to more people who can step in and enjoy it. For me, the beautiful thing about film is that it is the most democratic art form. Everyone has a film memory, a film experience - a formative experience with film.”

It’s a mere 10-minute walk (or 3 minutes on a bike) from the museum to the collection building. This houses 55,000 films, 20% of them digitised. “I think the programmes being put together by the six curators in the collection building can be made more visible and available here [in the museum], more like a library, and in special film programmes about the unexpected finds and pearls in the collection” the new EYE boss suggests.

Van der Haak herself has done research at the collection for her forthcoming documentary project Twin, following twin boys born in Palermo in 2016 from an Eritrean mother. They barely survived but are now almost seven. Over the next seven years, she will be spending some time with them, filming them as their lives develop.

“They [the EYE board] did like the idea to have a filmmaker in the position as director and they agreed it would be good to continue,” she explains why she is carrying on with the project.

Van der Haak has a rich and intriguing background. Not only is she a filmmaker. She trained as a dancer and has also studied law and political science.

As for the dancing, that was something she did when she was young. “When I was 18, I wanted to go to Paris and be a professional dancer. I went to school there but after one year I was a little bit bored. I was also really not the best. And I saw so many other interesting things going on, including film!”

Still, the dancing has helped her. It gave her discipline, a work ethic, and “the deep realisation that you have not only a mind but also a body. Some forms of filmmaking, like VR, are also showing more awareness of the bodily experience of film. That is something that interests me. As a museum, I think we can experiment with that.”

The new EYE director is now looking forward to EYE’s hugely ambitious exhibition and film programme ‘Werner Herzog: The Ecstatic Truth,’ celebrating the work of the visionary German director who has recently turned 80. This comes to Amsterdam from the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin.

How will Van der Haak strike a balance between artistic excellence at the Eye and making the museum as popular and accessible to a mass audience as possible?

“I think Sandra [den Hamer] has trodden that line very well and I think we can make many different kinds of people very welcome here. It is possible not to be everything to everyone but it is possible to be many different things to many different people,” Van der Haak suggests, pointing out that a screening of archival movies from Central Asia organised by artist Saodat Ismailova (the subject of a current art exhibition and retrospective art eat EYE) was completely sold out - and so was the Sunday morning programme for kids aged from 2 to 6 (or “lovers of film in the making,” as the EYE director describes them).

Furthermore, Van der Haak wants to make the EYE building itself yet more welcoming to the public. “Some people feel intimidated or impeded by the stairs and the way up to the ‘altar of film’ and I think we can open up some of the spaces on the waterfront, maybe have a VR space there, and have multiple entry levels… and maybe an open air cinema outside - that would be nice for free screenings.”

The new director is also looking to strengthen ties between EYE and the Netherlands Film Fund. “My hope is we can be even more generous and open doors to the industry… we need to see what they want from Eye. Beyond premieres, it would interest me to have a safe space [at EYE] where you can maybe share works-in-progress.”

“I very much love the fact that this is a public institution - that people already paid for it with their tax payer money. It’s not our Eye. It is the EYE for everyone!”
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