Johan Leysen

Presentation from the San Francisco Film Festival :
“Johan de Bakker is a first-rate baker, meticulous in his trade and exacting in his recreational pursuits which include balancing eggs, building towers of pebbles by the river and waiting stoically in the town square for the daily bus to arrive. Illiterate and hardly exacting in his social skills, Johan is a 35-year-old child and the enigmatic hero of this charming Dutch comedy. His slightly more worldly friends decide to play Cyrano and their ghostwritten love letters on his behalf provoke a woman’s visit “from foreign climes.” Set in a tiny village in the north of Holland, Egg takes its eccentric characters at face value and Israeli-born writer-director Danniel Danniel’s cheerfully deadpan approach is reminiscent of early Jacques Tati. Skillfully introducing the villagers through their mundane routines, Danniel weaves a whimsical fable based in limited realities where “more than one outcome is possible. With a talented cast, Egg succeeds as an offbeat comedy through understatement and authentic charm.”
—Richard PenaRead More »

Harry Kümel’s last major film to-date, a masterpiece of vividly operatic style and fluid camerawork. Despite being based on a 19th century classic Dutch novel, the film is less a traditional costumer (as apparently the critics took it to be) than a flamboyant fantasy on Kümel’s running theme of a vicious cycle of repeated wrong decisions and bad choices that engulf the lead character and eventually destroy her. The film displays the usual influences of von Sternberg, Resnais, Bergman, the Belgian symbolists, but creates a uniquely Kümelian feel and texture of a different reality at one remove from ours.Read More »

The McBee family has erected a government over a future ‘colony’, that looks like a run-down Paris divided into sectors by the Berlin Wall. All male family members suffer from a mysterious disease and are in urgent need of organ transplants. The perfect donor, Tykho Moon, probably has been killed in a fire, but according to rumours he’s still alive. Although assassins stalk the family members, the McBees start a hunt for Tykho. Trying to escape the dragnet, Alex, a sculptor, meets Lena, a killer posing as a whore. (imdb).Read More »

Quote:
A sculptor is fighting his final battle against death on his houseboat on the frozen Schelde river. Two women are at his side: his first wife, who he is divorced from, and his second wife. The latter is most concerned about his death as she realizes that in the end the only result will be irrevocable loneliness. She wants to postpone the fatal moment and therefore tries to find comfort in her reminiscences from the times when she was happy with him. A story about fidelity till after death.Read More »