Between October 30th and November 3rd we’re pleased to inaugurate the first edition of the Amsterdam Film Meeting.
The AMFM (and what a precisely glib, vaguely corporate name, for an event that has its home in Filmhuis Cavia, a cooperatively run, independent cinema) doesn’t necessarily respond to a lack in film exhibition — the collective experience of the screening room, and the opportunity, albeit increasingly rare, to watch moving image on its original format, in the presence of its makers, remains nonpareil. The urge for the AMFM, was rather to wind back some of the problems of the international festival setting, with its increasing commercialisation, pitches and distribution windows, to make space for more discussion, more personal cinephilia, more emphasis on process over product, and more community for filmmakers working independently.
Over one long weekend at the seam between Autumn and Winter, AMFM will convene a varied programme in terms of style, form, and school of cinema. Filmmakers and artists working from many different vantages and “stages of career” are brought together to a relatively small cinema to show works-in-progress, diaristic collections, a partial retrospective in international premiere, and analogue cinema performances. Their shared commitment to experimentation figures as the main curatorial throughline.
Indeed, as many films across the programme interrogate, the cinematic encounter is incomplete without an open-eyed and curious spectator. We hope you can make it out, we hope you can bring friends, your film school class, your neighbours.
This first edition of AMFM is only made possible due to the support of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst. We are tremendously grateful for their trust.
Sunday 13 October
20:30 | Pre-festival screening: Weightless
Monday 28 October
20:30 | Pre-festival screening: Eros, O Deus Do Amor
Wednesday 30 October
14:00 | Nuit Obscure - Feuillets Sauvages
20:00 | Nuit Obscure - Au Revoir Ici, N'Importe Ou
Thursday 31 October
16:00 | Kung Saan Ang Gabi'y Walang Hanggan (work in progress)
20:30 | Haruhara-San No Uta
Friday 1 November
14:00 | A Ilha
17:00 | Paysage Aux Torchons + La Distraction
20:30 | Kanata No Uta
Saturday 2 November
11:00 | Paixão E Sombras
14:00 | Catherine + Come On Pilgrim + Hexham Heads
17:00 | Bande De Cons!
20:30 | O Desejo
Sunday 3 november
11:00 | O Palácio Dos Anjos
14:00 | Passages, Messages
17:00 | Centre For Creativity (short films)
20:00 | Expanded Cinema
Sunday 13 October, 20:30
FILM FESTIVAL
Pre-festival screening
Weightless
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas | 2023 | Ukraine, NL | 70’ + Q&A | English subtitles
In Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas’ debut feature collaboration, self-taught ethnographer Khrystyna Bunii travels solo across remote southwestern Ukraine in pursuit of her anthropological research. As she encounters people and digitises their family photo archives, conversations and interconnections emerge. Conducting visual research into the trans-national region of Hutsulshchyna, Bunii pursues a political practice of self-narration from the margins of representation. The sequences of this poetic journey do not simply elucidate the history of the region, but rather call for an associative labour from researcher and spectator alike, and finding people who want to talk about the region’s past is not an easy task.
Made through close collaboration between the film’s directors and protagonist, Weightless combines observational and direct cinema styles with staged performance and elements of documentary-essay. This screening will be in the presence of the filmmakers, in anticipation of the screening of their short films at the Amsterdam Film Meeting, taking place on November 3rd.
Monday 28 October, 20:30
FILM FESTIVAL
Pre-festival screening
Eros, O Deus Do Amor (Eros, God of Love)
Walter Hugo Khouri | 1981 | Brazil | 107’ | English subtitles
The AMFM is proud to present the first partial retrospective of Walter Hugo Khouri’s work outside of Brazil, in collaboration with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Estate of Walter Hugo Khouri. This selection highlights Khouri’s distinctive exploration of the erotic drama genre, focusing on themes of desire, obsession, and the complexities of human relationships. Spanning multiple decades of his career, these films reflect Khouri's unique position in Brazilian film history. In Khouri's universe, unreliable narrators, mysterious women, and elements of psychological horror create an expression that stands apart from both mainstream and underground Brazilian cinema.
Entering the 1980s, Khouri directed one of his most acclaimed films, Eros, O Deus Do Amor, the culmination of his stylistic evolution. The film is a blend of experimental techniques with a voyeuristic meditation on memory and the character’s sexual encounters — a kind of Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) à la brasileira. Through the eyes of his protagonist, Khouri invites the audience into a world of obsession, violent sex, and inner turmoil, where the boundaries between observer and participant blur, and the act of looking becomes a scopophilic exploration of male desire.
Wednesday 30 October, 14:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Nuit Obscure - Feuillets Sauvages
Sylvain George | 2022 | France | 265’ + Q&A | English subtitles
After studying philosophy, law, political cinema and cinema Sylvain George completed his first short films in the mid 2000s. Standing in the tradition of the cinétract or newsreel, these early works, first shot on Super 8 and then in digital, which would go on to become his medium of choice, always in black and white, pose a simple, but radical question: what is a political film?
In Nuit Obscure - Feuillets Sauvages, Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is one of the few land borders between the African continent and Europe. A buffer zone on Europe's external borders, towards which migrants from Asia, the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa converge. A place where European migration policies, their stakes and consequences, can be seen and read.
The two parts of Nuit Obscure form a diptych — independent of each other, nonetheless maintaining relationships which correspond between works. Sylvain Geroge will join us in Amsterdam to present the films and discuss them with the public.
Wednesday 30 October, 20:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Nuit Obscure - Au Revoir Ici, N'Importe Ou
Sylvain George | 2023 | France | 183’ + Q&A | English subtitles
In transit through the city of Melilla, Malik and his friends, minors of Moroccan origin, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. Night after day, they wander the city in all directions, exploring its most burning pasts and presents, taking every risk to cross barriers and climb onto boats. Would they stay there, as if dead before they were born? Rather “burn the sea” than die before having lived.
The two parts of Nuit Obscure form a diptych — independent of each other, nonetheless maintaining relationships which correspond between works. Sylvain Geroge will join us in Amsterdam to present his films and discuss them with the public.
Thursday 31 October, 16:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Kung Saan Ang Gabi'y Walang Hanggan
(work in progress)
Liryc Dela Cruz | WIP | Italy, Philippines | 70’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Embracing our commitment to fostering space for dialogue around filmic creation, we will screen a work-in-progress cut of Liryc Dela Cruz’s forthcoming feature film, Kung Saan Ang Gabi’y Walang Hanggan (Where the Night Stands Still). Dela Cruz’s films are deeply tied to his origins and personal biography, while his performances and research focus on care, hospitality, indigenous and decolonial practices, a post-colonial Philippines, and the transpacific forced migrations of enslaved people.
Recently, Dela Cruz inaugurated his first major exhibition, ‘Il Mio Filippino: For Those Who Care To See’, at the Mattatoio di Roma, which highlights his years long research into exhaustion, slavery, care, hospitality, and the colonial history of the Philippines. In his new project, the fragile ties of an estranged family, separated after their immigration to Italy, is explored visually and sonically, as a long journey into the night.
Thursday 31 October, 20:30
FILM FESTIVAL
Haruhara-San No Uta
Kyoshi Sugita | 2022 | Japan | 120’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Harugara-san No Uta (Haruhara San's Recorder) marks our first screening in the presence of the contemporary master Kyoshi Sugita. His film creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology. Though we learn little about her, the central character, played by Chika Araki, is marvellously present: she rents an apartment on her own, gets a job in a café, and begins to find peace after a recent tragic event.
Fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, as well as lunches, teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical, Sugita alights upon surprising, inexplicable, and frequently moving moments that motion towards the spiritual in everyday life. Adapted from a tanka (a short poem) by Naoko Higashi, Sugita’s film, which won the Grand Prize at FIDMarseille in 2022, employs cinematic form to express the otherwise inexpressible.
Friday 1 November, 14:00
FILM FESTIVAL
A Ilha
Walter Hugo Khouri | 1963 | Brazil | 113’ | English subtitles
The AMFM is proud to present the first partial retrospective of Walter Hugo Khouri’s work outside of Brazil, in collaboration with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Estate of Walter Hugo Khouri. This selection highlights Khouri’s distinctive exploration of the erotic drama genre, focusing on themes of desire, obsession, and the complexities of human relationships. Spanning multiple decades of his career, these films reflect Khouri's unique position in Brazilian film history. In Khouri's universe, unreliable narrators, mysterious women, and elements of psychological horror created an expression that stood apart from both mainstream and underground Brazilian cinema.
Khouri’s fifth film, A Ilha (The Island), marks a turning point in his career, portraying São Paulo's white bourgeoisie. The film was an early indicator of Khouri's stylistic temperament, where the influence of neorealism is evident in its depiction of class dynamics and interactions. In The Island, Khouri’s stylish black and white photography invites us into the complex emotional landscapes of his characters, adrift in strange circumstances.
Friday 1 November, 17:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Paysage Aux Torchons + La Distraction
Valentine Guégan & Hugo Lemaire | 2023 / 2024 | France | 87’ + Q&A | English subtitles
In Valentine Guégan and Hugo Lemaire's work, a new kind of Rohmerian sensibility is at play. Between the intimate nature of their fictions and their economic approach to mise-en-scène, their films navigate the terrain of contemporary independent cinema with a discerning eye, opening up a dialogue between classic narrative styles and the contemporary anxieties of the Parisian youth.
Paysage Aux Torchons
Valentine Guégan & Hugo Lemaire | 2023 | France | 57’
In a quaint southern French village, two women from different worlds find themselves unexpectedly drawn together. Laure, who sells antique linen, and Ophélie, who runs an art gallery, have seemingly nothing in common. Yet, as their paths intertwine, their contrasting personalities create a newfound connection.
La Distraction
Valentine Guégan & Hugo Lemaire | 2024 | France | 30’
Lucie, about to graduate university, gets permission to submit her Master’s thesis at the end of summer, so she can write peacefully. But, alone among the idle vacationers, she easily gets distracted by the outside world and deviates from her resolution.
Friday 1 November, 20:30
FILM FESTIVAL
Kanata No Uta
Kyoshi Sugita | 2023 | Japan | 84’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Sugita’s latest feature, Kanata No Uta (Following the Sound), tells the story of Haru, a bookstore clerk who reunites with Takeshi, whom she first met a few years prior, when she stopped him from jumping in front of a train. Takeshi offers Haru a job. Another day, Haru is worried about Yukiko who is sitting on a bench in front of the station, and talks to her. This leads them on a parallel journey together. Haru takes along a cassette tape and recorder left behind by her mother Taeko, who died of illness when Haru was in primary school. Haru again faces regrets of not being able to help her mother, which she had held for a long time.
The film unfolds in Sugita’s known style, emphasising atmosphere over plot. It employs a stream of consciousness approach to delve into the characters' daily lives and experiences. An extended Q&A with Sugita will be held after the screening.
Saturday 2 November, 11:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Paixão E Sombras
Walter Hugo Khouri | 1977 | Brazil | 98’ | English subtitles
The AMFM is proud to present the first partial retrospective of Walter Hugo Khouri’s work outside of Brazil, in collaboration with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Estate of Walter Hugo Khouri. This selection highlights Khouri’s distinctive exploration of the erotic drama genre, focusing on themes of desire, obsession, and the complexities of human relationships. Spanning multiple decades of his career, these films reflect Khouri's unique position in Brazilian film history. In Khouri's universe, unreliable narrators, mysterious women, and elements of psychological horror created an expression that stood apart from both mainstream and underground Brazilian cinema.
In Paixão E Sombras (Love and Shadows), Marcelo, an archetypal figure in the Khourian universe, is a filmmaker who finds himself creatively paralyzed in the production of his next film, not satisfied with the technical and logistical conditions available. What’s more he feels the absence of his inspirational muse and former lover, Lena, who has abandoned cinema and the filmmaker to dedicate herself to a more secure career in television. Amid memories of more prosperous days and faced with the new reality, Marcelo struggles to persist with his creation, while living out the last days of his studio, which will be transformed by developers into a supermarket.
Saturday 2 November, 14:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Catherine + Come On Pilgrim + Hexham Heads
Mars Saude + Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen | various | UK, Belgium | 71’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Three films, bound not by time or place, but by a similar approach to memory, retelling, and in the landscapes of near and far histories. A belated Halloween screening.
Catherine
Mars Saude | 2018 | 10’
An agrarian, prevaricating adaptation of an ill-remembered fairytale. A 16th century estate becomes a dark room. A woman in white roams to electric clangs.
Come On Pilgrim
Mars Saude | 2022 | UK | 27’
A playful investigation into settler-colonialism and landscape hauntings, Come on Pilgrim bounds from the filmmaker's personal experience through field recordings and pantomime re-enactment, with protestors and kin, to challenge official histories and the political present, equally bizarre as it is hideous.
Hexham Heads
Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen | 2024 | UK, Belgium | 34’
A collaboration between filmmakers Chloë Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen, Hexham Heads recounts a pastoral horror that occurred in the north of England, in the early seventies. Playing with hallmarks of the folk horror genres, archive and dream, the film uses documents as evidence of domesticity, to interrogate them as ghostly. A paranormal crime scene that traverses decades and experiments with the natures of family and photography.
Saturday 2 November, 17:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Bande De Cons!
Roland Lethem | 1970 | UK, Belgium | 72’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Belgian filmmaker Roland Lethem’s most (in)famous film is an experiment into the power dynamics at play between filmmaker, audience, and society at large. It addresses the police abuse, state abuse, and the abuse of the spectator by the director. Lethem has been making films since 1963, heavily inspired by the style and politics of the surrealists and Japanese counter-cultural cinema.
The film was used by the University of Amsterdam for a study into the influence of film criticism on the appreciation of a film (‘De Invloed van het Lezen van een Filmkritiek op de beoordeling van de betreffende Film,’ Psychologisch Laboratorium van de Universiteit Amsterdam, 1971). This is the first time the film will be screened in Amsterdam ever since, in the presence of Lethem himself and guest curator Xavier García Bardón, who alongside film critic Nicole Brenez, recently edited a book on Lethem’s work.
Saturday 2 November, 20:0
FILM FESTIVAL
O Desejo
Walter Hugo Khouri | 1975 | Brazil | 99’ | English subtitles
The AMFM is proud to present the first partial retrospective of Walter Hugo Khouri’s work outside of Brazil, in collaboration with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Estate of Walter Hugo Khouri. This selection highlights Khouri’s distinctive exploration of the erotic drama genre, focusing on themes of desire, obsession, and the complexities of human relationships. Spanning multiple decades of his career, these films reflect Khouri's unique position in Brazilian film history. In Khouri's universe, unreliable narrators, mysterious women, and elements of psychological horror created an expression that stood apart from both mainstream and underground Brazilian cinema.
In O Desejo (Desire), Eleonora, recently widowed by her husband Marcelo, a successful businessman, struggles in her grief to comprehend his tempestuous interiority. She begins a book project about his life but is unable to complete it. When her friend Ana Maria arrives, Eleonora's world becomes a mix of memories and vague expectations, as Ana Maria shares her own painful recollections of the late Marcelo.
Sunday 3 November, 11:00
FILM FESTIVAL
O Palácio Dos Anjos
Walter Hugo Khouri | 1969 | Brazil | 96’ | English subtitles
The AMFM is proud to present the first partial retrospective of Walter Hugo Khouri’s work outside of Brazil, in collaboration with the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Estate of Walter Hugo Khouri. This selection highlights Khouri’s distinctive exploration of the erotic drama genre, focusing on themes of desire, obsession, and the complexities of human relationships. Spanning multiple decades of his career, these films reflect Khouri's unique position in Brazilian film history. In Khouri's universe, unreliable narrators, mysterious women, and elements of psychological horror created an expression that stood apart from both mainstream and underground Brazilian cinema.
In O Palácio Dos Anjos (Palace of Angels), Bárbara, Mariazinha and Ana Lúcia are three bank employees who deal daily with moral and sexual harassment not only from their boss, Ricardo, but also from the institution's wealthy clients. After meeting a luxury pimp, the three decide to move in together and start their own business, a high-end bordello.
Sunday 3 November, 14:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Passages, Messages
Blanca García + Guy Sherwin | 1981 - 2024 | 70’ + Q&A | Spain + UK | no dialogue
Across her graceful, often fleetingly brief films, Blanca García deftly conjures small and gestural worlds. Blanca's films are shot exclusively on Super 8 reversal stock so that each film exists as a single copy, continually inscribing the memory of each of its projections. Her films explore diaristic notions of presence and chance encounters with the natural world and everyday life. Playing with the interaction of visual and verbal poetics, she draws on writers such as Emily Dickinson, Ann Quinn, and Robert Walser. García will join us in person to present, as the first part of her programme, a selection of six Super 8 films, including her most recent, in original format.
Following this, we will screen Guy Sherwin’s Messages (1981-1983), a film made for and with the filmmaker’s daughter. Through this constellation, García’s and Sherwin’s works dialogue with each other, through their usage of language, and its relation to our perception of the world.
how to make magic
(Blanca García, 2024, Super 8mm, 5’)
ipsa (I watched the Moon around the House)
(Blanca García, 2023, Super 8mm, 15’)
that what moves: does the leaf know
(Blanca García, 2022, Super 8mm, 3’)
that what moves: fingerinesses
(Blanca García, 2023, Super 8mm, 3’)
passages
(Blanca García, 2022, Super 8mm, 3’)
breathing exercises
(Blanca García, 2021, Super 8mm, 3’)
Messages
(Guy Shewin, 1981-1983, 16mm, 40’)
Sunday 3 November, 17:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Centre For Creativity (short films)
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas | 2018-2024 | NL, Poland, Ukraine | 70’ + Q&A | English subtitles
Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas, founders of the WET film cooperative in Rotterdam, are visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural organisers who have developed a formally innovative and thematically urgent body of work in recent years. Using both digital and analogue techniques, their films offer intimate portraits and observations, exploring the intersections of art, memory, and resistance. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
Seven Women
Marta Hryniuk | 2018 | 1’
A series of intimate portraits of women of different ages. The footage was shot by Hryniuk’s great aunt Maria Jastrzębska in the late sixties on her portable 8mm camera, and edited by the artist decades later.
The Close River
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas | 2020 | 27’
The Close River takes the form of an observational documentary. Setting out from the Polish-Ukrainian border, the camera makes an itinerant journey along the river Dniester, eventually reaching the Ukrainian Carpathians. The film is a poetic investigation of a region with multiple overlapping temporalities of colonisation and exploitation, tracing shifting borders and markers of power, exploring how the histories of coexistence, violence and resistance are carved into the landscape and culture of the region, and ultimately how they shape contemporary ways of living.
Centre for Creativity
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas | 2024 | 23’
Two parallel stories set after the full scale invasion of Ukraine. Oksana is a psychologist and dance teacher at the Centre for Creativity, a community space in Kosiv, west Ukraine, now repurposed as a hub for volunteers to make soup, salo, and camouflage nets for the frontlines. Margarita is an artist and volunteer medic, working to evacuate wounded soldiers, civilians, and animals, whilst maintaining her practice as a painter. A meditation on resistance, the role of art in extreme times, and the ways in which people relate to, or make sense of war.
School Number One
Marta Hryniuk & Nick Thomas | 2022 | 16’
School Number One is a two-channel video made in the Carpathian mountains, west Ukraine, in 2021. At the centre of the piece is a music session at the high school in the town of Verkhovyna. Two groups of students — one younger and one older — practice under the watchful eye of a teacher. Periods of individual instruction are interspersed with traditional folk tunes and eventually a leap into abstract improvisation. What they are practising for is not apparent, but they clearly play with an audience in mind. Around them the rest of the town continues its daily business, soundtracked by the small ensemble.
Sunday 3 November, 20:00
FILM FESTIVAL
Expanded Cinema
Esther Urlus, Lichun Tseng, Robert Kroos | 2024 | NL | 70’ | no dialogue
For the final event of the AMFM, we present an evening of analogue film performance in the spirit of Rotterdam’s Filmwerkplaats, a DIY analogue filmmaking collective, highlighting film as a tactile, expressive medium through two live performances on the intersection of image and sound.
The evening begins with Ebb and Flow, a collaboration between Lichun Tseng and Robert Kroos. Drawing on the I-Ching’s themes of cycles and transformation, this performance uses 16mm film projectors and analogue-generated waveforms to create a hypnotic, meditative experience that evokes the rhythms of life, death, and renewal.
The final performance by Dutch film master Esther Urlus, combines positive and negative 16mm film loops in a visually dynamic piece. Playing with focus, synchronicity, and phasing. For this occasion, Urlus’ work will also be accompanied with sonic textures by Robert Kroos.
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Lichun Tseng is a Taiwanese artist based in the Netherlands. She approaches her research and practice mainly with 16mm film, installation, and performance.
Esther Urlus is an artist working with motion picture film formats Super8, 16mm and 35mm. Resulting in films, performances and installations, her work always arises from DIY methods based on reinventions of those from cinema´s pioneers.
Robert Kroos is a musician, sound designer, and field recordist based in Rotterdam. He explores music and sound in all its manifestations.