Bert Haanstra

This Dutch documentary was prepared upon the death of the great documentarist Bert Haanstra in 1997. It consists of fascinating interviews with the director conducted in the 1980s, plus illuminating film clips from his many award-winning documentaries and infrequent fiction films, which he comments on in retrospect.

It's important in giving the viewer a sense of Bert's great humanity as well as his incisive knowledge of cinema. Sadly, he belongs to a class of brilliant filmmakers who were household names and widely celebrated by cineastes several decades ago but now largely forgotten (and hardly seen anymore except in film school classes), as no longer "au courant".

Never released in the USA, this docu is only available within a Dutch boxed set devoted to Bert's movies, located on the disk containing his 1983 masterpiece "Vroeger kon je lachen".