Windshade (IFFR 1986)

The film is Constructed around two poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar, who reads his own verse off-screen.

This avant-garde film is a curious melding of poetry and visual narration. Director Frans van de Staak coordinates the reading of two poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar, a well-known Dutch poet, with visual sequences of a couple going off on vacation. The vacation idyll is interspersed with nature shots and minimal, barely-present dialogue. Soon the couple is packing up and heading back to their daily routine -accompanied by poetry that reinforces the image of unsatisfactory lives, adrift and floating with the current, no destination in sight. [Eleanor Mannikka]