Amsterdam Global Village

Whether or not you have already walked the cobblestones of the mythical Amsterdam, it is a stunning immersion in the living heart of the city that allows this film to look like a monument. And it is through a path of pure cinema that van der Keuken invites us for a year in his huge global village. A path lined with surprises, detours, performances, anecdotes. A path that is both meticulously drawn and resolutely open to the real, as much in the script as in the filming and editing, to give substance to a city, at a time, by exploiting perfectly the power of synthesis of the cinematographic form. "Amsterdam Global Village" is a poem, a symphony, the sometimes cubist, sometimes pointillist portrait of a city at once extraordinary and venerable. It comes out with the feeling of having stayed there for a long time, to have been projected in the mid-1990s and to have traveled in the world that the filmmaker then gave us to understand. Sylvain Baldus

Featured in Zomergasten: Episode #13.2 (2000)