Latest / MUBI Podcast / Smashing in the doors of Amsterdam cinema (w/ BABYGIRL director Halina Reijn)

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Smashing in the doors of Amsterdam cinema (w/ BABYGIRL director Halina Reijn) · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes adult language and spoilers.
• 0:07
  So back in the summer of 2008, I was reporting a story about housing in the Netherlands' capital city of Amsterdam, and I got invited to watch what I often tell people is the most civilized thing I've ever seen.
• 0:23
  It happened on a cobblestone Amsterdam street, one Sunday morning, lined with the tall, thin 17th century brick houses the city's known for.
• 0:31
  All of them with big front windows overlooking a lovely canal right in the centrum, the heart of the city.
• 0:36
  This was prime real estate.
• 0:38
  About 20 young people crowded around the door to one of those homes.
• 0:42
  These kids had been keeping an eye on it for months.
• 0:46
  They knew it was empty.
• 0:46
  No one had lived there for over a year.
• 0:49
  I don't know, maybe the owner was waiting to sell it.
• 0:51
  Maybe they just hadn't moved in yet.
• 0:51
  Who knows?
• 0:54
  Someone produced a stepladder.
• 0:55
  One of the kids stood up on it, took out a mallet, And smashed in the glass window over the door.
• 1:05
  The others hoisted the kid up and he wriggled through the hole and into the place.
• 1:09
  I should remind you, this was in broad daylight.
• 1:12
  The kid unlocked the door from the inside, and now his pals passed him a few items to take in, a little table, a chair, a folded cot.
• 1:21
  Meanwhile, one of the others, a lawyer, took out a cell phone and called the police.
• 1:28
  Cops arrived, talked to the lawyer, the crowd parted and let the officers into the place.
• 1:33
  A couple minutes later, cops came out, shook hands with everyone and said, in Dutch, "Everything checks out.
• 1:41
  "Be safe in there." And then everyone hugged each other, went inside, patched up the window, cooked themselves a communal meal and started living there.
• 1:56
  These kids, most of them college students, had just legally squatted the building.
• 2:01
  They stayed in the place rent free for months, and though I hadn't made the connection at the time, this kind of thing is one reason why even today, Amsterdam is one of the coolest cities in the world to watch movies.
• 2:24
  I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 2:27
  MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema.
• 2:30
  On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 2:33
  This is season eight.
• 2:33
  We are calling it 'Traveling Shots'.
• 2:35
  Every episode I'm taking you along on a tour through the film culture in a different international city.
• 2:40
  To meet its best filmmakers, learn about the cool, sometimes crazy ways people there make and watch movies and try to understand why they do it that way.
• 2:48
  This week is Amsterdam.
• 2:51
  Regular listeners of this show know it is my favorite city on Earth.
• 2:54
  Our very first episode of this show was based in Amsterdam, and some of you might find that weird, me being a movie fan, because the country's own filmmakers will tell you it is not some respected movie capital, not even to them.
• 3:06
  We don't like to see our own movies.
• 3:06
  We don't like our own language.
• 3:10
  We don't want to see ourselves, basically.
• 3:12
  That is Halina Reijn, the Dutch director of last year's acclaimed erotic thrillerBaby Girl, starring Nicole Kidman.
• 3:18
  And I spoke with her and many more about how a tiny city that's been historically short on great cinema is packed with cool cinemas in the unlikeliest places.
• 3:27
  And if you look behind you, there is a place that looks like this concrete slab on the floor.
• 3:32
  This was mainly the place where dead bodies would be cut up.
• 3:35
  Spoiler alert breaking into buildings plays a role.
• 3:38
  So pack up your lock-picking tools and prepare for takeoff.
• 3:42
  We're flying in to the cinema scene, past and present of Amsterdam.
• 3:54
  When Halina Reijn was a kid in the tiny Dutch village called Wildervank, probably no one would have guessed she would grow up to make movies.
• 4:01
  A) 'cause the area had exactly one cinema three miles out of town, but more importantly B)...
• 4:06
  I was not allowed to see any moving images because my parents were radical hippies and they thought it would be bad for the soul or the development of whatever to see TV or any screen.
• 4:18
  Back then, it was possible to just keep your children away from screens, and they did that.
• 4:22
  But only for a while.
• 4:23
  They needed to hire a babysitter, and the babysitter was so bored with us because we didn't have any toys.
• 4:29
  We only had like wooden blocks because they believed in, you know, us using our imagination.
• 4:34
  And so she was so fed up with us that she took us to the cinema.
• 4:38
  Me and my older sister.
• 4:39
  And then she took us to see Annie about the orphan...
• 4:43
  You don't understand.You don't have to do any cleaning while you're here with us.I won't? And that's completely ruined everything.
• 4:51
  Just like my parents thought, actually.
• 4:53
  It changed my soul.
• 4:53
  It changed my whole being.
• 4:55
  And from that moment, I decided I wanted to be her.
• 4:58
  I wanted to be Annie because I thought she made the movie herself.
• 5:01
  I didn't understand that there were other people behind the camera or whatever, so I just decided I'll be her.
• 5:07
  I think I'm gonna like it here. She decided to study acting, and around age 17, landed a role on a TV show that taped in Amsterdam, where she got her first taste of homegrown movies.
• 5:20
  For me, my first real memories of, like, what is Dutch cinema is Alex van Warmerdam.
• 5:23
  Watching the Nördlinger, The Northerners.
• 5:27
  And that left a huge impression on me.
• 5:30
  I mean, that's an amazing movie where he creates everything, he builds all his sets.
• 5:34
  So it was kind of like a fake world, but it looked very Dutch.
• 5:38
  And he's a painter, you know, he started as an artist, painter, fine art.
• 5:42
  And you can really see that he has his own style completely.
• 5:46
  Yeah, The Northerners from 1992 is a surreal as it comes.
• 5:50
  A black comedy set in a Dutch planned community in the 60s.
• 5:54
  In the middle of nowhere.
• 5:56
  The seemingly square bourgeois characters turn out to harbor wild fantasies, doing weird things in the nearby forest.
• 6:10
  It's a movie about what goes on beneath the surface, about people with secrets, and Helena says it spoiled her.
• 6:18
  'Cause she says in the Calvinistic Netherlands, a lot of movies, like the society aren't into secrets.
• 6:26
  It's an old Protestant or Calvinistic belief to not hide anything or to be honest.
• 6:31
  You know, very Dutch.
• 6:32
  And so in the Netherlands and especially in Amsterdam, you will see all the houses with no curtains or curtains open, like you can see everything.
• 6:38
  What you see is what you get.
• 6:38
  And that's very much in our culture.
• 6:44
  What is amazing about Dutch people is that they are so bluntly honest.
• 6:49
  But movies and theater, and storytelling is something that is not so honest and is more poetic or more hidden and more mysterious and more layered and more complex.
• 6:59
  And that's a fertile ground for art.
• 7:02
  And historically, the standard Dutch feature hasn't gone for that.
• 7:10
  By way of example, Helena tells me about the Flodder franchise a huge deal when she was a kid in the 80s.
• 7:16
  It's about a proudly anti-social family of louts who get relocated to an upscale hood where they blithely cause havoc.
• 7:26
  The story and the characters hide nothing.
• 7:26
  Everything's right in your face.
• 7:32
  In the Netherlands, it was one of the top ten movies ever and spawned two sequels and a TV show.
• 7:37
  I mean, they were incredibly successful, but very, like cartoons, you know.
• 7:41
  And of course, we're generalizing a little bit for the sake of this interesting conversation, you know.
• 7:45
  But yeah, that's how it often felt to me.
• 7:48
  That's my opinion about why we have struggled to take our place on the world stage.
• 7:52
  Yeah, internationally, Dutch features haven't had the hugest rep.
• 7:56
  Very few get a decent release outside the country.
• 7:59
  Ask your average filmgoer to name a Dutch director.
• 8:01
  They might know one Paul Verhoeven.
• 8:04
  In 80 or so years of the Cannes Film Festival, the Dutch have won zero Palme d'Ors zero jury prizes.
• 8:10
  And Helena says on some level...
• 8:14
  They're okay with that.
• 8:16
  The Dutch hate themselves, right?
• 8:16
  That's also part of our culture.
• 8:19
  It's like we mock ourselves, we deprecate ourselves.
• 8:22
  We are not proud.
• 8:22
  We don't believe in hierarchy.
• 8:24
  We're all the same.
• 8:24
  And don't think you're all that.
• 8:28
  Be normal, that's funny enough.
• 8:29
  That's our main saying.
• 8:30
  I've heard that so many times in Amsterdam.
• 8:32
  Be normal. That's weird enough.
• 8:34
  It's like, don't try to be special.
• 8:34
  Don't get a swelled head about yourself.
• 8:37
  Yeah, so we don't like to see our own movies.
• 8:39
  We don't like our own language.
• 8:39
  We don't want to see ourselves, basically.
• 8:44
  And yet Amsterdammers sure seem eager to see other people's movies, in cinemas that to me, are totally special.
• 8:54
  I'm going to start with one that's merely beautiful.
• 8:56
  It's called, with typical Dutch bluntness, The Movies.
• 8:59
  The city's first movie house, established in 1912.
• 9:03
  And last summer, that's where I met up with...
• 9:05
  Nina Siegal.
• 9:06
  I'm an author and a regular contributor to the culture sections of the New York Times, from Amsterdam.
• 9:12
  Nina's lived in Amsterdam for nearly 20 years.
• 9:14
  - The Movies is her local.
• 9:14
  - There are four screens here, I think.
• 9:18
  It has a really beautiful cafe with a sort of art deco style.
• 9:23
  It's so adorable wood paneled room, low ceiling in this part of the cafe, and then it opens up almost Frank Lloyd Wright style, into a larger room where you can get cappuccinos and stuff, little wooden tables.
• 9:36
  There's like an easy chair over there with a design that looks like it's like straight from 1920 at latest.
• 9:42
  There's an Art Deco style that's called the Amsterdam School.
• 9:45
  Very sleek, and I've been coming here since I first moved to Amsterdam, which was in 2006.
• 9:51
  I think it's one of my-- I think it is my favorite cinema in Amsterdam.
• 9:56
  But can you sense her hesitation there?
• 9:58
  That's because she had a ton of cinemas to choose from.
• 10:01
  Yeah, I guess I was really surprised by just how much there was.
• 10:04
  There's so much going on all over the place.
• 10:07
  In this neighborhood where we're sitting now there's this cinema, there's one that's just in the park over there, there's another kind of funky little place called the Cavia that's right around the corner from that.
• 10:18
  Pretty much in every corner of town, there's a cinema.
• 10:23
  There are more than the corners.
• 10:25
  You gotta understand, geographically, Amsterdam's a postage stamp.
• 10:29
  I met a local once who called it the biggest village in Europe.
• 10:32
  You can bike the length of it in like an hour and packed into an area around ten miles across there's something like 20 cinemas.
• 10:41
  Those are just the official ones.
• 10:42
  Whether it's a large and beautiful cinema or a modern cinema, or it's like a tiny little room where someone's showing interesting old films.
• 10:52
  Funky film nights and artistic film nights and film nights that are combined with other kinds of like dance events or things like that.
• 11:01
  Why? Why does it have such a concentration?
• 11:03
  Well, it might also have something to do with the weather.
• 11:05
  I mean, there's not that many activities that you can do outside during most of the year.
• 11:10
  But yeah, I think this is a very art oriented culture.
• 11:13
  It's a visual culture.
• 11:15
  Think about Bosch, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Vermeer.
• 11:18
  Then we have Van Gogh, we have de Kooning.
• 11:21
  - Mondrian.
• 11:21
  - Mondrian. Right.
• 11:23
  Also, a lot of the visual culture of fine art is storytelling.
• 11:27
  So if you look at Rembrandt's paintings, they're theatrical scenes, they like mise en scene.
• 11:32
  There's a lot of like, drama happening.
• 11:34
  So if you're already a culture that is attuned to visual storytelling, cinema is like a perfect fit.
• 11:41
  I never thought of the connection between Rembrandt some of his most famous paintings, which are right here in town at the Rijksmuseum.
• 11:48
  The Night Watch.
• 11:49
  It's like a scene out of a movie.
• 11:49
  It's like very dramatically lit.
• 11:53
  There's like a cast of characters, there's action implied, like, these guys are about to go out on their night watch and, like, defend the neighborhood.
• 12:02
  That's really true.
• 12:02
  I hadn't thought about it.
• 12:04
  I think if Rembrandt were alive in the age of cinema, he would have been a filmmaker, probably more than a painter.
• 12:13
  I can actually imagine a Rembrandt joint screening in a bunch of places around Amsterdam.
• 12:18
  Like, say, at a different kind of museum, The Eye, a huge postmodern temple of cinema on the banks of the city's IJ River.
• 12:25
  It's one of the biggest film museums on earth.
• 12:28
  Or better yet, there's the 1920s era movie palace called the Tuschinski, an opulent art deco womb that feels as warm and dark as a Rembrandt.
• 12:37
  But there's another breed of cinema around here that's maybe not Rembrandt's speed.
• 12:41
  More of a Basquiat vibe, like punk as fuck.
• 12:48
  In the west of Amsterdam, there's a busy street called Overtoom, just off Amsterdam's biggest park, the Vondelpark.
• 12:54
  And if you walk it, you can't help but notice a pair of tall metal double doors with the building numbers stenciled across it in huge black and white font.
• 13:03
  301.
• 13:04
  That's where I met up with a guy named Ivo Schmidt.
• 13:07
  So you have, 14th of November, 1999.
• 13:10
  We gathered here in front of the building and, you know, cars were driving past, and we had a wall of people here, like maybe 100 or something.
• 13:19
  - 100 people?
• 13:19
  - Yeah, I guess around 100 people.
• 13:22
  So then here, this metal door, it was, it was opened.
• 13:26
  Somebody opened it?
• 13:27
  Yeah. We always, that's the great thing about the squat scene there was always the breaking team, which are people, experienced with, you know, breaking open doors and locks.
• 13:37
  Yeah, just like the students I watched bust into that canalside house.
• 13:41
  Ivo and his crew were squatting Overtoom 301.
• 13:44
  Except this place wasn't just going to be used for living quarters.
• 13:48
  If you want, we can go have a look here.
• 13:48
  That's the concert space.
• 13:52
  Turns out, on the other side of those metal doors, across a courtyard, there's a huge 1930s era building, a warren of halls and tiled floors and stairwells leading to big, high ceilinged rooms.
• 14:04
  There's one with a stage and lighting gear for music acts.
• 14:07
  Then this space.
• 14:10
  This is the bar.
• 14:10
  People can have a drink here.
• 14:14
  Even have an old popcorn machine that still works.
• 14:17
  And then down the hall is for me, the coolest surprise.
• 14:20
  It was for Ivo too, when he first saw it.
• 14:22
  Yeah. Now, the nice thing was, when you enter a new building with freshly squatted, you go in and you go like on adventure, like you never know what's there.
• 14:31
  So we went in here, You know, open the door, and then all of a sudden you're like, whoa! Oh my God. There's just there's like, there's a cinema here! A cinema complete with a screen, ten rows of raked seating and a projection booth.
• 14:47
  The building, see, was a former film academy.
• 14:50
  Yeah, that's that's just, yeah, something you can't imagine or can't predict to happen.
• 14:54
  But it's great, of course.
• 14:54
  And especially for a collective like us.
• 14:58
  We were already, you know, organizing all these things from art exhibitions to music nights and film nights.
• 15:05
  So, yeah, that's like your dream come true.
• 15:08
  If then you squat a building and the place is just perfect for what you want to do there.
• 15:13
  Ivo's crew was just one of a long line of artist collectives that squatted buildings all over Amsterdam, a wave that really started swelling in the 70s when the Netherlands made it legal.
• 15:27
  Or at least semi-legal because remember how Amsterdam's tiny?
• 15:31
  It's also crammed with around a million people.
• 15:34
  And there was a lot of people needing housing, especially, you know, young students, people just arriving in town, they can't find nothing or it's super expensive, which nobody could pay.
• 15:42
  So back then, politicians figured if there was a square inch of space that could be used either for housing or serving the community, it should be instead of just sitting there.
• 15:52
  Because quite often people left buildings empty, speculating basically.
• 15:56
  Like buy it, leave it empty for five years, then sell it and make a lot of money on it.
• 16:00
  But you know, if in the meantime it could be used for four years by a collective to do, you know, nice things, that, of course, is great.
• 16:07
  A protocol developed.
• 16:09
  A building had to have been empty for at least a year.
• 16:11
  Then a squatter had to set up a bed, a table and a chair inside to prove they were living there.
• 16:16
  Meet those conditions and you could stay till the owner proved in court they had a plan to actually use the place.
• 16:23
  The result?
• 16:24
  Through the 90s, squatters set up their own kind of art punk shadow society.
• 16:28
  Well, in that time it was very big in Amsterdam.
• 16:31
  There was, you know, big squatted buildings in every area of town.
• 16:35
  Yeah, and every weekend new buildings were squatted and of course other places were evicted.
• 16:40
  But the scene was so big, it was like for me, it was always like a couple of different squatters.
• 16:44
  You had political squatters who were against, like, empty buildings.
• 16:48
  I consider myself part of the more arty squatters that we were artists.
• 16:52
  So we were squatting not only to live there, but to organize public activities like restaurants, concert spaces.
• 17:00
  But there was also shops.
• 17:02
  We were like helping out migrants, giving them rooms to stay.
• 17:05
  There was a radio stations, bookshops.
• 17:08
  Yeah, all this stuff, a lot of times under the same roof along with cinemas.
• 17:16
  Back then, a free zine called The Shark listed the squat events around town, and there was a whole row of listings for movie nights.
• 17:23
  Admission was cheap or free.
• 17:25
  In 2000, I visited OT301's vegan restaurant De Peper, I paid, I think, five bucks for a plate of food and a bottle of beer, then headed up to the cinema to watch a Godard flick for nothing.
• 17:36
  Today, for a few euros, you can catch anything there From Jackie Chan flicks to the nichiest of niche movies.
• 17:42
  From all over the world, like East German to Czech to Polish to whatever.
• 17:46
  Then we have this old 16 millimeter stuff being screened here.
• 17:50
  We have a lot of like, activist documentaries.
• 17:52
  Climate activists.
• 17:54
  When I first stumbled on this scene, it's hard to explain how cool it felt.
• 17:58
  Not just because you got to eat and see art and watch movies in these edgy, hidden spaces, because there was this addictive feeling of communal energy.
• 18:06
  I don't know, for me, it just it changed me as a person and how I think about life and everything and community, permanently.
• 18:19
  Sharing things, organizing things just for the love of it, for the passion of it.
• 18:25
  You were in those squatted places because you just loved being there, living or being there without luxury.
• 18:33
  And it was, you know, rougher and unpolished, but, you know, the creativity was, was just bubbling every time something was happening, something amazing.
• 18:44
  And it was like, wow, wow, what a night was this?
• 18:48
  Or what a day.
• 18:49
  Like all utopias, though, it wasn't going to last.
• 18:53
  The squat scene fades out, but its impact lingers.
• 18:56
  Coming up in just a minute, stay with us.
• 19:03
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• 19:12
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• 19:15
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• 19:21
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• 19:39
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• 19:47
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• 20:02
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• 20:05
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• 20:07
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• 20:20
  Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 20:28
  So it's the early 2000s squats like OT301 and their cinema programs are rolling along.
• 20:34
  I am visiting the city at least once a year and really digging these places.
• 20:38
  But I also start realizing not everyone in town is on board.
• 20:46
  Halina Reijn being one.
• 20:47
  At least back then.
• 20:49
  Of course, as it now is like a spiritual, I don't know what I am, person I of course really understand what that was and how important that was and how special that was.
• 20:59
  But at the time, any friend of mine that would be living like that in a squatted house, I would be like Jesus, Lord, get over yourself, participate, get a job.
• 21:09
  I really didn't like it.
• 21:11
  I didn't like anything that had to do with hippies because I was rebelling.
• 21:15
  'Cause remember, her parents had been counterculture hippies.
• 21:18
  So anything that had to do with all of that, I was like, whatever, you know, I was always like, they tried that. It failed.
• 21:25
  An arty rebel, who wasn't quite into squatter level, arty rebellion.
• 21:30
  And it sounds like Amsterdam itself was kind of similar.
• 21:33
  Of course, our city has been very progressive, you know, always and open to any minority and anybody was welcome.
• 21:41
  And a big gay scene that we had and lots of tolerance and everybody was equal.
• 21:45
  That's of course, also we're very socialist at heart.
• 21:48
  And I think that invites art, you know, and anything obscure.
• 21:52
  But there's an undercurrent of complete conservatism that is so scary and horrifying.
• 22:01
  Tonight in the Netherlandsthere's only one news story to report, and with it, an awarenessthat this murder threatens a long cherished reputation for tolerance. Yeah, I saw a scary side in the oughties.
• 22:13
  That's when anti-immigrant, especially anti-Muslim sentiment, ramped up in the Netherlands, especially after provocateur Theo van Gogh who had made movies critical of Islam, was murdered by an Islamist.
• 22:24
  In a few years the majority of the youth in our largest citieslike Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrechtwill be of non-Dutch descendancy, will be of Muslim descendancy.So he wanted us to think about this. I started feeling a vibe from some locals that squatting had become less for Dutch students and artists, and more for migrant outsiders.
• 22:45
  Meanwhile, Dutch governments got more conservative and more into privatizing well, everything, including housing and local government wanted to attract techies and creatives with a vibe that was less punk, more polished.
• 23:01
  In 2010, squatting was outlawed.
• 23:06
  There were protests.
• 23:12
  People like OT301's Ivo Schmidt tried to make the case that artists squats were actually an economic engine.
• 23:19
  No culture without subculture.
• 23:20
  That was the sort of phrase describing what we were doing.
• 23:23
  Like, hey guys, no culture without subculture.
• 23:27
  If you kill free spaces and the squat scene and, you know, you cut it off by the roots, then how do you think Amsterdam is going to be interesting for young artists who can't afford luxurious workspaces and expensive houses and stuff everywhere in the world they need places like this.
• 23:45
  They are the breeding grounds, the fertile soil of what is later called creative industry or culture.
• 23:53
  Without places like this, you cannot be a cultural city, I believe.
• 23:57
  Hundreds of squats got evicted anyway.
• 24:00
  There was a five storey building on Spuistraat in the middle of town that provided living and workspace for squatters for decades.
• 24:06
  When I visited in 2015, it had been emptied out, about to be converted into upscale apartments.
• 24:12
  Someone had left a spray painted sign in one of the windows.
• 24:16
  "You can evict our home, but you can't evict a dream." And sure enough, in a few corners of town, the dream hasn't ended.
• 24:34
  About a 13 minute bike ride from OT301 sits Filmhuis Cavia.
• 24:39
  The two places have a lot in common.
• 24:39
  They both started as squats.
• 24:42
  Cavia was a squatted boarding school.
• 24:44
  Their cinemas are both tiny.
• 24:44
  Cavia's just 40 seats.
• 24:48
  It looks like a place you'd take a school exam.
• 24:50
  And they were both among a lucky few squats that got, "legalized." The government let them buy their buildings cheap, and today they're nonprofit culture centers.
• 25:00
  Oh, and they both share the services of this guy: Hello, and welcome to Filmhuis Cavia.
• 25:03
  My name is Jeffrey.
• 25:08
  I'm the programmer of the film tonight, of course, and I'm jumping around town like always.
• 25:11
  Tonight we have a film by Marco Ferreri.
• 25:11
  Bye Bye Monkey, made in 1978.
• 25:17
  His name is Jeffrey Babcock, and he's been showing and introducing cool movies in unexpected corners of Amsterdam since he moved here from the States in the 80s.
• 25:25
  - Let's walk over here.
• 25:25
  - Yeah.
• 25:27
  All right, so where are we and what are we doing?
• 25:29
  We're in my apartment.
• 25:30
  A day after that Cavia screening, I met up with Jeffrey at his pad.
• 25:33
  A humble little one bedroom crammed with books, vinyl records everything is old school analogue, including the way he plans his screening schedule.
• 25:42
  So we're going over to my blackboard here so I don't do my programing on my computer.
• 25:48
  I do it on an old fashioned blackboard with chalk.
• 25:51
  This looks like it was taken from a school from like 1962.
• 25:54
  It probably was.
• 25:54
  I think I probably found it on the street.
• 25:57
  And his choice of screening spaces is old school, too.
• 26:01
  I would say almost 90% of all the places where I show movies were squats or started by squatters, or connected with the squatting movement.
• 26:11
  Like, for instance, an old 17th century mansion called Huis de Pinto, which in the 1970s was slated for demolition.
• 26:18
  And what happened was this...
• 26:22
  the City of Amsterdam, they decided, we're going to build a four lane highway that goes straight down the center of the city.
• 26:28
  And they tore down all the buildings, and some people came in this building Huis de Pinto, where I'm showing movies at once a month and squatted it.
• 26:37
  And they said, we refuse to leave.
• 26:39
  And all the-- you see pictures of that one building standing, the entire block torn down.
• 26:45
  And the City government kept on saying,"Oh, you know,"but we spent so much money and there's so many plans and and so much and we"there's no way we can turn around and we there's no way this cannot go through." And people refuse to, to leave.
• 26:57
  And then they actually did something very smart.
• 27:00
  They contacted a monumental organization to protect monuments.
• 27:04
  They came in, declared it a monument.
• 27:06
  There's nothing the government could do anymore.
• 27:08
  So they had to replan everything.
• 27:10
  And they made a thing called the IJtunnel which they pushed through the harbor instead of through the center of the city.
• 27:16
  So that building, you know, once again, has history.
• 27:18
  And it was because of the squatters.
• 27:18
  And a beautiful history.
• 27:22
  And so those are the kind of places I like to show movies at.
• 27:27
  But there's an irony. Today, the center of Amsterdam, all around Huis de Pinto, has massively gentrified.
• 27:34
  Rents are high.
• 27:35
  A lot of students and struggling artist types, some of the folks most likely to be into Jeffrey's movies have moved out to the cheaper edges of Amsterdam.
• 27:43
  But Jeffrey won't show films out there.
• 27:43
  By design.
• 27:46
  I'm showing movies only in the center because I feel the center is being hit the hardest financially.
• 27:52
  Everything is becoming outrageously expensive in the city.
• 27:55
  And my cinemas being in in the center of the city, offer some kind of alternative in a place where it's the most tough.
• 28:02
  It also seems like by doing these events in squats or former squats, it's almost like to me, it's like reminding people this kind of alternative culture existed here.
• 28:12
  You should know about this.
• 28:13
  It's bringing history, the history of what the city used to be more and keeping it alive in some kind of way.
• 28:19
  Like if you know anything about having fires, if you can keep a fire just a little bit going, just the embers going.
• 28:25
  If you want to start the fire again, then it's much easier than if you let the whole thing just die.
• 28:30
  And then you try to start the fire again from scratch.
• 28:33
  So that's my feeling about the cinemas.
• 28:33
  I'm trying to keep a certain spirit alive.
• 28:39
  And I'll say even in Amsterdam cinemas that are way less gritty, there's plenty of this kind of spirit.
• 28:45
  I think because we have four, we have four screening rooms, and I think that the fourth one might actually be open now.
• 28:55
  One summer day, I went to a place called LAB111 to interview their Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms.
• 29:01
  Or try to interview him...
• 29:04
  We are in the middle of a screening.
• 29:07
  I think...
• 29:08
  it was hard to find a quiet place to talk.
• 29:10
  All their theaters were running movies to packed houses since it opened about ten years ago.
• 29:16
  LAB111's become one of the most popular rep and art house cinemas in town.
• 29:20
  This actually does sound like a screening, so let's not go in here.
• 29:24
  I mean, this is pretty impressive.
• 29:25
  We're talking, this is a Wednesday at like, what is it now 3:00 or something?
• 29:29
  - And you've got all these movies going.
• 29:29
  - Oh yeah.
• 29:30
  The screening that we kind of just interrupted was people going to see the New Yorgos Lanthimos film.
• 29:35
  And then we also have Wong Kar Wai'sHappy Together screening right now, and people are watching David Lynch's The Straight Story.
• 29:41
  So that's everything that we have been trying to interrupt now.
• 29:46
  Crazy eclectic lineup for what I learned after we ducked into a basement room is a crazy eclectic place.
• 29:53
  It was a this old pathological, oh my God, I can never actually say it in one go.
• 29:58
  This old anatomical pathological laboratory.
• 30:02
  It was, I think it was built in the early 1900s.
• 30:05
  And if you look behind you, there is a place that looks like this concrete slab on the floor, which is...
• 30:11
  - Oh, yeah.
• 30:11
  - Yeah.
• 30:12
  It's... this was mainly the place where dead bodies would be cut up.
• 30:16
  Now, ironically, the joint is full of life.
• 30:19
  There's a cafe, a bar, offices and studios for filmmakers.
• 30:23
  Lab 111 wasn't a squat, but it's like OT301 and a lot of cultural spaces in Amsterdam, in the sense that it houses a million things under one roof.
• 30:32
  Sometimes you want to see a film, eat a pizza, hear somebody do an intro, then have a beer, then go to a club.
• 30:39
  Can you all do that in one go?
• 30:39
  Yeah, sometimes you can, actually, That's pretty nice, right?
• 30:42
  What about Dutch culture makes that end up happening?
• 30:47
  One place with lots of stuff going on?
• 30:49
  Because we can't make up our fucking minds.
• 30:52
  Yeah, honest to God.
• 30:53
  Okay, there's this thing in the Dutch language which is called polderen And polderen means that when you, and we do this in, we do this in politics, we do this in culture, we do this everywhere.
• 31:04
  It's when somebody comes up with an idea instead of saying,"Hey, that's a great idea!" we want to talk about it more and more and more and more and more, and then sometimes even destroy the idea because we end up constantly only over discussing the idea.
• 31:19
  Maybe it's part of that.
• 31:20
  Maybe we just can't make up our minds, and it's better to just have it all wholesale instead of constantly, like...
• 31:27
  Should we go out to the movies tonight?
• 31:29
  Or should we go out to the restaurant tonight?
• 31:31
  You're like, why don't we just do all of it?
• 31:32
  Exactly, exactly, yeah.
• 31:34
  And Tom says the same goes for his Dutch audience's taste in movies.
• 31:37
  They're pretty down to watch everything or almost everything.
• 31:41
  We take risks on cinema from abroad, but for Dutch films, it's a very...
• 31:46
  We ourselves look at something and go like, yeah, it's a Dutch film.
• 31:50
  Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.
• 31:52
  And he wonders if it's 'cause a lot of Dutch movies embody that attitude Halina Reijn lamented.
• 31:57
  Well, we have an expression whichDoe maar normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg. Act normal, that's crazy enough.
• 32:02
  It's this weird thing, and I know I'm hyper pessimistic about this, but I always have the feeling that there's within every instance of making something, there is something holding us back.
• 32:14
  We are constantly trying to take our foot off the gas pedal and on the brake.
• 32:19
  It's we need to we need to be, stay conservative, keep it tight.
• 32:24
  You're fascinated by other people going crazy, but you don't want to go too crazy.
• 32:28
  Right, right. Yeah.
• 32:28
  That we can handle.
• 32:30
  We can handle some Gaspar Noé doing crazy stuff, but for some reason, can't do that ourselves.
• 32:36
  I wish I was special So fascinatingly one of the best and most celebrated Dutch movies in a while is kind of about being conservative, tight, normal.
• 32:47
  And emotionally...
• 32:48
  But I'm a creep It definitely takes its foot off the brakes.
• 32:55
  It's a short called I Am Not a Robot by Victoria Warmerdam, and it's about a woman trying to use an online app at her desk job.
• 33:03
  Who keeps failing the part where you click on pictures to prove, yeah, that you're not a machine.
• 33:09
  Eventually, a yes/no questionnaire pops up on her laptop with a bunch of statements she responds to with growing horror.
• 33:16
  What the fuck?"I regularly feel that something's wrong.""Other people think I'm cold.""Welcome to the bot community" says a message that appears on her laptop.
• 33:30
  "There's an 87% chance you're a robot." Just last MarchI'm Not a Robot became the first Dutch film to win an Oscar in 24 years.
• 33:42
  Which excites Halina Reijn.
• 33:43
  First of all, because...
• 33:44
  That's a very Dutch filmmaker.
• 33:46
  I feel if I watch that, I find it very Dutch because it's, again, it's very honest.
• 33:50
  It's very-- there's something sort of square about it in a way that I love and that I'm inspired by.
• 33:56
  But at the same time, the movie's creepy, Mysterious and willing to tackle the dark layer beneath Dutch normalcy.
• 34:03
  Just like that movie The Northerners that blew Helena's mind as a kid, it's Dutch cinema as alluring as Amsterdam's cinemas.
• 34:10
  I think that's dramatically changing for the better.
• 34:13
  Younger people don't-- are not interested in being normal.
• 34:16
  And I think like my hope is for the...
• 34:18
  I'm Not a Robot generation for them to really, you know, grow and develop.
• 34:24
  But I also think, look, we're all-- everything is going to change.
• 34:28
  Everything is changing. AI is here.
• 34:30
  We're done. We're fucked.
• 34:32
  It's all over.
• 34:32
  So I heard a good friend of mine I was at a party the other day with, and I really look up to her.
• 34:38
  She's a very prominent figure in the movie world, and she took me to this big party.
• 34:42
  There were all these movie stars, and everybody kept asking her, so your sons, 'cause she has two sons, were like 18 and 20.
• 34:48
  What are they going to do now that they finished school?
• 34:50
  And she said, you know what I told them?
• 34:52
  She told this to everybody at that party.
• 34:52
  She told them, she lives in London, she said, "Go to Rome, see some art, and have sex with incredible women"because the world is ending." What do you think about that?
• 35:05
  Well, I mean, that's the most Dutch thing I've ever heard.
• 35:07
  Like, you're being pretty blunt about it.
• 35:21
  And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 35:23
  Follow us to hear more of my travels through the world's film scenes.
• 35:26
  Next week we're headed to Mexico City, where in the 80s, filmmakers grew up in the wreckage of an earthquake and in the 90s started making movies that really shook people.
• 35:36
  It is a film that when you're growing up in Latin America, but I think everyone in the world right now, it became a necessary pathway into adulthood to watch it.
• 35:44
  Featuring guests like that guy Gael Garcia Bernal talking about the classic Amores Perros.
• 35:49
  Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 35:50
  Meanwhile, if you dig us, leave a five star review wherever you listen tell them we're not your standard movie chat show.
• 35:56
  Also, if you've got questions, comments, or some brutally honest criticism about how we portrayed your country this season.
• 36:02
  Actually, do I want you to email us?
• 36:02
  Yeah. Why not?
• 36:04
  The address is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits.
• 36:09
  This show is written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 36:12
  Ciara McEniff is our Producer.
• 36:12
  Michelle Lanz is our Story Editor.
• 36:16
  We've got Assistant Producer Kat Kowalczyk.
• 36:18
  Steven Colon mastered this episode.
• 36:20
  Martin Austwick composed our original music.
• 36:23
  Thanks this week to MUBI's team in Amsterdam, everyone at Cineart, the Eye Film Museum, Jonathan Gruber and Olivia Richard for recording Halina Reijn.
• 36:31
  The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 36:36
  And finally, to watch the best in cinema.
• 36:36
  Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch some movies and travel tips for Amsterdam: don't walk in the bike lanes.
• 36:45
  Do eat pancakes for lunch.