For the past three and a half decades my professional life has included content development and programming for international film festivals such as IDFA, IFFR and Vision du Réel, creating DOX documentary film magazine, managing national and international funding schemes for documentary and fiction, serving on tens of selection committees for funding organizations and broadcasters in all stages of project development, moderating, consulting and coaching, and being head of Drama, Youth Programmes and Performing Arts at the Dutch Media Fund. I served on several national and international juries amongst which The Netherlands Film Festival, Docuzone, Media Art Friesland, Televisiebeelden and Prix Europa.
With my present creative development consultancy Sous l’Arbre I focus on individual writers, artists, directors and producers as well as on writers rooms and larger development teams. My consultancy extends to giving long term international workshops, such as the Concept Atelier and the Script Atelier at the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF) in Brussels. My main areas of consultancy are within fiction, documentary, animation and the performing arts. Apart from my private consultancy Sous l’Arbre I work as a freelance cultural and arts consultant in the public sphere. Clients so far have included many cultural organizations and festivals as well as the Dutch cities Utrecht and Amsterdam. From 2024-2027 I will continu as a committee member TV-series at VAF. I will also again serve as an independent chair for the Performing Arts Fund in The Hague. I hold a master in Sciences of Drama and Film.
The dance between ideology and personality moves your story forward
A lot of fiction and non-fiction projects centre around an engaging idea but choose convenient storytelling logic and simplistic dichotomy over an in-depth and multilayered – and fairer- exploration of our perplexing world. If stories and art works are to truly move us, they have to wake us up. When tales and art pieces do live up to the paradoxical intricacies of our lives while offering new takes on them, meaning can transcend beyond the actual plot. Complexity is not identical to complicated. Exploration rises above illustration.
A meaningful work leaves the audiences being both more understood and deeply challenged in their personal horizons. Storytelling and conceptualization will grow more from deciphering what can be questioned and never wholly understood than from relying on what seemingly can be simply depicted as evidential cause and effect.
Drawing on further experiences with Visual Thinking Strategies and plunging into some philosophy I have come to understand and teach conceptualising and storytelling more and more as a way of conversing with the other. When imagined and understood as a dialogue, they entail an exciting collision of world views within and between its characters as well as between the story at large and its audiences, with the artist as their particular founding source.
Proof of (f)act tires the truth out