Yesterday morning my good friend DJ called to share his plan to bike to Siberia. Any other friend I would officially declare crazy but DJ had done crazy bike tours before and DJ IS crazy. I wished more people were as crazy as DJ. In DJ’s case I would define crazy as following your dreams and make stuff along the way. The last bike tour took him from the Netherlands to Turkey….on a normal city bike and no cash. Fortunately he is not crazy enough to use that bike again. Now he talked about Kevlar tires and stuff I never even heard about. For this trip to Siberia he will be prepared. He will make miles and words. The story he wrote about his trip to Turkey was the most original and hilarious roadtrips I ever read. I bought the movie rights without hesitating a second.
Impressed and enthousiastic about DJ’s plans I walked into HKU (University for the Arts in Utrecht), were I work 2,5 days a week, entered a room and left via a door I normally never use. Next to this door someone sticked a note with ‘Free movie tickets” and underneath 6 tickets for the Dutch Film Festival. Two of them were for ‘Sketches of Siberia’ with an Q&A with director Ben van Lieshout. I wonder what DJ is going to ask him next week. DJ is going to Siberia but first Ben wil show him his sketches……in Utrecht:
‘In 1913, the Norwegian arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen took part in an expedition to establish a trade route. He sailed from Scandinavia via the Arctic Ocean to the Siberian interior. En route, he took photographs and kept a diary. Using themes like colonialism, mineral exploitation and demographic and geopolitical developments, the film holds up his observations to the present. This associative documentary in the form of a road/boat movie looks for the human dimension, with its precarious balance.’
https://www.filmfestival.nl/profs_en/films/sketches-of-siberia
Als ik DJ was zou ik een mountain bike nemen als ik die triller voor de IDFA bekijk. Goeie muziek trouwens!