Feature film
Zelfbeklag
Cyrus Frisch · 1993
Synopsis
A man stands in front of a blue and white backdrop, first dressed, then naked, writhing with shame. Beside him a projector runs a film he made at school, which a critic in a suit calmly comments on, explaining what he finds bad about it. Meanwhile the man, full of self-hatred, leans over an aquarium and tries to drown himself in it. He is on screen for fifty of the seventy minutes the film lasts.
Context
A single disobliging sentence, in the review of one of his film-school shorts by the critic Hans Beerekamp of NRC Handelsblad, put the director into a fury from which this film came. He invited the critic to come and play his own role in it and to say again in front of the camera what he thought of the short, which runs on the projector while he speaks. The film was shown at the Rotterdam festival in 1993 and at the Dutch festival the same year.
Who it is for
Seventy minutes in Dutch, with no story. One must know that the audience is taken to task and that the author himself spoke of seventy minutes of suffering.
Prizes and reception
An object apart in Dutch cinema, which earned its author his reputation as an enfant terrible; it is still shown in retrospectives.