Netherlands,
1986, 145 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
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Johan van der Keuken
- prod
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Johan van der Keuken
- cam
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Johan van der Keuken
- editor
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Jan Dop, Johan van der Keuken
- source
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ldéale Audience, 6, rue de I\'Agent Bailly, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-5320-1401
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COMMENTS
Johan van der Keuken appeared in person to receive the 1999 recipient of the Persistence of Vision Award.
OTHER
Van der Keuken once described this provocative work as an attempt “to film how people survive, and the money, how it flows, those who have it and those who don't.” I (Heart) $ moves between four of the world’s major financial capitals—New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Geneva—and explores the attitudes and lives of those on the top and at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid. Interviews with bankers and investors are intercut with observational journeys into the daily lives of those who are struggling—Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York, a young family in Hong Kong, illegal immigrants in Geneva—and with meditative and painterly explorations of each of these urban spaces. Under the entire film—with its lyrical camerawork, exquisite montage sequences and sometimes deliberately naive interview style—lurks van der Keuken’s playful, avant-garde sensibility and his outrage at our unjust global economic system. One of the financiers accuses him of “trying to put the whole world in one basket.” Indeed, for van der Keuken, it is only when the connections between individuals, economic systems and history—and also between private desires and public spaces—are examined, that life becomes worth living.
—Irina Leimbacher
FACTOID #180
According to the Chronicle’s Herb Caen, producer David O. Selznick’s ’last letter and last phone call were to [SFIFF administrator] Shirley Temple Black to whom he said, ’I can’t wait to see you at the Festival.’’ Selznick was the namesake for a series of awards at the San Francisco International.
