KEY TO HEAVEN

1 September 2025
Key to Heaven can still be seen here and there. In terms of audience, we are above what we expected on average. On September 7, the film will be shown in Bergen op Zoom, September 10 in Roosendaal, with Q&A, September 17 in Vlissingen at Film by the Sea, September 27 and October 2 in Utrecht, at the Directors’ Forum.

In the meantime, I finished the documentary counterpart of Hemelsleutel: The Cloud Factory, a film in which I follow the closure and demolition of the coal-fired power plant Hemweg 8 for 6 years. Actually, that should have been a kind of report, for all the people from Nuon/Vattenfall who worked there, composed of all that material that I shot there myself or with Jan Wich and Menno Euwe. I had pasted very factual subtitles in the editing, with what happened, with the date. But that was not appreciated by the people around me. Why should I put so much effort into a report? And why didn’t I add some kind of voice-over of my own in which I would try to explain that a bit? And thanks to Albert Eling’s severe criticism, I believe it has now become a film. Very strange. Yes, again about temporality of course.

June 4, 2025: We are busy with the release of Hemelsleutel. On Sunday 22 June, there will be an Amsterdam premiere in EYE. And on 6, 8 and 11 June pre-premieres in Terneuzen.

April 30, 2025:A release date has been announced! From 19 June, Hemelsleutel can be seen in Dutch film theatres. Distributor is Verde Films, by Joop Verdenius http://www.verdefilms.nl
To be honest, that’s a great relief. All kinds of people kept asking me when they would be able to see the film, and now I can answer. At the same time, I am also working on The Cloud Factory (De Wolkenfabriek), a documentary about Hemweg 8, the coal-fired power plant in Amsterdam, with its 175 m high chimney as a landmark. That film is more of a kind of report, a by-product of Hemelsleutel, because the Hemweg 8 was one of the subjects in the original documentary plan. That will be more of a film for lovers of analogue technology, industrial archaeology or circular demolition methods. Anyway, I’m not done with that yet. Finding a balance between archiving and poetry is quite complicated.

2nd February 2025:
The day of the premiere. It was beautiful sunny winter weather. So I went to LantarenVenster, in my beautiful vintage dress with sequins. I walked past the floating sheerleg, the grain elevator and those nice tugboats at the Leuvehaven, over the Erasmus Bridge and along the quay to the building of the Holland America Line. I had filmed there once, in 1989, for my film Nothing lasts forever. It was the time before the skyscrapers.
People were walking everywhere. It had something paradisiacal.
We ate at LantarenVenster with the team of Tomtitfilm. Very cozy. Then the script was completed: a final check of the projection, a table for the guest lists, tokens, posters. Guests arrived, my brother and sisters with supporters, the actors. Gijs Naber, Jacqueline Blom, Thomas van Luin, Jelle Mensink, Manouk Pluis, Nanette Edens, Mike Reus. And crew of course. It was a pleasant chaos to get everyone together for the photo opportunity. While the guests were already entering the room, Monique Busman and I also had a meeting with our moderator, Maria Giovanna Vagenas, who would do the introduction and the Q&A. She said all kinds of very nice things about the film. I never really know how to react. Would she really mean it? Or was it politeness? I can’t easily believe that people are really that enthusiastic. That also makes me old-fashioned shy.
Everything went well. So is the Q&A. Afterwards it was also very festive. Tom Jansen turned out to have come too! And Roman Conen, and Mike Lebanon, who plays my father in the film. And DJ Isis, with Moses.
People also came up to me who had just bought a ticket and thanked me. With a small group of actors and relatives we lingered for a while, talking about acting and intimacy coordinators.
It was a beautiful, clear evening and I decided to walk back to Hilton. The black asphalt of the footpath on the Erasmus Bridge is full of small shimmers. It was like walking on the stars.

23rd January 2025:
In just over a week, the premiere will take place in Rotterdam, in LantarenVenster. So there are still all kind of things to do, such as a final check of the sound, whether or not to give speeches, and where are we going to have a drink afterwards?
Do I find it exciting? Quite a bit. But yes, this is it. The question is: will the film then be locked up in a dark cupboard or will it be allowed to fly? At least occasionally. A bit of flapping of wings.
But the film has become what I wanted: research, a search for a lyrical moment.

19 December 2024:
This week it was officially announced that the film has been selected for IFFR 2025. I am very happy with that, because so far no other way has been found to give the film any visibility. Because yes, difficult, difficult. And there is no money to be made with that. Of course, I don’t find the film difficult at all! I sometimes say: it’s a romcom for intellectuals. Why shouldn’t that be allowed?

4 november 2024:
The grading (color correction) is done: everything looks nice now. Quite strange because there is very different material in the film: a piece of 16 mm from 1971, shot for the film Biosphere that we made at the Film Academy, a piece of mini-DV from 2000 (a timelapse shot of Tokyo), material shot by me with the Panasonic AG-AF 101E and the Panasonic DMC-G3, material shot by Jan Wich with the Sony FS7m2 and the drone cameras DJIMaviv 2 Pro and DJA Air 3,  and then of course the material that Melle van Essen shot with the Arri Alexa and the Sony Venice.
In the meantime, Marc Lizier is working the sound design. Some of the texts that I record myself have to be re-recorded, because we just did that for a trial with the phone.
To be continued!

On January 4, 2016 I wrote in my diary:
Seen La Grande Bellezza (2013, Paolo Sorrentino) on television and again that film made a very big impression. Partly because of the powerful, well-framed images, partly because of the associative way of telling the story. Anything is possible, actually, within a story that is hardly a story. It’s really like how your mind can jump, through time. And the film is about the big things: life (why? how?) and death.
Just at the VPRO New Year’s Eve party, I spoke with Robert Alberdinck Thijm. He thought I should write something like that, just all kinds of associations. I said I could see a scene in front of me. Venice, after that feast in that courtyard. Huge tables with the food displayed as majestic works of art. Later we walked back to the hotel, across the quay, the city in the distance. I was wearing the cyclamen pink dress. It was still warm, although it was blowing softly. What did we say? I don’t know. Above all, I remember a feeling: life couldn’t be more beautiful than this. Walking along a quay in the dark on a warm summer night.
Be as personal as possible, Robert said. Someone else couldn’t write this for me. I had to do it myself.
For my plan, I had to look for a kind of large global setting. Perhaps the beauty of Amsterdam and the beauty of Zonnemaire. With characters that have a kind of peculiarity. Endless exploratory movements, but also a kind of search for the grail. And of course that grail is not found, but in the end a kind of peace is made with life as it is. That this is all, that’s all there is to it. It’s like walking along the quay on a summer night.
But is there a main character? Isn’t that me? To be played by an actress, of course. Or can that “I” remain out of the picture? Is everything filmed from the perspective of that “I”? No self-censorship. I have to allow any association. Desire is a key word. [..]

It’s strange that I wrote all that down at that time. It would take another two years before I had anything on paper. But my new film plan seemed to go in a different direction when, after a screening of Wistful Wilderness, people from the port authority came up to me and said that it would be great if this kind of film would be made about the Amsterdam port area.
Just like the island of Tienmeten, the port would also undergo a huge transition in the coming years. Not only because of advancing housing construction, but especially because of the energy transition. The Hemweg power plant, with its chimney as a landmark, was due to be shut down in 2024. It would be an end to fossil fuels.
Port of Amsterdam had given me a beautiful map, with the names of all the ports. I visited all kinds of companies that were involved in the energy transition in one way or another, and obtained the diploma Safety for Operational Managers VCA  to have easier access to company sites. And I rode all four cycling routes through the area, partly alone, partly together with Hugo Naber who had signed up at the office as someone who wanted to do something with film.
In 2019, I wrote a screenplay for a feature-length documentary based on the transition of the Amsterdam port area. Just before the first lockdown in March 2020, the screenplay was submitted for Teledoc by Monique Busman (De Familie / Tomtit Film). The plan was rejected: it had no urgency, was too essayistic and not for a wide enough audience.

I decided to continue on the track I had started in 2016. A free, associative film that would be something between a feature film and a documentary. That landscape of the port of Amsterdam would still be the arena. In my explanation of the plan, I wrote:
Our protagonist could be a photographer, who is commissioned to capture the transition of the port of Amsterdam. Let’s call her Lea. How old is Lea? Old enough to have a past. [..] A film where everything is allowed, from documentary landscape shots to unannounced flashbacks. A film made up of apparent fragments that ultimately have some kind of connection. Loosely autobiographical. Uncompromising.

The plan was submitted to the Netherlands Film Fund on 20 May 2020. They were enthusiastic. I was allowed to develop it into a screenplay. Never in my life had I received such positive advice:
The treatment reads very excitingly, especially in a cinematographic sense; the detailed landscape observations, the lively dialogues during gatherings of friends, the letters of the deceased Boudewijnn that Lea gradually delves into, and the passage of time as a whole.
All these ingredients hold the reader in their grip and clearly express what is still hidden at the beginning of the story: Leah’s suppressed grief, her insecurity and her longing.
The closeness of humanity [..] versus the palpable distance to the larger is moving and thus becomes recognizable as a recurring theme throughout the earlier work of the director/screenwriter, who with this application shows that despite the already acquired impressive status of her cinematographic oeuvre, she is still challenged to take a step further.

But the screenplay we delivered less than a year later was not really appreciated by the Film Fund. And subsequent versions were also criticized. The suspense was lacking, characters were implausible, and the various storylines cannibalized each other. Also, ‘the cinematographic approach and working method (was) insufficiently clarified.’
Subsidy for realization was not an option if I would continue in this way.
I decided to rewrite the screenplay into a low-budget version, so that in the worst-case scenario, the film could be made without money, just like After the Tone (2014), also rejected by the Film Fund, and made anyway.
I scrapped all the play scenes: they would mainly take place off-screen. The actors would read their lines, in a sound studio, and I, as Lea, would be their antagonist. We could do a lot in two days in the studio. And we would combine those recordings with images of the port area. In part, I had already shot that material for what was supposed to be the documentary one day. It would be no longer a hybrid feature film, but a kind of documentary investigation into how you might be able to make a feature film.

Fortunately, we were still able to submit this to the Film Fund, as an artistic experiment, of course for a lower amount. Amazingly, a positive decision followed in November 2023: The film plan is [..] at the same time very personal and innovative, both within the maker’s oeuvre and in a broader playing field. Propelled by personal urgency and social relevance, the urgency of the film plan comes across convincingly.

Our first day of shooting was on February 12, 2024. The last one on July 5. In between were 14 shooting days. Which were fantastic. Great people to work with. Film as research. Exciting.

Funnily enough, the film we are editing now hardly differs from the treatment I once wrote. Freedom regained. And what the final result will be: I have no idea. But quite strange, I think.