Van Lieshout Filmproducties

Short highly stylised film about a controversial location. Mainly shot at night in an observant style, the film shows the highs and lows of shopping mall Hoog Catharijne and the adjacent train station area. The concrete jungle with desolate nooks, tunnels and arcades seems to lead its own life under the pulsating neon light. Gradually, the constructed surroundings emerge as a versatile, battered organism, used in a continuous, contrasting and bizarre way by junks and cleaners, travellers and shoppers.

In 1913, polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen took part in an expedition, to open up a regular trade connection between Norway and the interior of Siberia. His fascinating diary, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future, is an important inspiration for Sketches of Siberia, in which elements from Siberia’s past, and present are visualised, focussing on the mighty Yenisey river basin. Within themes such as colonialism, exploitation of mineral resources, and demographic developments i.e. the destiny of native people and the influx of convicts and exiles, we search for the human dimension balancing precariously amid the influences from outside. Nansen’s observations and considerations at the time, are mirrored in a present day context.

The idealistic intentions with which the Kola peninsula has been explored since the beginning of the Russian revolution have left deep traces in the landscape and in the minds of people.

The Russian/Dutch painter Tatyana Yassievich divides her time between St. Petersburg, Amsterdam and Berlin. Director Van Lieshout follows her in these three cities, while she takes pictures and makes notes of everyday public spaces: train stations, blocks of flats, canteens. Subsequently, she paints them in a realistic, yet simplified style and without any people, like stage scenery for the stories that are played out on those locations. 'I don't paint the people themselves, only the public places they pass through in their thousands.' Yassievich works in her studio, sets up an exhibition and tells in voice-over about her work and her ties with the three cities, and particularly about the changes that took place in St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between times, the documentary shows the sort of urban landscapes that Yassievich paints, in fixed frames, like moving pictures.