You have to understand what it’s like when your movies are not screened, but you keep making them, and only by the end of the 80s, after 20 years of work, random people here and there start saying: “This is actually quite good, let’s have it screened”. And you have all those films in poor quality, they have not been well-preserved. This kind of life has changed him, but he has not lost heart, and you can see that in his latest films, for instance, in “Sepio”: a country house in summer, we follow the heroine who is reading something, very slowly, in quite a vacation-like atmosphere, as if she were completely free for a couple of days. She writes a letter to her lover, takes a shower, goes out of the shower, changes her clothes, and we slowly follow her movements. It is full of femininity, sunlight and green grass. And what we see is that this film has no breakdown about it”
Kіrіll Adibekov (Moscow), programme supervisor, talking about Frans van de Staak, “a self-taught artist and director, “the son of a cobbler“. Being all that, no wonder he is barely known, having made most of his films with the money from his artistic grant.”

Frans van de Staak
Netherlands / 1975, 4 min

A concrete poem of words, sounds and images.

Frans van de Staak
Netherlands / 1996, 31 min

Like in his short Ten poems of Hubert Kzn Poot (1975) there is just one protagonist in Sepio. A woman is immersed within a landscape in summertime and she adores her beloved one in everything that emerges from her surroundings.

Uit het werk van Baruch d’Espinoza 1632-1677
Frans van de Staak
Netherlands / 1973, 32 min

From Spinoza's Ethica 82 sentences were selected without a strict coherence and re-assembled in seven components. Each component was filmed four times at least, in a different setting with different actors. Spinoza's sentences are taken as dialogues 'tout court', and not as a collection of opinions. Spinoza's style of philosophical thinking is presented as an activity in the first place, which is then revealed by each individual actor in his own way.