POSTER
 

Coco Schrijber

2008/ 87' / Netherlands
Director: Coco Schrijber

AWARDS:

Golden Calf at Netherlands Film Festival 2008 for Best Feature Documentary
Monterrey IFF 2009, Mexico (Award for Best Documentary and Best Editing)
DOKUFEST IDF 2009, Kosova (Audience Award)
HotDocs, Official Selection

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR:

Coco Schrijber studied audio-visual arts at the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam. She directed seven films. Her first feature First Kill was in the selection for the Joris Ivens Award at IDFA. Her film Wonderful World (2001) won six international prizes.

ABOUT THE FILM:

As one of her web interviews confirmed, the Dutch filmmaker Coco Schrijber found inspiration for this documentary in her own idleness. It may sound quite strange, somewhat bizarre too, to invite the audience to a film screening whose topic is threatening to waste the time you might have spent more excitingly otherwise. However, we are talking about a very impressive, interesting and experimental film through which we are guided by the narrating voice of John Malkovich. From its very beginning, literary quotations from F.M. Dostoyevsky (Notes from the Underground) and Bret Easton (American Psycho), introduce the viewer to the film’s imaginary framework which clearly attempts to provoke the interest of the audience by asking: what can we (not) do with our own time? Stylised with sophisticated visual shots, this atypical documentary project manages to “nest” itself into the intellects of its viewers in a very subtle way, thus gradually absorbing their attention into its fluid, carefully-shaped and fragmented structure. We could say that the poignant energy of this documentary is patiently building the scenery in which the meditative focus of the intellect eventually succeeds to blend with the perspectives of the protagonists (a Wall Street stockbroker, a worker in the cake factory, a painter who has been persistently painting “time” for 42 years, a retired lady spy from the Second World War, a nomad from the Sahara Desert and Brenda Spencer who, at 16, killed two and injured eleven children because she was bored) who, as the paths of their lives show, document the infinity of the wandering potential of human’s imagination which is trapped in the time and space of the human mind. For all those who would like to “have a break” from the thematic focus of our programme which is dedicated to human rights, watching “Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies” will be an outstanding opportunity for a somewhat different and evocative film experience.