Hembrug filmclub – Pip’s choice

This movie captivated me as an 10yr old and has been a trusted companion ever since.  At the very height of my fandom, we relocated as a family from Australia to the US. Over the coming years, the film would come to represent home: a place that I could return to over and over, that I had memorised down to the finest detail, a place that doesn’t change with the passing of time. And in my efforts to find a place in which I belonged, I immersed myself in the lore of this film.

The more time I’ve spent with the film, the more I’ve come to realise that it should never have been made.  This movie represents a one-off moment in cinema history, at once the pinnacle and the finale of the hand-made blockbuster.  An overly-optimistic 26yo Spielberg was handed an unworkable set of circumstances, resulting in a horror film that is part fiction, part documentary.  But in this accidental realism, we’ve been gifted a slice of cinema that transcends time and place to resound on a plainly human level.  The very fact that an Australian has been invited to present this film in The Netherlands is testament to that.