Feature: Are You There?

ONLY AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON VOD, 19 – 21 NOVEMBER 2021

ARE YOU THERE? I Netherlands, 01:32:00 I Director: Maartje Nevejan I Art & Experimental PG13 I WEBSITE

Emmy nominee director Maartje Nevejan explores the unconscious realms, based on her own experience with absence seizures as a child. The film is part of a 5 year research trans-media project in which art & sciences collaborated closely, called: If You Are Not There, Where Are You? In 2019 it resulted in a VR-installation, an exhibition, a book, a film and live events. This mysterious non-being, on the bottom of our existence can give us, just as a dark night full of stars, a feeling of belonging and also create a huge fear in us. Can you be absent and present at the same time?

Perhaps the darkest black is the black we carry within ourselves. It’s not the night where you switch the lights off – it’s the night where you close your eyes. To make new art, you have to make new space.

Anish Kapoor

Maartje Nevejan is an award winning independent filmmaker (based in Amsterdam), with a background in theatre and multi media. In her projects she likes to research the (raw) poetic quality of reality. Maartje is also a changemaker and a innovative social interpreneur. She loves to bring opposites together and capture these insightful, intimate and sometimes wild cooperations on film. She loves to hangout where “reality rhymes.”

Maartje travelled and created films and festivals with angry immigrant teens around the world debating with eachother; she initiated a transmedia project about a ballet crossing disabled people and their little red cars with the world famous Dutch National Ballet company; and she directed a multimedia event about the meaning of the passion of Christ in this millenium, crossing the storylines of inhabitants of the red light district in Amsterdam with well known artists like Ger van Elk and Desiree Dolron.

Highly interested in what moves people Maartje’s films and projects are daring, funny, heartrending and very often changing the people who are in it.

Total Streaming Time: 01:43. Please note, some content may be unsuitable for children under 13 years of age. VIMEO links will go live from 12am ET (Eastern Time) on the 19th November 2021.