Bewaren of hoe te leven

As long as she can remember, director Digna Sinke has been saving all sorts of things. When she sits at her desk at the beginning of BEWAREN OF HOE TE LEVEN she’s surrounded by the vast collection that will play a role in this personal essay film. If comparisons be made, this is her homage to Agnès Varda’s LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE (2000). She films the stacks of newspapers that her producer and life partner René Scholten amassed in order to cut out the film reviews, and her niece’s many wedding photos on her computer screen. In so doing, she also introduces a more philosophical theme: how the tactility of memorabilia has evaporated in the transition from analogue to digital. Sinke speaks with her mother, who was also a prolific collector; she visits home-bound hoarders and minimalist digital nomads. BEWAREN starts nostalgically, then reveals how objects are also time machines. Perhaps, she muses, people who store everything in the cloud lose their sense of touch and recollection. And with her characteristically dry humor, she lets the shapeshifting clouds over the village of Zonnemaire where she grew up float through her film. BEWAREN is thus also an archive of cinematic imagination. (Dana Linssen)

In the presence of Digna Sinke and Gerwin Tamsma (Curator).

Digna Sinke (selection): GROETEN UIT ZONNEMAIRE (1972), DE STILLE OCEAAN (1984), BELLE VAN ZUYLEN (1993), Tiengemeten Project (2001–2006), WEEMOED EN WILDERNIS (2010), AFTER THE TONE (2014), UNDER THE SURFACE (2016), BEWAREN / KEEPING & SAVING (2018), ZOET & ZOUT (2019), GRENZEN (2020), HEMELSLEUTEL (2024)