Farewell Cineville

"Mike? I'm extremely excited."

The Cineville card is a scheme where you pay 21 euros a month (less if under 29 years of age) for a subscription which gives you free entry to arthouse cinemas across the Netherlands both for normal screenings and special events, such as festivals. It’s great! It means that I go to the cinema much more often than I would otherwise.

Nowadays, a single cinema ticket costs 10 euros here, so if you go more than three times a month you get a good deal. Cineville is celebrating 10 years of existence and I’m moving country, so it seems a fitting time to look back at what I have seen. When I stop to look at my ticket history online, it has actually been quite a lot and quite a diverse selection. To take just the last two years, between April 2017 and March 2019, I’ve seen around 150 movies with my card (festival screenings don’t always get recorded so the figure itself is not exact).

The Noble Art of Bingeing

Further, what I like about having the card is that it opens up the possibility for a good old binge, so I that can see three films in one day on a Sunday if I want (I’d never spend 30 euros on the cinema in one day otherwise!). Or indeed, I can for example check out the Go Short film festival in Nijmegen and see a bunch of short films. Whilst IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) is sadly not yet fully Cineville, at least this year they had the shorts and mid-length series available on the card. Since the scheme is nationwide, I popped to the EYE when in Amsterdam to see Het Wilde Stad about the city’s hidden wildlife or when on the way home from Zwolle I stopped at the Vue in Deventer, where I saw the incredible Sami Blood which is about indigenous kids growing up in the north of so-called Finland.

Festivals that are within the scheme include Architecture Film, Belgisch Film, Camera Japan, Eastern Neighbours, Itinerant Movies and Movies that Matter. I am happy to say I have seen some films in the last two years that would certainly find a place in my all-time top 50. These would include Hard Paint (Filipe Matzembacher & Marcio Reolon, 2018—a great queer film from Brazil), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017—written and directed by Martin McDonagh), Raw (2016—an excellent debut from Julia Ducournau) and The Other Side of Hope (2017—a masterpiece by Aki Kaurismaki).

I have lots of good memories of randomly watching wonderful films, for example feeling a bit lovelorn after waving someone off at Schiphol Airport, I stumbled across a Hungarian film about love called On Body and Soul (Enyedi, 2017) at the Louis Hartlooper in Utrecht.

I’ve also seen a few clangers of course. Watching Miss Julie as a sneak preview a few years back put me off previews for a long long time. It still makes me shudder to think how insultingly bad that film was. But hey, if I’d paid 10 euros I would be livid, at least a Cineville pass removes the problem of feeling short-changed. We just walked out. Another film I walked out on (this happens so rarely it’s easy to recall the times) was Phantom Thread and we caught Fatih Akin’s In the Fade (2017) instead, which was an intriguing fictionalised account of some real-life neo-Nazi murders in Germany.

Documentaries

I also have seen LOADS of great documentaries. Wow so many great documentaries. A few I would recommend would be:

• Rabot (Christina Vandekerckhove, 2017)—a powerful film profiling the residents of a tower block in Ghent which is slated to be demolished

• Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (Stephen Loveridge, 2018)—an excellent access all areas adventure with the popstar and human rights activist M.I.A.
• Cold Case Hammarskjold (Mads Brügger, 2019)—a super crazy romp investigating the murder of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, which uncovers even more conspiracies!

• The Islands and the Whales (Mike Day, 2016)—a touching film about the people of the Faroe Islands, some of whom battle to protect their right to kill whales, even though the growing scientific evidence is that whale blubber contains an unsafe level of mercury.

• So Help Me God (Yves Hinant, Jean Libon, 2017)—probably the craziest of a mad bunch, this documentary (which must be fiction except it’s true) follows Anne Gruwez, an extrovert Belgian judge, as she rampages through her cases.

• Homo Sapiens (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2016)—this totally blew me away when I saw it in a deserted room on a Monday morning, it’s a film composed of very very long still shots of derelict spaces. It’s amazing!

Classics

It’s always enjoyable to see a classic film in the cinema on the big screen. In the last year, I very much enjoyed rewatching two of my all-time faves: My Own Private Idaho (Gus van Sant, 1991) and Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). Do I now understand the latter? No, I wouldn’t say that exactly but I do have a theory that works for me and to explain more would require a new article entirely. A classic film I saw at WORM in Rotterdam which was new for me at least was the outstanding L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1926).

Mainstream Crap

Having the card means that I can also watch a lot of Hollywood crap I definitely wouldn’t otherwise have bothered to watch, and sometimes to be fair I was pleasantly surprised. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) was great, War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2017) had an excellent performance from Woody Harrelson, Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018) had a strong female ensemble cast and Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016) had a few decent jokes.

Dutch

I even saw a few decent Dutch-language films! Layla M. (Mijke de Jong, 2016) is a really good film about a Dutch Moroccan woman who slips into jihad through the friends she keeps and the next film from the same writer/director was also a powerful film about family dynamics. It was called God Only Knows (Mijke de Jong, 2019). Het Verlangen (Joram Lürsen, 2017) was another unexpected gem, it’s a sharply plotted comedy about a publishing house which decides to spice up their release a novel written by a boring middle-aged man by claiming it was written by a conventionally attractive blonde woman. With hilarious consequences...

Farewell

For me these past five or so years having a Cineville card has been awesome. I’ve seen some fantastic films and also dared to watch things which otherwise I might not have seen. Viewing habits change, of course people now find it easier to watch things at home and on online, I do not necessarily find that’s not a reason to be sad although I do enjoy going to cinemas and I do hope Cineville is providing a way for these beautiful spaces to survive. I love visiting cinemas.

Yes we can question the logic of a society in which a certain class of person is able to access culture cheaply via Cineville, Museumkaart, an OV discount card, perhaps a We Are Public card and so on, whilst walk up tickets for cinema, trains, museums etc are terribly expensive for casual users (just don’t get me started on Dutch xenophobia). At the same time, I would say Cineville offers good value for money for arthouse lovers.

Farewell Cineville, it’s been fun!