"Obsada" means "film crew" in Polish, but can also mean "task force". The crew here is dual purpose. First the film crew, in front of and behind the camera, who are all women – art and film students brought together for the occasion at the Sztuki Museum in Lodz. The community are busy unravelling and investigating an initiative undertaken in 1973 by another film crew – who were all men. The challenge, initiated by the famous film school in Lodz, was to explore the collective aspect of filmmaking over 23 days. From the filmmaking of one group to another, Wendelien van Oldenborgh continues her lively investigation of the counter- history of feminism with Obsada – following on from her exploration of modernist architecture in Two stones (FID 2020), and the invisibility of women artists from a decolonialised perspective in Hier. (FID 2021). Proceeding via shifted frames and reverse shots, as both tools and the subject of this investigation, Wendelien van Oldenborgh sheds light on her own shooting process, thus turning invisibilities on their head. While the black and white archives of the event are revived and set in motion in order to be queried and turned into new material, colour is presented as another issue for this group of women. This symbol of (masculine) Polish modernism is reappropriated here : through the coloured gels which the women manipulate, monochrome clothes they wear, Sellotape and the walls. Overlays, drawings, all the many gestures which accompany and unravel what is said. However, Obsada doesn’t content itself with merely revisiting the past. The key objective, both then and now, is to recall the fact that this is still work in progress in Poland, a country where, as we are well aware, reactionary, draconian measures are in place which thwart women’s freedoms.
(Nicolas Feodoroff)

Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Wendelien van Oldenborgh uses architecture both as a setting and as an investigative tool to question politics and its history. We remember the formidable sophistication constructions of Two Stones (FID 2020) and Beauty and the Right to the Ugly (FID 2015). The deliberately simple title of his latest film unequivocally underlines the importance of space. And once again, he refuses the schematisation and demagogy of shortcuts, here, it is complexity that is required. As this space, the ” here” that is filmed, is instantaneously multifold: the land and the setting in which we find ourselves; the place we come from, which continues to float within and around us (in short, the musicality of a space); the memory of the place, itself intertwined (layers, visible or not, of the archive formed by a site). Seizing the opportunity of the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, issues related to the Indo-European community in the Netherlands are revisited, forming a three-threaded tress: a group of young musicians, FRED; a poet, Pelumi Adejumo; and an art historian, Lara Nuberg. Although the Museum’s original building is part of a colonial past, its current vocation is to promote women artists and artists from different cultural backgrounds. Here are the young women who have been called upon to bring this Museum to life, before our very eyes: through sound and words, analysis and poetry, actions and images. To engage with the walls of the building and the allegories that it harbours. A collective work, in which the director draws all the subtleties into a magnificently intelligent dance.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm)