Synopsis for the Film

It was an ‘everyday’ waterfront with its windmills and pastoral landscape. Millions must have taken in the quiet idyll in passing and millions more must have been just walked along without stopping to take the least notice. Until the great Bert Haanstra captured it on film with a perception that was painterly, poetic and sheer heightened cinema. Mirror of Holland didn’t just immortalize ‘a day in the peaceful country’ but was a meditation on the under-currents of life itself. Capturing the inverted reflections along the canals, even the mighty windmills seem liquid- dissolving as it comes together and etching surreal landscapes that are as ephemeral as they are enduring and as trancelike as they are real. Mirror of Holland was Haanstra’s breakthrough film that first got the world to notice the plucky Dutchman who could make you dream a vivid beautiful dream even as you lay awake.

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