Illustration: two women in Edwardian dress standing apart in a field of tall grass.
Ikasia

Approach

Narrative films about how people experienced change.

Film has many ways to bring the past closer to our own experience. I look for subjects that would come to life in a film and have never had one.

Films

Still from The Reinvention of Kyoto: a visitor looking out over the garden at Murin-an, the hills of Higashiyama behind. Watch the full film
“Suddenly the whole world was upside down. Many people didn’t understand what was going on.”
Wybe Kuitert, in the film

Released

The Reinvention of Kyoto

Seen through its gardens

Kyoto's gardens are world-famous for their beauty. They are also the record of a crisis. When the emperor left for Tokyo in 1869 the old capital lost its court, its patrons and its purpose, and the gardeners who had served them had to find new patrons, and a new style to serve them with.

A canal was cut through the mountains from Lake Biwa, new money arrived, a new elite discovered a taste for nature, and a gardener named Ogawa Jihei VII turned a declining city into the birthplace of a garden style the world now reads as timeless.

Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert, a historian of Japanese gardens and landscape architecture and the author of Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650–1950 (University of Pennsylvania Press), advised on the script and appears throughout. His work showed me how closely garden culture tracks the politics around it. I drew on that and other sources to build one continuous film. It is a lesser known story outside Japan, and I wanted to bring it to a wider audience.

Production note

Kyoto is still there to film, but the nineteenth century survives mostly in still photographs, with only a few fragments of early film. I didn’t want to drop that material into the edit as digital inserts, so I put it back in front of the camera. I colourised and printed the photographs, then lit them and filmed them as objects. The moving footage I played on an analogue television and filmed off the screen. Because I shot everything on one camera, the film holds one continuous look.

Finding the story inside the material, and taking it no further than the sources allow, was the work I enjoyed most.

50 minutes · 2026 · available on YouTube
A film by Rani Schilperoordt
Featuring Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert

The Japanese Garden at Clingendael under snow, the red bridge over the frozen pond.
Opening shot of the Dreaming of Japan preview: the Garden at Clingendael in summer, the thatched pavilion above the pond and the red bridge beyond. Watch the preview
“They were after a feeling, a piece of a country most of them would never see.”

In production

Dreaming of Japan

The Japanese Garden of Clingendael

Around 1900, Japanese gardens were the height of European fashion, and almost nobody knew how to build one. Baroness Marguérite van Brienen went to see for herself, and came home with crates of plants and hand-cut stonework. The garden she finished at Clingendael around 1913 was lush and ambitious, full of flowers and the showiest plants she could find.

After the Baroness passed away, generations of gardeners continued to tend the moss, the trees and shrubs, and kept the essence of the Japanese Garden with loving care for a century. The film is made with the people who do that work today: head gardener Levi Schilperoordt, and Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert, who wrote a conservation study of the Garden in 2002. The Garden has been in the care of the City of The Hague since 1954. The City gave permission to film, and the production is independent.

Most people visit the Garden for its beauty rather than the history. With this film I want to give an obscure story a proper account, and one that is a pleasure to watch.

Production note

The Garden is still there, but almost nothing was written down as it was made, and no moving image of its early life exists. It is almost the opposite of the problem I had with The Reinvention of Kyoto.

What is left is lush and alive, which is rare for a century-old subject. So I film the interviews at the objects themselves, and I film the maintenance going on now as part of the history. Shooting runs across a full year to catch each season. There is almost no visual material of the Baroness and her staff, so I asked a costume historian to bring together a group of re-enactors with the right period dress.

Expected 2027
A film by Rani Schilperoordt
Featuring Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert and Levi Schilperoordt

Research

Made with the people who know the subject.

Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert and head gardener Levi Schilperoordt in conversation beside a stone lantern at Clingendael.
Filming Dreaming of Japan at Clingendael

Each film starts by finding the historian who knows the subject best and asking them in before the research begins. I write a first draft, they correct it, and the corrections arrive while the script can still change. They see the rough cut before anything is locked. And they are on camera, presenting their own material.

It means I am not the only judge of the material, which on a subject outside my own training I find important. I think it also makes for a better film, and it is part of how an Ikasia film gets made.

Contact

Rani Schilperoordt

Ikasia is the work of Rani Schilperoordt.

I’m a filmmaker by trade, based in the Netherlands. Usually my work is commissioned, but Ikasia is where I choose the subject myself and carry it from research and script through to the final edit.

It stays small on purpose: I do the research, the writing, the filming and the editing, and bring in help on set when a shoot calls for it. So the person you write to is the person who makes the film.

info@ikasiafilms.com