Narrative films about how people experienced change and history

“Suddenly the whole world was upside down. Many people didn’t understand what was going on.”

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

“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 after months away with crates of plants and hand-cut stonework. The garden she finished at Clingendael in 1913 was lush and ambitious, full of flowers and the showiest plants she could find.

Every generation since has arrived with its own idea of what a Japanese garden ought to be, and the garden has been adjusted to match. Her lantern, a design unlike any standard type, collapsed in the 1960s and was replaced with a conventional Japanese one. Years later the City studied the old photographs again and returned a faithful copy of her original to the water. Each of those decisions was made in good faith, by the standards of its moment.

The tending has not changed. Nobody planted the moss that now covers the ground. It came as the garden grew dark and damp, and stayed because someone kept working here, year after year, for a century. The film is made with the people who do that work: 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. They gave permission to film, and the production is independent.

The garden draws crowds every year, and most people come for the beauty rather than the history. I wanted to put that story on film at length.

Production note

The Reinvention of Kyoto had the opposite problem. This garden is still there and still being worked on, but almost nothing was written down as it was made, and no moving image of its early life exists.

So the camera works mostly in the present. I film the interviews at the objects themselves rather than in a room, and the maintenance going on now as part of the history. Shooting runs across a full year to catch each season. From the early years there is almost no visual material with people in it. Re-enactment fills that gap, built from what the record does hold. A tea party in the pavilion, the baroness walking friends through her garden.

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