🎬 MOONS OF CAVIA | Documenting Absence: De toekomst is failliet + Do You Love Me + VHS Jam Session
During the first weekend of September, we will be hosting the seventh edition of our outdoor film festival, featuring not only Oscar-nominated features and local eye-opening shorts, but also music, food and performance, making for a truly special experience. Once again, we will try to spotlight some of the diversity that makes up Cavia’s many identities, celebrating a year of incredible moments for our small cinema.
→ Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam + follow the signs!
Click HERE for the full programme.
----------------------------------------
DOCUMENTING ABSENCE:
De toekomst is failliet + Do You Love Me + VHS Jam Session
The opening night of Moons presents two films which converse about the loss of personal histories through the disappearance and destruction of (urban) infrastructure. In the search of remembering fractured and fuzzy memories, or intentionally hidden histories, both films engage directly with the power of archives.
Suzzane Koopstra's short magic-realist documentary De toekomst is failiet follows Bep and Tinus, two elders who have been capturing the disappearance of their neighbourhoods over the last 60 years. By digging through their personal archives and photographic albums, the film offers a unique glimpse into Rotterdam's rapid gentrification and housing crisis.
Lara Daher's Do You Love Me reconstructs the fragmented collective memory of Lebanon, by panning through 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography from private collections and abandoned archives. In the words of Lara Daher "In our schools, we have no shared history book, our past remains unspoken. This absence pushed me to the archives to search, collect, and listen—to understand not only what came before, but our present."
Alongside the double-bill, visitors will be able to interact with Cavia's own VHS archive, a collection gathered over years which includes festival submissions, experimental films, underground oddities, and homemade tape compilations, among many others. This will be set up by the Archive Jam Sessions, preceding the screenings.
DE TOEKOMST IS FAILLIET
Suzzane Koopstra | 2024 | NL | 27’ | Dutch, EN subtitles
The endless Rotterdam construction pit unfolds as a moving spectacle for the very last time. Amidst a desolate backdrop where once the lost city resurrected from the rubble, the earth swaps itself for a shiny skyline in a whimsy permanent longing for the new and the better. In a race against the clock, Bep and Tinus persist in making their last attempt to capture that elusive time, by chasing it with their camera.
+
DO YOU LOVE ME
Lara Daher | 2025 | Lebanon, France, Germany, Qatar | 75’ | EN subtitles
Do You Love Me is a playful and personal journey through Lebanon's audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche - marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory.
+
VHS JAM SESSION
The Archive Jam Session hands Filmhuis Cavia's VHS archive over to the audience. A participatory method for exploring it collectively and horizontally, one night at a time. The audience becomes co-curator, sifting through decades of tape to build something live and shared.
Around the space, TVs and videocassette players turn into preview stations. In small groups, participants search the archive, chasing a title, a label, a hunch, then gather at a station to watch what they find. From hours of footage, each group cuts fifteen minutes: a few fragments, rewound and primed to the chosen moments.
Then the big screen takes over. One by one, groups step up and press play. Without a script, fragment meets fragment, image answers image, and something clicks: a jam session made of images instead of sound, each riff building on the last. Along the way, a glimpse of everything that lives inside Cavia's archive.
Full programme:
18:00 | Doors open
18:30 | Soup dinner
19:00 | VHS Archive Jam Session
21:00 | De toekomst is failliet
21:45 | Do You Love Me
