Barbara Visser Wins Dutch Cultural Media Fund Documentary Award

Dutch documentarian Barbara Visser has won the 2010 Dutch Cultural Media Fund Documentary Award, announced by the fund’s chair Jacob Kohnstamm at the opening ceremonies of IDFA, the largest documentary film festival in the world. The prize of € 125,000 was awarded for the realization of her plan for the film C.K. The film concerns an accountant for a large art fund who suddenly disappears from the face of the earth along with his family and millions of euros of public money. Bewildered, the people he leaves behind do everything they can to reconstruct his secret lives: the facts, interpretations and speculations are different for each of them, producing hugely divergent perspectives on C.K. and what he did. The prize of € 125,000, provided by the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, exists to stimulate cultural media production in the Netherlands and is awarded for the realization of the best film plan developed at the IDFA Documentary Workshop. The Workshop is funded and co-organized by the Cultural Media Fund.

Barbara Visser (born in Haarlem in 1966) studied photography and audiovisual media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.  Her work is exhibited internationally in museums and has been featured at  the São Paulo and Venice biennials. Visser also lectures at the Masters courses at Eindhoven Design Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. The jury selected the winning film plan from the eight developed under the guidance of documentary maker Coco Schrijber. The jury report describes the winning plan as "a film that might be a thriller or a fairytale, about a man who fools everyone, including perhaps himself,  by taking millions that don't belong to him and starting a new life."

Sandy Mandelberger, IDFA Dailies Editor