De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel

In his debut as a filmmaker Jan Vrijman portrays Karel Appel ("I paint like a barbarian in a barbarian era") as a painter whose creativity erupts like a form of natural violence. The core of the film is a visit to the studio of the passionate Appel, who squirts paint onto the canvas with growling noises before modelling it with filling-knives. The sequences of the artistic process are complemented with atmospheric images from Appel's place of residence, Paris. At the Berlin Filmfestival this film won the Golden Bear, but was received with mixed feelings in Holland. According to Vrijman the reason was that until then documentaries had been "extremely formal". "What kind of people did you see? Individuals making statements, representatives of certain opinions, of truths. Not subjective truths, but the accepted truths, the truisms."