Het rijk der schimmen

The starting point for this film is the second commandment, ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them, nor serve them.’ Visual artist Fiona Tan brings together a number of different photo collections in the film. She asks herself what these sometimes everyday, sometimes world-famous images mean to their owners, and to her. For example, we see the favourite pictures of various people and the bungled and discarded snapshots of amateur photographers. In many cases, these images say more about the world than most newspaper photographs. The film was shot in both black-and-white and colour, experiments with found footage and was edited in the form of an associative collage.