Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows

In 1873, Vincent van Gogh moved to London to work in his uncle’s gallery Goupil. He was just 19 years old and took up lodgings with a widow named Ursula Loyer. Legend has it that Van Gogh fell in love with her daughter, who turned him down, and that he subsequently sank into a deep depression. He moved out to work locally as a preacher before becoming an artist years later. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a postman identified this humble row house at 87 Hackford Road in South London as Van Gogh’s former residence. The discovery saved the house from demolition and it was given a blue plaque and a listed status. In 2012, a Chinese businessman bought the dilapidated house sight unseen at an auction. Filmmaker Saskia Olde Wolbers presents the house as an invisible narrator interweaving stories from its past and its occupants. She alternates slow pans across bare and claustrophobic spaces with underwater shots inside scale models to tell a speculative story where facts are very fluid. Voices from different times are overlayed like sheets of wallpaper. This fictional historical "reverse engineering" questions the place’s social history – where everyday stories of ordinary people become entangled with art history and the mythologizing that surrounds Van Gogh.