"Guido van der Werve • Director of The Breath of Life" by Teresa Vena

“Cinema is a solution to what I want to do, and that is to touch people”

Dutch director Guido van der Werve presented his autobiographical documentary The Breath of Life as a world premiere in the Tiger Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam. We talked to him about his biking accident that changed his life, enabled him to process traumas from the past and, at the same time, allowed him to embrace the future. The director also told us how he searched for a more universal approach to the topic, which the audience would be able to relate to.

Cineuropa: Could you explain the Dutch title of the film, Nummer achttien (lit. “Number 18”)?
Guido van der Werve: It has a very simple meaning: this is the 18th film that I have made. I started numbering my works when I made my graduation film. I have always been interested in mathematics. The title is therefore not that important; it's usually the subtitles that matter more.

Why did you want to make this film? Did it help you process your experience?
I always keep my work very close to myself – usually, my films are a mirror of myself. After the accident, when I regained consciousness, I was wondering about what I could do next. People who knew me, also from my professional circle, kept asking questions about what happened. So I had this drive to make a movie about it, rather than being forced to tell the same story again and again. During my rehabilitation, I also realised the scale of what had happened. The doctors told me that I should be very happy that I had survived, since 99% of people would have died in such an accident. My cameraman then started to come to the rehab centre, at the end of 2016, and we began documenting everything. While I was thinking about my life in this situation, many moments from my childhood came back to me. Then, I realised that I had been over-compensating a lot during my life because of something that I would call an inferiority complex. I processed my childhood traumas in the film.

Read full article at cineuropa.org