Close To Vermeer (2023)
Director: Suzanne Raes Run Time: 79 min. Release Year: 2023
Country: Netherlands
Language: Dutch, English
About the film:
Go behind the scenes of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever mounted, now on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Capturing the imagination of the art world – with glowing reviews, global publicity, and tickets sold out through the entirety of its run – the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective is nothing short of an historic event.
Suzanne Raes’s film follows curators, conservators, collectors, and experts in their joint mission to shine a new light on the elusive Dutch Master. This fascinating documentary reveals everything from the quiet diplomacy required to get the Vermeers to the Netherlands and the new technical knowledge gained by scanning the paintings layer by layer, to the shocking news that one work may not be by Vermeer after all. In the process, we discover how Vermeer was able to depict reality so differently from his contemporaries.
But above all, Close to Vermeer (2023) shows the infectious love Vermeer’s art inspires. As one curator lovingly puts it: “A good exhibition should change your view of the world. Vermeer can really do that.”
About the filmmaker:
Suzanne Raes has been working as an independent filmmaker for more than 20 years. Her early films The Houses of Hristina (2007), The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island (2009), and The Successor of Kakiemon (2012) premiered at IDFA and won several awards at international film festivals. Her film Come Closer (2015) about Boudewijn de Groot received the IDFA Music Audience Award in 2015. For her short film about the Rotterdam quid pro quo social service, De tegenprestatie (2015), Raes won a Golden Calf, the most important film award in the Netherlands. More recently, the co-production Ganz, How I Lost My Beetle (2019) had a successful theatrical release and the documentary Two Men (2022) won the Jury Prize for best documentary feature at the Bruges International Film Festival.
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