Reruns (2018)

Directed by: Rosto | 14 minutes | animation, short film

Tragically, ‘Reruns’ is the last film by master artist Rosto. One of the Netherlands’ most idiosyncratic talents died on March 7, 2019 from the effects of lung cancer. ‘Reruns’ is the final piece of the Thee Wreckers Tetralogy, which will be released in its entirety in cinemas a year after his sad death. It’s wonderful to see ‘No Place Like Home’, ‘Lonely Bones’, ‘Splintertime’ and this film one after the other, but ‘Reruns’ is also an animation gem on its own.

Like the other titles in Rosto’s oeuvre, ‘Reruns’ is also a film in which you should not look for too much plot. It is a mixture of fantasy and dream images, interspersed with sensible texts (“You don’t have a dream city? Where do you go when you dream? It’s like a sunken maze of memories, with recurring places and recurring events, always the same but different every time”). If there must be an ultimate poetic explanation for what you see when you dream, this is it.

The events are sometimes illogical as dreams can be: for example, the main character suddenly finds himself back at his high school as a grown man, but is dressed in almost the same outfit as his younger version. Rosto cleverly plays with the science behind dreams: can you make choices in your dream? Funny is the confrontation of the main character with the child with whom the film opens; the child parrots the main character, but this nevertheless creates a logical dialogue.

‘Reruns’ feels personal, because of the universal anxiety in the nightmarish dream: the feeling of being late, having failed in your life and not being taken seriously. Memories of your youth, letting go of them. The film appeals to your gut feeling with grey/green tones and a hypnotic score: this is (just like Rosto’s other films) a film that you want to suck up, have it injected intravenously into your veins. Not to be explained, but to undergo. To review. And never want to forget. Where is that statue to Rosto?