2km2 two square kilometers city (2008)

Directed by: Carel van Hees, André van der Hout | 80 minutes | documentary

Sometimes a city and especially parts of that city have something aloof, like French villages that you pass through when you go south and take the alternative routes: they look drab and dull from the outside; all shutters are often closed, especially in the afternoon. Yet it is not to say that there is no vibrant life within the walls, invisible to the eyes of outsiders. Rotterdam sometimes evokes that image. According to many Rotterdammers, the city is bustling and it is an absolute fact that a lot is invested in art and culture, for example, but you have to go there to see it, feel it, experience it. You can also watch this movie, up to a point, because you do get a colored picture.

Rotterdam-born photographer and filmmaker Carel van Hees brings the viewer closer to Rotterdam by zooming in on a part of the city and life there: the port and trade, the workers, the drink, the immigrants. All ranks and positions pass briefly in our field of view. We follow a homeless junkie, two judges, some regulars in a pub, an older Turkish couple, whose man plays a traditional Turkish stringed instrument, authentic Rotterdam touts, young Moroccan boxers, men’s hairdressers (one white and one black) and a pregnant dark woman who gives birth before our eyes. They are actually filmed in a mosque (ever witnessed an Islamic ‘sermon’ up close?).

Comments and questions are missing, great. The film lets us draw our own conclusions. The scenes follow each other at a decent pace and so ‘2km2’, which won a nomination for a Golden Calf at the Dutch Film Festival in 2008, looks mainly like a nice photo album, but a bit of a wedding where you weren’t there. Many different stories are also told, or rather: fragments, snatches from stories. Rotterdam apparently has many faces, but sometimes just a little too much for the viewer, causing the attention to fade here and there.

The first shots suggest that it will all be nicely set with an agreed upon pose here and there, witness the close-up of the basketball hands and the posing oldie outside the fences of the street basketball court, almost as a cliché of a kind of American ghetto, where this part of the city sometimes resembles. In the rest of the film, such poses do not actually occur. You would say: fortunately, but strangely enough, later in the film, the need for such pictures arises, because they could also have formed beautiful benchmarks. Like that rare beautiful shot of the silhouette of a heron on a pole by the harbor, somewhere in the evening or night. Would have liked more. Take a rest from all impressions. The director is very close to his subjects, so close that you sometimes wonder whether it is all so specifically Rotterdam. Because if you zoom in like that, you sometimes lose the bigger pictures. And yet: wasn’t Rotterdam the city where the integration issue was highest on the political agenda? After watching this film you will at least understand that it is alive and also a little bit why. Like the frustrated pub-goer in the film sighs that you hardly see any white people on the street anymore. At least not in these 2 square kilometers of Rotterdam. Would it really be that bad?