Schatgraven

Doing the shopping on a weekday can lead to an investigation of the Dutch landscape and its inhabitants. This is what Elsbeth Dijkstra, the maker of this documentary, experienced when she bought a cauliflower in the supermarket. When cleaning it back home, she found a wedding ring, completely fasciated with the rosettes. An ordinary golden wedding ring: slightly scratched and bearing an inscription with the initials J.D. – 6 – ’25. This bizarre discovery brought back the memory of the inexplicable stories about ghosts and events in the small Swiss village where Dijkstra's family comes from. In the neatly ordered Dutch landscape, the filmmaker looks for the magic, but also for the owner of the wedding ring. In brief encounters with various people who are part of the path the cauliflower has covered from field to supermarket, the filmmaker not only finds clues as to where she might find the owner of the ring, but also stories about the Netherlands that have been handed down: apparently, the wedding ring is not the only one wandering around in the ostensibly rectilinear landscape. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)