De grote vakantie

In October 1998 Johan van der Keuken called his radiologist at the Academic Hospital in Utrecht from Paris and heard that he only had a few years to live. Prostate cancer cells had taken hold in his body. Van der Keuken has travelled the world for years with his wife Nosh van der Lely. Together they decided to spend the rest of their precious time looking and listening. At Christmas they set off for Bhutan. They decided to take along a small digital Panasonic video camera as well as the Aäton film camera. Both ‘languages’, that of film and of video, have come together on 35mm film. Johan van der Keuken regarded the film they were embarking on as a chronicle of his own view of the world, made all the more urgent by his own mortality. Later in the film – and in his life – things will take a turn for the better, when Johan van der Keuken finds a new medicine in the United States that drastically increases his chances of survival. The Long Holiday has turned into a kind of ‘road-air movie’. The motion of their travelling is the motion of the film, interspersed with their many encounters with very different people from very different societies and cultures. ‘Living against all odds, with the aid of beautiful stories they sell themselves, as a comfort in the face of nothingness’, as Johan van der Keuken comments in the film. Living against all odds turns The Long Holiday into a vital film, in an ode to life on earth.