Car Aircon Electrical Autocartoons

The late Gertjan Zuilhof’s work as curator of world cinema is a legendary part of IFFR’s legacy. This film reveals another aspect of his protean personality: his creative drawing. Using a humble computer, he playfully transforms sampled imagery, inventing imaginary creatures and recreating everyday sensations.

Many IFFR staff and audience members hold fond memories of Gertjan Zuilhof (1955–2025), whose outstanding programs devoted to contemporary filmmaking in Africa or the Philippines – little recognised on the global festival map until he did the work of curating and highlighting it – were milestones in IFFR’s history. Less well known is his work as a devoted amateur of the art of drawing.

Car Aircon Electrical Autocartoons uses the unfussy technology of digital drawing. In short episodes strung together to form a magnum opus, Zuilhof gathers fragments of still and moving photography, plus his own works on paper – and then begins to embroider, animate and transform them all with playful colouring, shifting and redrawing. Above all, he depends upon his own sensory and emotional impressions, returning time and again to particular obsessions: birds, water, streets, imaginary animals… The accompanying music is a vast collage including contributions by Khavn, Babel Gun and Jerry Gordon.

Somewhere between childlike doodling and the anthropological ‘fieldwork drawing’ practiced by Michael Taussig, Gertjan Zuilhof has left us his creative testament.

– Adrian Martin

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