With Glass, Haanstra became in 1959 the first Oscar winner of The Netherlands. This short ‘free’ film, shot in the glass factories of Leerdam and Schiedam, demonstrates how glass blowers do their work. But thanks to the superbly edited ballet of working hands and the sequence of mechanical motions of the engines, is it especially a cinematic tour de force. That the industry can’t do without man’s involvement is shown in the scene where we hear the voice of Haanstra himself counting the bottles on the conveyor belt, until one bottle breaks… Eddy van der Enden was operating the camera, the images are underscored by the music of jazzman Pim Jacobs. More than a thousand film copies of Glass went all over the world and for decades the film remained compulsory learning material at film academies in many countries.
DAFilms.com is powered by Doc Alliance, a creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals. Our aim is to advance the documentary genre, support its diversity and promote quality creative documentary films.