Narrative films about how people experienced change

Released

The Reinvention of Kyoto

Seen through its gardens

For more than a thousand years Kyoto was the seat of the emperor’s court. When the court left for Tokyo in 1869, the city lost its largest employer, and the gardeners who had tended the gardens of the nobility were left without clients.

Kyoto set about rebuilding itself, and cut a canal through the mountains from Lake Biwa to power its new industry. What nobody had planned was that the water from the canal could also bring flowing streams to gardens, and that the land along it would draw a new elite of industrialists and politicians, who wanted gardens that looked as if nature had made them. A young gardener, Ogawa Jihei VII, used the canal water to give them exactly that. As the city recovered, his style came to define the taste of its new elite, and Kyoto’s gardeners had work again.

Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert, a historian of Japanese gardens and landscape architecture and the author of Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650–1950 (University of Pennsylvania Press), advised on the script and appears throughout. His work showed me how closely garden culture tracks the politics around it. I drew on that and other sources to build one continuous film about a story that is little known outside Japan.

Production note

Kyoto is still there to film, but the nineteenth century survives mostly in still photographs, with only a few fragments of early film. For this film I wanted one continuous look, so I shot everything on one camera: I colourised and printed the photographs, then lit them and filmed them as objects. The moving footage I played on an analogue television and filmed off the screen.

50 minutes · 2026 · available on YouTube
A film by Rani Schilperoordt
Featuring Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert

In production

Dreaming of Japan

The Japanese Garden of Clingendael

Around 1900, Japanese gardens were the height of European fashion, and almost nobody knew how to build one. Baroness Marguérite van Brienen went to see for herself, and came home with crates of plants and hand-cut stonework. The garden she finished at Clingendael around 1913 was lush and ambitious, full of flowers and the showiest plants she could find.

After the Baroness passed away, generations of gardeners continued to tend the moss, the trees and shrubs, and kept the essence of the Japanese Garden with loving care for a century. The film is made with the people who do that work today: head gardener Levi Schilperoordt, and Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert, who wrote a conservation study of the Garden in 2002. The Garden has been in the care of the City of The Hague since 1954. The City gave permission to film, and the production is independent.

Most visitors come to the Garden for its beauty and few know the history. I want to tell that history properly, in a film that is a pleasure to watch.

Production note

The Garden is still there, but almost nothing was written down as it was made, and no moving image of its early life exists. It is almost the opposite of the problem I had with The Reinvention of Kyoto.

What is left is lush and alive, which is rare for a century-old subject, so I film the interviews at the objects themselves and treat the maintenance going on now as part of the history. Shooting runs across a full year to catch each season. There is almost no visual material of the Baroness and her staff, so I asked a costume historian to bring together a group of re-enactors with the right period dress.

Expected 2027
A film by Rani Schilperoordt
Featuring Prof. Dr. Wybe Kuitert and Levi Schilperoordt