“At first, I only wanted to talk about love”: Visual artist and filmmaker Jeroen Kooijmans finds the light in thirty years of his video archive with Love-22-Love

Jeroen Kooijmans can be pretty hard on himself. The romantic yearner and perpetual overthinker filmed himself for more than thirty years, recording along the way how he drifted in and out of psychotic episodes. Miraculously, he has turned his intimate documentary debut, Love-22-Love, into a sun-kissed ode to the love of his life, the artist Elspeth Diederix.

Thirty-three years in the making, with thousands of hours of footage accumulated, digitised and processed in the editing bay. And then you premiere at IDFA with a brisk documentary clocking in at 84 minutes. “Really, is this the film…?” was Jeroen Kooijmans’ first reaction when he saw the final cut of Love-22-Love. “At first I thought: who wants to see this film? Isn’t it too specific or personal?” Says the Dutch visual artist and filmmaker, who made his documentary debut with Love-22-Love. Only later came the realisation that this was exactly what it always should have been, he recalls on a video call on his last day of a Vienna trip.

The film opens on a harrowing selfie video, with a distressed Kooijmans declaring, in the grip of a psychosis, that he is on the verge of dying.

And what is Love-22-Love if not a tiny miracle of a documentary? Part diaristic confessional, part historical overview of the many rises and falls of a prolific visual artist, Kooijmans’ film is a cinematic voyage through a life marked by depression. The film opens on a harrowing selfie video, with a distressed Kooijmans declaring, in the grip of a psychosis, that he is on the verge of dying. Fortunately, this all-encompassing despair soon makes way for light, as Kooijmans flips the page on this dark chapter and turns to the story he actually set out to tell: how an undying love for his life partner Elspeth dragged him out of even the vastest black holes.

At first, I only wanted to talk about love,” he admits. “When I started the film, I found myself once again in a terrible depression, and what helped was to turn to love and light.” He takes us back to the early days of the COVID pandemic, when time ground to a halt and Kooijmans finally sat down to digitise stacks of old DV tapes, with the aim of making a documentary portrait of Elspeth. “I was constantly cutting myself out of the film,” he says of those early days at the computer. “Partly because I couldn’t stand the sight of myself.”

But then a crucial realisation kicked in. Every fable about light needs darkness to shine against. Or, put simply: “a good film needs drama.” It was something Submarine producer Bruno Felix had already been urging him to look for in the material. “I was hesitant,” Kooijmans recalls, “as I didn’t want to return to all that darkness. I had only just come out of it and didn’t want to go back. But as time passed and I felt better, I realised I should tell the whole story after all.” And so Kooijmans himself emerged as the protagonist of his documentary feature, with the illuminating figure of Elspeth always floating above him, the fixed star of the whole journey.

We have all experienced the cringe of seeing ourselves on video and probably can’t even begin to imagine how excruciating it must be to turn thousands of hours of footage into an autobiographical documentary. To help him sort through his overflowing hard drives, Kooijmans turned to close friend Viktor van der Valk, a gifted filmmaker in his own right, responsible for the marvellous Dutch fiction debut Nocturne (2019). “He very patiently convinced me that I should use the more diaristic and vulnerable shots,” Kooijmans says about his trusted collaborator, credited as co-writer on the film. “When I showed him the recording that the film now opens with, he said: ‘this is exactly what we need.’ Without him that footage would never have made the cut.”

The irony isn’t lost on the director when he says that sculpting Love-22-Love was “the work of a mad man”. Of the 3,000 hours of footage, he handed about 500 hours to editors Coen Hagenaars and Lot Rossmark, who distilled Kooijmans’ manic, megalomaniacal and masterful material into a free-flowing archival film that lovingly oscillates between tender and terrible moments. Kooijmans, who graduated from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 1995, has a long background in video and film, but working on a feature was an eye-opener nonetheless. “The way they found new meaning by piecing footage together was so hopeful to me,” he says with a smile. “Suddenly I saw how my own body of work served as a visual language for our storytelling. It makes the film even more personal: how my artworks carry so much meaning within the edit of the film.”

For as long as Kooijmans can remember, he has been making images. His childhood was spent drawing and painting how he saw the world around him. “My brush and pencil became an extension of my thinking,” he vividly remembers. “Then I turned to the camera, a novel extension of my body. I bought a beast of a second-hand camera from someone at Dutch broadcaster VPRO, but soon jumped to more palm-sized consumer camcorders that allowed me to film with far less discomfort.” His insistent filming gives Love-22-Love its mythical quality: the passage of time made visible on screen. One of the film’s most remarkable stretches takes place in New York City, where Kooijmans held a studio residency at PS1/MoMA around the time two planes hit the World Trade Center in September 2001. “I was escaping my success back home in Amsterdam. I went to New York, almost went broke, and tried to get new commissions,” Kooijmans recalls. “These rises and falls of my life and career prospects shape time in Love-22-Love. And naturally this traumatic event had an indirect effect on what I was actually doing and feeling.”

One of the film’s most remarkable stretches takes place in New York City around the time two planes hit the World Trade Center

But even the most symbolically charged geopolitical tragedy of our century couldn’t distract Kooijmans from what was always on his mind: “the idea that love is the most important thing in existence.” Explaining how his devotion to Elspeth shaped Love-22-Love, he acknowledges that “relationships also have rises and falls”, but says that “perseverance has always made me see the light in ours”. Coming back to where this crazy film adventure started, Kooijmans says his goal was “to make a whole auditorium fall in love with Elspeth”. He is happy and honoured he had the world premiere at IDFA, in the palatial screening room of Amsterdam’s cinema temple Tuschinski, where an audience was indeed enraptured by Kooijman’s endlessly optimistic ode to the power of love. “Even though it completely revolves around me,” Kooijmans says, “I saw how universal the film actually is. It’s humbling to see how the work now touches other people so deeply.”

Now, Kooijmans is ready for the entire city of Amsterdam to fall in love with Elspeth and him all over again. Love-22-Love is heading to local cinemas, many of which host Q&As with the filmmaker. Meanwhile, his overwhelming film journey lives on in book form as LV-22-LV, 312 pages lovingly designed by Marius Schwarz as a reservoir of texts, images, artworks and personal extracts that once and for all closes the darker chapters of Kooijmans’ life and celebrates the radiance of love. That’s what will stay with Kooijmans the most, he concludes, “that it could have been a really dark film, but that it ended up being something so bright and so alive.”