Joke Olthaar
Niederlande, Rotterdam
Joke Olthaar is a theater and film maker, based in Rotterdam. From a background in the visual arts, she developed into a theater maker, set designer, screenwriter, writer and illustrator of children’s books and now a maker of artistic films.
She started her own theater company in which she worked in collaborations with various other artists. Besides the direction and performance she also writes scripts and designs and realizes scenery and costumes. Her plays and performances can be seen in theaters, museums, schools and at street festivals. Since 2011 she has organized ‘n Bries, a yearly project in nature in which the combination of theater performance and nature impression brings a complete new experience to city children, changing children’s view of their environment. In 2011, Olthaar received the Culture Award for this project.
Before that for a few years she used to manage her own theatrespace Op de Tak in a demolition building. Here she welcomed audiences for visual arts and theater, where the young visitors could explore and push their creative boundaries.
Olthaar’s film career started with a cooperation with photographer/visual artist Kiki Petratou, with whom she made a short film about underground music phenomenon Harrie Merry. This is the prelude to Olthaar’s first documentary Here is Harry Merry, which premiered at IFFR 2013 and was picked up by the national press as a ‘true germ’. In 2021, she made her first feature-length artistic film BERG. This work has been screened at more than 30 national and international film festivals, amongst others IFF Rotterdam, Netherlands Film Festival, Dokfest Munich, FIDBA Argentina, Dokufest Kosovo, Mediawave Hungary, Ulju Mountain film South Korea. At several festivals BERG has won awards amongst which the prestigious Dutch Director’s Forum. The film also had a tour along cinemas in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and was part of a group exhibition in Gallery WEST the Hague.
Since 2014, Olthaar has been an active member of Stichting B.a.d. an ambitious studio collective in the southside of Rotterdam. Joke Olthaar is interested in the movements of people in different spaces. Olthaar often approaches her visual artworks by scratching on materials ranging from paper to ice flowers to glass, and by making linoleum cuts and lithographs.
https://www.berg-film.nl
Joke Olthaar is a theater and film maker, based in Rotterdam. From a background in the visual arts, she developed into a theater maker, set designer, screenwriter, writer and illustrator of children’s books and now a maker of artistic films.
She started her own theater company in which she worked in collaborations with various other artists. Besides the direction and performance she also writes scripts and designs and realizes scenery and costumes. Her plays and performances can be seen in theaters, museums, schools and at street festivals. Since 2011 she has organized ‘n Bries, a yearly project in nature in which the combination of theater performance and nature impression brings a complete new experience to city children, changing children’s view of their environment. In 2011, Olthaar received the Culture Award for this project.
Before that for a few years she used to manage her own theatrespace Op de Tak in a demolition building. Here she welcomed audiences for visual arts and theater, where the young visitors could explore and push their creative boundaries.
Olthaar’s film career started with a cooperation with photographer/visual artist Kiki Petratou, with whom she made a short film about underground music phenomenon Harrie Merry. This is the prelude to Olthaar’s first documentary Here is Harry Merry, which premiered at IFFR 2013 and was picked up by the national press as a ‘true germ’. In 2021, she made her first feature-length artistic film BERG. This work has been screened at more than 30 national and international film festivals, amongst others IFF Rotterdam, Netherlands Film Festival, Dokfest Munich, FIDBA Argentina, Dokufest Kosovo, Mediawave Hungary, Ulju Mountain film South Korea. At several festivals BERG has won awards amongst which the prestigious Dutch Director’s Forum. The film also had a tour along cinemas in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and was part of a group exhibition in Gallery WEST the Hague.
Since 2014, Olthaar has been an active member of Stichting B.a.d. an ambitious studio collective in the southside of Rotterdam. Joke Olthaar is interested in the movements of people in different spaces. Olthaar often approaches her visual artworks by scratching on materials ranging from paper to ice flowers to glass, and by making linoleum cuts and lithographs.
https://www.berg-film.nl