Flemish Fields [DVD]

29 min/colour/video. In September 1995 Hans van der Meer started taking photographs of lower division amateur football games in The Netherlands (later extending to Flanders and other countries). He went out looking for football in its original form, as it had started more than hundred years ago: a plot of ground, 22 players, hardly any spectators around the pitch, just a horse in the next meadow. His results were published in Hollandse Velden (Dutch Fields), for which former Dutch soccer international Jan Mulder wrote the accompanying texts. The work is as much about landscape as it is about culture at large. Amateur football turns out to be the perfect metaphor for life in general. Flemish Fields is the video equivalent to the highly successful book . With a mild irony, Van der Meer shows us the mismatch between human ambition and the effective result, between an individual’s ‘inside’ perception and a more objective, distanced view of our behaviour.