Ansage Ende

The experimental short film ANSAGE ENDE by Stijn Verhoeff and Sjoerd Leijten is an artistic reflection on being engaged with the world. Combining fiction and documentary, music and text, this hybrid film calls for a collective and activist approach to the climate crisis.

The visually stunning ANSAGE ENDE opens with an imaginative journey through an empty landscape where water meets land. Two characters walk through the mud, away from the viewer, into an open yet unknown future. They fantasize about what our rapidly developing world might bring and question their personal participation in this possible future. Slowly the film moves away from the imaginary into the real. Climate destruction becomes ghastly visible: huge machines in a brown coal mine eat up the soil, searching for energy and profit. Policemen and women enable sawers to cut down the neighbouring forest for the expansion of the mine. Young activists occupy the trees, trying to stop the destruction of this primeval forest.

An experimental musical score strengthens the joyful militancy of the activists and leads the narrative of the film to a third location: an old barn. Here, surrounded by animals and farm life, three musicians play music; their tunes travel to the many corners of the farm. With subverting fragments of text mixed through the music, they call for more radical action and hint at overthrowing the economic elite.

A short, but poignant sci-fi excursion ends ANSAGE ENDE, shedding dystopic light on our shared future, while a megaphone choir suggests a collective uprising: “The seas are rising and so are we!”