House of Janus

Synopsis
A summer vacation listening to the opera of love, Dido & Aeneas, drifting into daydream and nightmare. Adriaan is ninety years old and in his golden hour. The inevitable will come to pass, he will have to leave his beloved House of Janus behind.

This meditation on past and future evokes the threshold of two-faced Etruscan god Janus. The face of life and the face of death. The film opens towards different existences, non-human and human, living frailties and non-living eternities.

Director’s Statement
This creative documentary is about the life of 91-year-old Adriaan van der Staay, the Rotterdam Art Foundation Director who initiated Rotterdam Film International, the precursor of IFFR. It’s a specific part of his life about a house he conceived, designed, and built. Filmed entirely on location in Casa Giano (The House of Janus), the film’s approach has been to parallel Adriaan’s love for the house with the 1689 opera DIDO AND AENEAS composed by Henry Purcell.

Like Aeneas, Adriaan will be unable to bring his love into the future and will have to leave his beloved house behind. In this creative documentary, I harness the potentiality of Aeneas, undeveloped in the mythical opera, to project beyond ephemeral human life into non-human existences and the sun which may burn out. The film also has echoes of the Aids epidemic, which affected Adriaan profoundly in the 1990s.

This is only the second film I have made after 28 years. In 1996, I felt disempowered by the commercial film studio and cinema distribution system. My first film, Army Daze, was a commercial hit grossing S$1.6mil (approximately 1 million euros today), but it was not my life. I decided to move away from film-making as a young director. Performance allowed me to experiment intensely with opera, dance, time-based live art, installation, film, literature, and discourse. I was attracted to the disappearance of performance, for it was a challenge to preserve.

Today, the world is transformed with different uncertainties. I return to film with The House of Janus, a passion project, with all the confidence of my hybrid oeuvre to make the film that I want. It is a full circle to return to the fleeting time in film to discuss the transience of life, the remains of personal actions, and what permanence is.