Sluizer Films

A spiritual time-shifting drama following a woman from her carefree 20s in 1960s rural Thailand to present-day Bangkok as an older army general's wife.

After a near-death experience due to an aneurisma, director George Sluizer felt he had to go on filming and started research for a project he had in mind for a long time. It became the documentary HOMELAND, the fourth of a series about two Palestinian families he followed since 1974 in "Land of the Fathers", "A Reason to go" and "Adios Beirut". HOMELAND is also a personal film about his motivation, his relationship with the members of the two families who became very close. They are now scattered around the world, unable to return to the homeland. It is also an historical saga about the Palestinian people and their struggle for land and dignity.

A little village. Between the loam huts, a new construction: the school. In the classroom, adults make a first attempt at writing. At home,the children help their illiterate parents with their schoolwork. A woman :“Why I am at school? I don’t need to read or write. But I want to vote.”

The picture retraces the professional, social and family life of Zeca, a cow-boy from the northeast of Brazil. From the most perfect calm he can fly into a state of the wildest excitement. From his lazy hammock he leaps into the hard saddle, which carries him at breakneck speed along tortuous paths in search of his cattle.

Against all advice, a destitute Brazilian old man marries a nineteen-year-old girl. Because he can’t give her any children, he moves to the interior to make money, so she will at least have a good life. When he returns, he is told she has a three-year-old daughter. He buys himself a knife. Suspense movie with a combination of ethnography, adventure and dramatic action, based on a poem by the Brazilian writer Odylo Costa Filho.

An intimate account of a thousand kilometer journey on a river in the Northeast of Brazil on a self-made raft carrying a small household including two children. The raft is the means of transport since time immemorial and the journey to the town of Teresina lasts about a month. Life in slow-motion, with fleeting encounters along the banks. When the family arrives in Teresina, the merchandise is sold, the raft dismanteld, branch by branch, leaf by leaf.

Texas is the homeland of the Western diamondback rattlesnake, a plague to cattle, oilpipe engineers and everyone not on the alert. At Sweetwater’s annual Rattlesnake Round-Up - the largest in the world – only live snakes are brought in, to extract the venom needed for medical research. Thus, ingenious and scrupulously delicate hunting techniques are developed.

The polder, main feature of the Dutch landscape, has a disconcerting effect on the traveller who comes across it. In the film a young man begins to explore this world and finds himself steeped in silence and in the vastness of space. He has a feeling of serenity which he naively endeavours to capture. But the climate of Holland always seeks revenge. Serenity gradually gives way to despair against the backdrop of the bare landscape with no shelter to offer. The very same reasons which explain the polder’s charm now become responsible for a hostile attitude : the vastness becomes oppressive, paradise becomes a hell.

In 1974, George Sluizer and Fred van Kuijk made Land of the Fathers, a film about two Palestinian families and the new diaspora of Palestinians: a Muslim family from the refugee camp and a catholic family living in a downtown apartment. In 1948, the year the State of Israel was established, they fled to Lebanon. In 1977, the filmmakers returned to the two families. Adios Beirut is the account of their third visit, at the end of 1982. Years of turmoil, terror, uncertainty and longing. Shot in Lebanon, Israel, France, Italy and Cuba.

Land of the Fathers is a film about the followers behind the Palestinian guerillas, is a film about two families driven from their rightful territory, is reflective about a situation of political tension, violence and terror, is, nevertheless, a film about daily life. Land of the Fathers was filmed in one of the camps in Lebanon, shortly after an Israeli bombardment.