Love-22-Love

Jeroen Kooijmans is an artist who explores the intersection of art and cinema in a unique and groundbreaking way. This has earned him much recognition, but has also brought him its share of hardship. In 2002, he woke up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in New York, where he had been admitted due to a psychotic episode. In this intimate documentary, he reconstructs the period leading up to the psychosis, as well as the long road he had to travel afterward. He does so using videos—some of them incredibly intense—that he made at the time of himself and his partner, the artist Elspeth Diederix.

As befits a “Catch-22,” art plays a paradoxical role in Kooijmans’ life: without art, his existence would have no meaning, while at the same time, that very art lays bare the darkest recesses of his psyche. But fortunately, there is his love for his wife Elspeth; she is his anchor, his light at the end of the tunnel that seems insurmountably long.