Focus on Field Recordings

Field Recordings (“FR”) is a platform for experimental and anthropological film, sound, and landscape cinema.  WORM is happy to bring you an in-depth interview with Tim Leyendekker, Field Recordings co-founder.

Tim Leyendekker is a filmmaker with a background in fine arts who has worked as an independent film programmer since 2010, and for the past few years has coordinated WORM’s film programme in Rotterdam.

Field Recordings #6 takes place 12-14 June at WORM. Festival and Day Passes are available via this link. Tickets for individual screening blocks or talks are available via the June agenda.

Field Recordings traditionally has three tenets: experimental film, anthropological cinema and landscape film. How do you see these intersecting, or conversing with each other?
TL: At the most basic level, anthropology is the study of human behaviour and the cultures that emerge from it. At Field Recordings we show work that asks how people inhabit their environments and landscapes, and how those landscapes shape them in return. The landscape is never just a backdrop; it carries the marks of political decisions, labour, borders, ecologies.

 …A big part of our programme could be described as auto-ethnography: people sharing their own lives through their art, rather than looking at other people’s conditions. That’s partly because it’s hard, sometimes impossible, to really look at “the other” without flattening them, and just as hard to be vulnerable and honest when showing your own life. Film and sound are good media for that double movement. They offer the possibility to take a step back and try to see what moves another person, what makes them behave the way they do, how they respond to the realities, physical or psychic, they have to live with. They show what makes us different, and at the same time what binds us. 

…Experimental film, like the other arts, can offer alternatives to what we take to be fixed: how we live, how we relate to each other, how we design our environments. It can poetically hack the world as we think we know it. I sometimes have this experience quite literally, walking out of a screening into the street, looking at people with slightly different eyes. What we want to present is work that feeds that curiosity, that makes you wonder how someone else is seeing, and what might be missing from your own perspective.

For the ingénue, what is anthropological cinema?

I founded Field Recordings in 2018 together with Sander Hölsgens, who is also a filmmaker and a scholar in Visual Anthropology at Leiden University. Between 1990 and 2017 there was a festival in Amsterdam called Cineblend (formerly Beeld voor Beeld) that focused on documentary work with an anthropological angle. When it closed, there was no Dutch platform left that occupied that territory, and bridging that gap was one of our starting motivations. Marta Hryniuk took over from Sander in 2024. She runs and produces the festival; the programming we do together. The idea was to build on what had gradually become the identity of the programme rather than overhaul it.

…So anthropology is at the core of what Field Recordings is, though we apply it freely and with some wariness about the term’s colonial baggage. Classical anthropological cinema looked at “the other”. What interests us is the effort of looking at another person and taking their position seriously, knowing that to anyone else, your own life is “other” too. That’s why so much of what we show is auto-ethnography. Faraz Fesharaki’s What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?, made out of ten years of webcam calls between Berlin and his family in Isfahan, is a good example. 

…The notion of “field recordings” itself [is something] we also apply freely. In film, the term refers to sound recorded on location rather than built in a studio. In ethnography, it points to the audio and film recordings made during fieldwork, capturing oral histories for instance. For us it’s become more a question of attitude than of medium: an interest in what’s recorded on site, and what that opens up about “the real” beyond the conventions of documentary or fiction.

How do you think FR has developed over the years, in terms of its programme and mission?

From the beginning we were uneasy with calling ourselves a festival, because the word brings a set of expectations we’re not very interested in. Festivals tend to organise themselves around world or national premieres, which is understandable, but we’d rather stick to content-driven curatorial decisions instead. A lot of festivals also run competitions; we prefer to use those resources to commission a new work by an artist, which can then premiere with us and travel onwards wherever they like. That’s how we’ve supported Morgan Quaintance (Repetitions, 2023, later selected for the Tiger Shorts at IFFR) and Anna Khvyl (Still Present As You Notice Its Absence, 2024, an audio walk through Rotterdam). For FR6 we’ve commissioned a new work from Raquel Vermunt.

…That said, there’s a lot in what we do that does overlap with what a festival is, and we’ve come to embrace the word for what it originally meant: a gathering, an occasion to come together. We’re very much looking forward to watching and listening to all these works together, to seeing how they land, and to getting into conversation about them.

…By the way, WORM is not the only Field Recordings venue. This year we will collaborate again with VERA Zienema in Groningen and with a new partner, Buurtcinema Hammerstraat in Rotterdam-Noord. And there’s an online programme of shorts available worldwide for two weeks during and after the festival, for people who can’t get to Rotterdam. We also present events outside the three-day programme. On June 3rd, for example, we’ll show The Sealed Soil (1977) by Marva Nabili at WORM, one of the very first feature films directed by an Iranian woman, shot in secret in the years before the 1979 revolution. 

And how do the non-filmic elements dovetail with the programme? 

Alongside film programmes, we also present sound works, to be experienced in the cinema room, and outside. Last year’s commission was an audio walk by Anna Khvyl. The piece, which is still accessible via an application called TRACKS, can be experienced via headphones while walking a specific route in Rotterdam, individually, or as a group. We also always present a video installation, which runs throughout the duration of the festival and is accessible free of charge.

You have some remarkable highlights in the 2026 programme, can you tell us about them?

This year we’re paying particular attention to early moves in artist/filmmakers’ careers, to the moment a voice is taking shape. The two In Focus programmes are on Ivana Mladenovic and Marion Scemama, both of whom will be in Rotterdam to talk about their work.

Mladenovic is a good case in point. She’s a Serbian-Romanian filmmaker who has clearly arrived: Ivana the Terrible won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno in 2019, and her most recent feature, Sorella di Clausura, premiered in the Locarno main competition in 2025 and won the Heart of Sarajevo award for Best Direction. What we want to do is rewind to the work that made that possible: the early documentaries and shorter works that have rarely been seen outside Romania, in which you can already see the sharp, embedded, slightly uncomfortable attention that runs through her later films. The culmination of that early phase is Soldiers. Story from Ferentari (2017), which I saw years ago at IFFR and which has stayed with me ever since because of the way it matter-of-factly places queer intimacy inside a community that is often reduced to hardship. It has played in Rotterdam before, but we have a good reason to bring it back: getting to know the work that led up to it changes how you read it, and changes how you read what’s come since.

Marion Scemama moved from Paris to New York in 1981 on a magazine assignment, after a decade working as a freelance photographer for Libération, Actuel, and other French publications, and became part of the downtown art scene around Pier 34, a derelict industrial hangar on the Hudson that had become an informal and illegal art space and cruising area. Relax Be Cruel was shot there in 1983, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring (then still unknown) painting on the walls in the background. The negatives were partially lost in a house fire; Scemama only re-edited the film in 2023, and it has since entered the MoMA collection. It’s a strange, dreamlike middle-length film that holds fiction and document in the same frame, told from the perspective of a young female punk squatter watching the many lives that pass through the pier shortly before the city tore it down. We’re presenting it alongside her later video diary Summer ’89, and other works made with David Wojnarowicz and her partner François Pain shortly after Wojnarowicz’s AIDS diagnosis.

We’re also showing James Benning’s 11 x 14 (1977), his first feature. You can really see him finding his voice in it: the long takes and fixed framings that became his signature are already there, but the film is also unusually narrative for him, with a sense of plot that almost coheres and then dissolves. We’re pairing this screening with a conversation with Raquel Vermunt about her film Blue Amigo, which we commissioned and is still in progress. Vermunt is a young Dutch artist from Noord Brabant who has been working with 16mm film format some time ago. Blue Amigo is a short hybrid documentary set on the ferry between Dordrecht and the Biesbosch, repetitive, rhythmic, attentive to landscape, into which she’s weaving a semi-fictional story about a robbery, giving it a kind of Brabant neo-noir undertow.

Around these three points runs a programme of shorts in which landscapes and infrastructures carry the marks of political and ecological force: railways, glaciers, archives, bureaucracies. Nika Autor on a Yugoslav railway built in 1947 by youth brigades and now sometimes used as a migration route. Oleksiy Radynski on 1980s Soviet footage of Indigenous peoples of Siberia, rediscovered in Kyiv in 2022. Pablo Diserens with field recordings from a melting Icelandic glacier. Alongside, work by Malena Szlam, Yuyan Wang, Stéphanie Lagarde, Salomé Jashi, and the Toronto-based trio of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko.

Our thanks to Tim Leyendekker. FR’s Insta is @_fieldrecordings where you keep up to date with latest news from 2026’s festival.