4 - 7 December
Amsterdam Film Meeting
2nd Edition
The Amsterdam Film Meeting is a small-scale festival devoted to the art of cinema as encounter. In its second edition, it brings together independent filmmakers, film histories, and audiences (local and international) for screenings, conversations, and expanded cinema events. The festival values presence and promotes an ongoing dialogue between films and those who watch them. It is hosted and run in collaboration with Filmhuis Cavia since 2024.
Thursday 4 December
20:30 | Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind)
Friday 5 December
18:00 | Bamssi
21:00 | Frágil como o Mundo (Fragile as the World)
Saturday 6 December
11:00 | MACDO
14:00 | A Vingança de uma Mulher (A Woman’s Revenge)
16:00 | Deux Fois (Twice Upon A Time)
18:00 | Fuck the Polis
21:00 | After Manet After Giorgione – Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe + Horror Film 1
23:30 | Équation à un Inconnu (Equation to an Unknown)
Sunday 7 December
11:00 | Scénarios + Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario
14:00 | Drôle de Pays (Strange Land) + Kev
16:00 | La Nuit de L’Ours (Night of the Bear) + Hotel New York
18:00 | Just a Lonely Boy
21:00 | O Império do Desejo (Empire of Desire)
Thursday 4 December, 20:30
CONTEMPORARY
Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind)
Marta Mateus | 2024 | Portugal | 74’ | EN subtitles
Fogo do Vento is the feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus. Following the path of her short film Barbs, Wastelands, it is a materialist tale after Brecht, rooted in the land and lives of Alentejo's vineyard workers. During harvest, as grapes are cut in the blistering heat, blood is spilled and myth is born. Past and present merge as memories resurface and a spectre of dictatorship haunts the soil. Politically charged, the film embraces a deep connection to earth, gesture, and the enduring need for revolution.
Dutch premiere. The director will be present for a Q&A.
Friday 5 December, 18:00
DOCU
Bamssi
Mourad Ben Amor | 2025 | Tunisia, Belgium | 26’ | EN subtitles
Made in a dialogue between cousins, one in Mahdia, Tunisia, and the other in Brussels, Belgium, in Bamssi, Mourad Ben Amor and Fairuz Ghammam present filmmaking as a collaborative act of seeing, sharing, and showing the world. Screens, distance, dust roads, violent winds, and the grace of what is always to hand.
Friday 5 December, 21:00
CLASSIC
Frágil como o Mundo (Fragile as the World)
Rita Azevedo Gomes | 2001 | Portugal | 90’ | EN subtitles
Frágil como o Mundo tells a story of passage: that of two adolescents, Vera and João, fleeing the strictures of society to live their impossible love within nature’s embrace. What unfolds is a world sustained by poetry and by the textures of landscape. The causes of their separation matter less than the way Gomes renders their longing apart. Shifts between black & white and colour mark the movement between dream and awakening, but never where one expects them to be.
The director will be present for a Q&A.
Saturday 6 December, 11:00
CONTEMPORARY
MACDO
Racornelia | 2025 | Mexico, Greece | 117’ | EN subtitles
Tapping the oneiric dual veins of telenovela and unmistakably domestic magnetic tape video MACDO begins as an ostensibly placid Christmas Eve in Mexico City in the 1990s, but submerged in the warmth of the scene sits a festering aggression. Mexican multidisciplinary artist Racornelia trained classically in dance and music during their childhood and made their first feature almost entirely under their own steam. Beyond its strangeness and boldness the film probes the systems of abuse inherent in love, family, image-making and nation with urgency and emotion. Dutch premiere.
Saturday 6 December, 14:00
CONTEMPORARY
A Vingança de uma Mulher (A Woman’s Revenge)
Rita Azevedo Gomes | 2012 | Portugal | 100’ | EN subtitles
With A Vingança de uma Mulher, Gomes turns Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 19th-century tale into a chamber piece of velvet and shadow. Through a single confession, a woman recounts her revenge, and cinema reveals its own artifice. Like Oliveira (but also like Rohmer, and Rivette) before her, Gomes works through the gesture of staging a film that is at once out of its time and contemporary.
The director will be present for a Q&A.
Saturday 6 December, 16:00
EXPERIMENTAL
Deux Fois (Twice Upon A Time)
Jackie Raynal | 1968 | US, France | 75’ | EN subtitles
Deux Fois, filmed over nine days in Barcelona and edited entirely in-camera, embodies Jackie Raynal’s minimalist radicalism. Called a “pioneer of the unedited long take” by Peter Wollen, Raynal’s film deconstructs cinematic illusion and narrative. Described by Raynal as “a feminist manifesto and an unfinished diary of a love story,” it captures the liberatory spirit of ’68. Featuring actors like Francisco Viader and Sylvina Boissonnas, and with editing freedom by Néna Baratier, the film stands as a spontaneous, utopian testament to youth, freedom, and cinematic experimentation.
Saturday 6 December, 18:00
DOCU
Fuck the Polis
Rita Azevedo Gomes | 2025 | Portugal, Greece | 74’ | EN subtitles
In her latest collaborative work, Fuck the Polis, Azevedo Gomes returns to Greece – and to herself. Echoing her earlier flirtations with documentary form, the film is an act of reflection and inner transformation. In 2007, after receiving a medical diagnosis, she traveled alone through the Greek islands. Fifteen years later, she retraced that journey with friends. The film unfolds between past and present, cinema and literature, as they read a short story written by another friend, inspired by Gomes’s original voyage – layering memory, companionship, and creative exchange.
Dutch premiere. The director will be present for a Q&A.
Saturday 6 December, 21:00
EXPANDED CINEMA
After Manet After Giorgione - Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
Malcom Le Grice | 1975 | UK | 60’
+
Horror Film 1
Malcom Le Grice | 1971 | UK | 21’
Following last year’s successful expanded cinema night, AMFM returns with two screening-performances in memory of British filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice. A pioneer of materialist film and co-founder of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, Le Grice merged cinema, art history, and performance. This programme explores how expanded cinema can endure beyond its maker. Featuring a re-enactment of Horror Film 1 and a rare presentation of After Manet After Giorgione, Expanded Cinema Trajectories invites us to reflect on the legacy, liveness, and continued relevance of Le Grice’s radical cinematic practice.
Saturday 6 December, 23:30
SEX POSITIVE
AMFM x Porn Film Festival Amsterdam
Équation à un Inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) – 16mm
Francis Savel | 1980 | France | 100’ | EN subtitles
This restored 16mm print, commissioned by filmmaker Yann Gonzalez in 2016 from the original negative, screens now for the first time in Amsterdam, on loan from the Cinémathèque française and Gonzalez himself, who will introduce the film in person. Co-programmed with the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam.
Équation à un Inconnu is at once a defining moment and an obscure episode of gay erotic cinema. Its director, Francis Savel – an artist who worked largely within the margins of 1970s and 80s French New Wave and adult film production – sets his images to a pulsing synth score. In the film, we follow a young motorcyclist through a series of erotic encounters that circle around desire, memory, and the search for another, the “unknown” of the title. The year that followed would bring the first recorded cases of AIDS, giving Savel’s elegy of bodies an unintended prophetic weight.
Sunday 7 December, 11:00
CONTEMPORARY
Scénarios
Jean Luc Godard | 2024 | Switzerland | 18’ | EN subtitles
+
Exposé du film annonce du film scénario
Jean Luc Godard | 2024 | Switzerland | 34’ | EN subtitles
On September 13, 2022, the news broke that Jean-Luc Godard had passed away. In a final act of defiant creativity, his death did not end his filmmaking. Just days before choosing to end his life, Godard completed a project which – in typical Godardian fashion – is actually two films. Scénarios and Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario form a diptych that diverges and reconnects, creating a cinematic self-portrait. Our screening, just after what would have been his 95th birthday, marks their Dutch premiere.
Sunday 7 December, 14:00
DOCU
Drôle de Pays (Strange Land)
Clémence Hébert | 2015 | France, Belgium | 24’ | EN subtitles
+
Kev
Clémence Hébert | 2017 | France, Belgium | 47’ | EN subtitles
In Drôle de Pays, people and places reveal themselves only through time spent together. Twelve young people, each living with psychic fragility, journey through the Moroccan desert. The vastness of the landscape mirrors the inner expanse of their solitude and imagination. The filmmaker films where words falter. In Kev, Hébert turns her camera toward a young man existing at the edges of language: once a child, found locked in a bedroom, his only companions are the rays of sunlight filtering through the blinds. Now a teenager, he lives with a form of autism so profound that most institutions have turned him away. The filmmaker chooses to accompany rather than explain.
The director will be present for a Q&A.
Sunday 7 December, 16:00
CLASSIC
La Nuit de L’Ours (Night of the Bear)
Jackie Raynal | 2004 | France | 26’ | EN subtitles
+
Hotel New York
Jackie Raynal | 1984 | US, France | 63’ | EN subtitles
Hotel New York contains perhaps the greatest depiction of a post-screening discussion in cinema history. Inspired by Jackie Raynal’s experience of losing her laundry in a vanished New York building, the film reflects on transience and dislocation with sharp wit. “Everything is transitory here below,” Raynal notes. In La Nuit de l’Ours, she again plays a director filming a film – this time about a 19th-century countess assaulted by a bear. The result is a layered satire of cinema’s obsessions with ego, finance, and spectacle, spiraling into a brilliant cinematic mise-en-abyme.
The director will be present for a Q&A.
Sunday 7 December, 18:00
EXPERIMENTAL
Just a Lonely Boy
Fred Pelon | 1999–2005 | Netherlands | 70’
Fred Pelon began his filmmaking journey in the 1980s, documenting revolutionary movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Returning to Amsterdam, he immersed himself in experimental cinema, developing a hands-on approach that combined found footage with original material, often altered by decay and mold. A founder of Roze Filmdagen and organiser of the iconic Vivipara Expanded Cinema nights, Pelon became a key figure in the city’s underground film scene. Just A Lonely Boy brings together 16mm reels and digital transfers, projected live to evoke the raw spirit of Vivipara and Pelon’s enduring commitment to film as a community.
The director will be present for a Q&A.
Sunday 7 December, 21:00
CLASSIC
O Império do Desejo (Empire of Desire)
Carlos Reichenbach | 1981 | Brazil | 100’ | EN subtitles
Carlos Reichenbach (1945–2012) was a master of anarchic, genre-blending cinema – a poet of Brazil’s peripheries whose work collides exploitation, melodrama, and political allegory. In O Império do Desejo, a widow reclaims her beach house and invites a hippie couple to stay, triggering a swirling erotic drama where desire reigns. Labeled a “pornographic spectacle” by censors, the film reflects a volatile moment of repression and release in 1980s Brazil. With subversive intelligence, Reichenbach turns the male gaze inward, proving that cinema made from precarity can explode with vision, freedom, and provocation.