Til Schaap Project — Noor de Vries

About

Noor de Vries is a researcher, video artist and film programmer. Her work focuses on themes of collectivity, public space and direct action, often weaving archival anecdotes together with political theory and personal stories.

She is a graduate from The Sandberg Institute (Critical studies department) and has a BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition she worked as a film programmer at Filmtheater De Uitkijk and has now continued to program film nights on an irregular basis as part of the Pottenkijkers collective of which she is one of the programmers and co-founders.

CV

Til Schaap Project March 2025

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TIL SCHAAP PROJECT
March 2025
Short film, 11 min.

Screened at:
Eye Filmmuseum, Lesbival, La Salinié Festival

DESCRIPTION

Til Schaap was an artist and amateur filmmaker who managed to capture essential parts of the feminist and lesbian movement in the Netherlands in the 1970s. She documented protests, meetings, and squatted women’s houses; she interviewed protesters and also showed personal and intimate moments shared between lesbians during that time. IHLIA LGBTQI Heritage archived and digitized her footage and gave Pottenkijkers the opportunity to work with this material.

I used the range of footage available at IHLIA LGBTQI Heritage to make a short film. Using the original audio and video by Til Schaap, a new montage came together, resulting in The Til Schaap Project.

This short film was first presented as a preview to Born in Flames (1983) at the Eye Film Museum on the 7th of March. Afterwards, I discussed both films with Maaike Meijer. Maaike Meijer is an emeritus lecturer in gender studies and was one of the founding members of Paarse September, a radical lesbian action group active in the early 1970s. She also appears in Til Schaap’s footage, as she was one of the organizers of the first gay demonstration in June 1977.

The film was later screened at Lesbival, and La Salinié Festival in the south of france.