There are film houses in almost all major cities in the Netherlands. Most recently, in 2020, the MIMIK film house was opened in Deventer, a city with a population of 90,000 – in the province of Overijssel, which borders North Rhine-Westphalia and is less than 130 kilometres from Münster. At the beginning of March, employees and members of Filmwerkstatt Münster, Filmfestival Münster and Linse set off for their Dutch neighbours with lots of questions: How does a film centre work? How is it financed? What is the audience structure like? And how did the Dutch film enthusiasts manage to get the city to build this attractive and modern cultural centre for film and, incidentally, theatre fans?
A group of film enthusiasts led by Johan Bunt, who also guided the guests from Münster through the MIMIK, fought for a municipal cinema back in the 1970s until the “Filmhuis de Keizer” was able to open in 1995. In the years that followed, there were numerous collaborations with the Filmwerkstatt and the Münster Film Festival, a mutually beneficial exchange, as Dutch films are otherwise rarely shown in Germany – and vice versa.
The Filmhaus in Deventer is now a success story: by 2020, demand for high-quality films had risen from a few thousand visitors in the 1970s to more than 65,000 visitors in 2019, when the MIMIK cultural centre was about to open. And the trend is rising, as Johan Bunt affirms. The friendly, light and airy new building offers plenty of space for catering, a multifunctional theatre hall and four cinemas with a total of 500 seats. The technology and comfort are state of the art and can compete with any multiplex. An attractive, open catering area with a view of the River IJssel right on the doorstep is an additional attraction.
After a brief welcome, we hurriedly went to the cinema screens, as the cinema programme at MIMIK starts in the morning. The guests from Münster were amazed: who goes to the cinema in the morning? Their amazement grew when they saw the large crowds streaming into the cinema on a Tuesday morning.
Future collaborations were discussed with Johan Bunt and cinema director Anton van Amersfoort and – very practically – started immediately. The documentary film “Die Berkel”, produced by the Filmwerkstatt Münster, was in the luggage and was on the programme at MIMIK two days later. The film itself is a German-Dutch collaboration between Filmwerkstatt director Anna Schlottbohm and Dutch journalist Willem Kootstra.
The opportunities and potential of a film house with its own cinema and event spaces were the subject of the concluding discussion. In any case, the Dutch neighbours gave the film culture delegation ideas and dreams to take back to Münster.
The Münster-Deventer Film Culture Exchange project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the Interreg Germany-Netherlands programme.
Video impressions of the Münster-Deventer exchange
