Jan ven den Berg

Roles: Director

Jan van den Berg’s films are mostly about human rights and the environment, but he also created important documentaries on culture, like El Abrazo (1990) about famous tango dancers in Buenos Aires, and the series Utrecht by the Sea on that city’s artists.

Forty years after recording his first film ‘Olvereños’, Jan returns to the topic of that film: small family farms which try to survive under almost impossible circumstances. At the time, many farmers from the Spanish city Olvera migrated to the Netherlands for work. The film was included in several school projects to inform people about the reasons behind this migration flow.

In 1974, it was the continuing drought in Andalusia that forced people to leave their country. In 2013 it are large multinational that force small farmers off their lands on a large scale in various countries around the world. In Silent Land we see how some of these farmers try to resist.