As part of The Broken Pitcher Forum, we gather at Kriterion for an evening that brings together film, archival practice, and questions of refuge, displacement, and collective resistance in Amsterdam. Through a screening and a talk, the program traces how urban spaces become sites of survival, struggle, and re-imagination, engaging movements around housing, migration, and the making of home.

Transit Levantkade by Rosemarie Blank is a stylised documentary portrait of the Levantkade in Amsterdam and the ‘urban nomads’ that found refuge in that no-mans-land in the late 1980s which has since transformed into the gentrified KNSM Island, the city’s eastern port area. During the 1920s, the Levantkade in Amsterdam’s eastern port area was a transit station for Eastern European migrants heading for South America. During the 1980s, it was a rugged no-man's-land that provided refuge for, among other people, the homeless migrants. They lived in a world of their own on the Levantkade quayside, until the police cleared the neighbourhood because almost all of the existing buildings had to be torn down for new ones. This documentary paints a fascinating portrait of a number of urban nomads; images and audio clips are interspersed with archival footage of migrants in this same area on the periphery of central Amsterdam in the year 1926. Rosemarie Blank provided the script, some of the photography, the editing and direction. (Digital restoration by Eye)

hetvrijearchief.net is a collaboration between Luna Hupperetz and Kenneth Geurts. The Vrije Archief Nieuwmarkt is an autonomous archive that documents the activism of the Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt (1967-1976) against Amsterdam’s post war city planning. The audiovisual collection of Vrije Archief Nieuwmarkt consists of sound and image recordings, the unsynchronised footage is currently housed in the archives of IISH (audio) and Sound & Vision (film). The collection’s Creative Commons status, and the platforms of the institutional archives invite creators and researchers to engage with the material, yet constraints of archival access make accessibility opaque. Unlike textual materials, the transition of visual content into the public domain remains imperfect, demanding critical observation. In response, the web based installation hetvrijearchief.net advocates for squatting the archive. Through a dynamic shuffle of image and sound snippets, it aims to embrace the archive’s dispersion and accentuate re-appropriation possibilities by inviting the audience to create their own assemblages of unsynchronised archival material. Seeking to transcend traditional audiovisual frameworks, it poses a question: how can these methods resonate with the practice of squatting and image appropriation? Moreover, it endeavours to bridge generational gaps, inviting reflection on communal resistance and housing crises in a contemporary context.