Love-22-Love

At the start of his documentary Love-22-Love, video artist Jeroen Kooijmans is lying in bed in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital. It’s 2002 and he’s filming his own anxious face: he has just experienced a psychotic episode.

The film then takes us ten years back in time. In numerous home videos, we see him and his partner Elspeth Diederix, a successful artist in her own right, at home, traveling and at work. But in Kooijmans’ voice-over, he regularly talks about his “demons”—and his reluctance to talk about them with others. He does discuss them “with himself”: in emails, he corresponds with a “Jeroen” who is free of depressive thoughts.

As time slips by year by year, we pass through his stay in New York—where he and Diederix also experience 9/11—and the film moves towards the present. Giving up his artistic career, embracing fatherhood, and ultimately rediscovering his creative urge lead him to come to terms with his psychosis. We see this reflected in a number of striking video works and in this candid film debut itself, Kooijmans’ love letter to Diederix.