In a 1978 interview, Serge Daney and Jean-Paul Fargier spoke with the Dutch documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken for Cahiers du Cinéma. It would mark the beginning of a broader recognition of the Dutch filmmaker’s work in France. In the same conversation, Van der Keuken pushes back against the widespread misconception about documentary. A documentary filmmaker, he states, can never pretend to represent reality. ‘For me, the material side of film comes first: a beam of light on a screen. And what is transmitted in that bombardment of light on a screen is always fiction.’ And yet, the documentary filmmaker Van der Keuken stands radically in the world, looking through his lens, framing reality. Van der Keuken’s oeuvre originates from the adventure of that gaze. It is that conflict between ethics and aesthetics – that irresolvable tension of the ‘unequal exchange’ between the filmer and the filmed, as Daney put it – that forms the main driving force behind his work.

The Way South was originally made in three parts for the VPRO television network and later edited into a single film. It follows a journey from Amsterdam to the banks of the Nile, featuring encounters with people striving to carve out a place for themselves: squatters, travellers moving from rural areas to cities, from south to north. ‘He passes by Paris, the Drôme, Rome, Calabria,’ Daney writes on the film. ‘Those who he crosses paths with and respond to his questions have nothing in common except for this: they have accepted their environment, they don’t want anything else, they want to stay where they are. [...] But going to the South means losing the North. The Way South is Van der Keuken’s most simple and direct film to date. It’s the account of a journey, some pages torn from a log book, a travelogue.’

‘It is a story of outer emigration and inner alienation, but also a series of signs of the cour­age to face life. It is the obsession with rooms, streets, places where people try to communicate their lives to other people and fight their battles against the injustice of the world. The film is long, two hours and twenty-five minutes, but it has to be this long to enable me to record the impressions of a dream voyage and to register changes in perception and style. I had in mind the creation of a composition that would be balanced and yet, at the same time, take shape spontaneously. One often walks on the border of arbitrariness: everyone has something to say.’ – Johan van der Keuken