Bert Haanstra
1916–1997 · Dutch documentary and feature film director
Albert Haanstra (Espelo, 1916 – Hilversum, 1997) was a Dutch filmmaker who directed both documentaries and feature films. He matters because he brought the author documentary to a very large audience in the Netherlands and earned international recognition with works such as Glass.
He was born in Espelo, near Holten, to a schoolteacher father, and grew up in the village of Goor in a modest environment. He was accepted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences but turned the place down, feeling that long years of study could not match real-life experience. Working as a press photographer, he experimented with staged photography, and from this came his first film, Catfish. In 1947 he became a professional documentary filmmaker.
His international profile came with Spiegel van Holland (Mirror of Holland), which won the Grand Prix du court metrage at Cannes in 1951. During the 1950s he made six films for Shell, among them The Rival World (1955), about insects that spread deadly diseases. His documentary Glass (1958), made in a glass factory, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1959.
In fiction he is best known for Fanfare (1958), a comedy set in a small Dutch village that was the most visited Dutch film of its time, although it was hardly noticed abroad despite its selection for Cannes and the 1st Moscow International Film Festival. He then directed Zoo (1962), which compared the behaviour of animals and humans, and in the 1970s and 1980s he focused largely on animals, as in Ape and Super-Ape.
His legacy lies in the humorous and reflective way he portrayed the Dutch and their country. He received close to a hundred awards and was an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau. He died at the age of 81 in a nursing home in Hilversum. After his death, the Oeuvre Award was renamed the Bert Haanstra Oeuvre Award.