Love-22-Love

In 2002, artist Jeroen Kooijmans wakes up in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital. He has been admitted with a psychosis. In the intimate documentary Love-22-Love, Kooijmans reconstructs the period leading up to this moment and the long journey he was to travel over the years that followed. He uses videos he made of himself and his loved one, or that she made of him. The footage is unbearably painful when Kooijmans films himself as depression takes hold or psychosis makes him unrecognizable to himself. In letters he writes to himself, he identifies his demons. The Jeroen who responds in this dialogue is lively and confident—the version of himself he longs to be.

Love-22-Love is an ode to art, which is Kooijmans’ purpose in life, but which also drives him to despair. Above all, it is a love letter to his wife, artist Elspeth Diederix, who is his anchor in life and the light at the end of the tunnel. We follow their love from its earliest days, dancing by a river, to the time they travel the world with their three daughters. The film leaves space for the doubts and struggles that love brings—and for the question of how it relates to the darker recesses of Kooijmans’ psyche. After 33 years, the period this film spans, an answer finally emerges.

Love-22-Love shows Kooijmans in his most raw and vulnerable state, in both art and love. He goes further than he has ever previously dared, in a deeply personal film that is also a search for love for himself.