Delight in the Details

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The new documentary The World According to Carlijn focuses on Dutch artist and cartographer Carljin Kingma as she creates a work of astounding precision and detail.

In the film, viewers follow Kingma’s hand as it crafts each turn and delicate angle. It focuses tightly on her face, picking up a gaze or wince and transmitting every mumble and comment. The eye directing this personal and precise view belongs to filmmaker Ariane Greep ’82. “My husband and I saw in 2018 an exhibition of a young woman who made drawings with a pen, and we were enthralled, I mean, totally overwhelmed,” says Greep.

That’s when she first approached Kingma about making a film about her. The young artist was hesitant. “And then in 2022, exactly two years ago, she called us up and said, ‘I’m starting a new drawing. So if you want to be there, you’ve got to be here now, this weekend, because I’m going to start,’” recalls Greep. “We had our own camera, and so we just decided to film it ourselves.”

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Greep’s 92-minute film takes in the young artist’s raw moments of indecision as she puts pencil to paper to begin her epic creation: a drawing called The Waterworks of Money, a visual interpretation of society’s financial system, informed by the research conducted by Kingma, along with professor Martijn Jeroen van der Linden and investigative journalist Thomas Bollen. The expansive rendering depicts two worlds: the glittering surface of an architecturally beautiful city and the complex, treacherous machinations below it all.

The filmmaker’s fascination with process was apparent in her earliest endeavors. It was February 1979 when Greep left her home in the Netherlands to visit her aunt and uncle in Bronxville, New York. Her relatives urged her to take a course at Columbia University. Greep went to the University to take a look, wandered over to Barnard’s campus, and knew immediately that she wanted to apply. To her delight, her parents supported the idea, and Greep was off to Barnard. A year after she enrolled, she discovered her love for film. That’s when she knew she’d have to improvise.

“There was no film department in Barnard. We only had [opportunities] to gather at seminars and screen films. So that became my job, and I projected films, 16-millimeter,” recalls Greep. She also took film classes at Columbia, where she met movie luminaries, including Robert Redford and Miloš Forman. She graduated as a visual arts major, after asking for special permission to make a film for her thesis project. Barnard said yes.

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“I was the first Barnard student to make a film for a final project,” says Greep. That film also involved carefully following a process: Greep captured how two fellow students with disabilities navigate campus life.

After graduation, she attended New York University to study film. Still, she ultimately went home to Europe and “rolled into a TV career.” As an on-air journalist and host of her own show, Greep met deadlines and created daily. But she soon realized she had a passion for long-form documentaries, telling a more in-depth story from behind the camera.

Fast-forward to now and her latest film.

Greep is exhibiting The World According to Carlijn on the international film festival circuit for the first time. Nearly all of her previous productions were made specifically for and aired on television in the Netherlands. This step marks a new, exciting chapter in her career —  “a whole new world” for her.

“Now I’m really thinking about ‘Okay, what’s my next movie? What’s my next project?’” says Greep. “A lot of people, when they’re 65, they stop working in the Netherlands, but I don’t think I’m ever gonna stop making films if my body and mind stay healthy.”