In memoriam drs. Steef Meyknecht (1951-2015)
We are extremely sad to learn that our beloved friend and inspiring colleague Steef Meyknecht has passed away on Saturday November 21, much too early. Steef has been a member of the programme council of the Beeld voor Beeld Ethnographic Filmfestival for many years.
Since 1980, Steef was a teacher in the Visual Ethnography program of Leiden University, inspiring and supervising many students. He was also an engaged filmmaker, producing powerful documentaries shown on Dutch television (NCRV Dokument) and on ethnographic film festivals across the world.
Steef Meyknecht’s intimate film portraits will remain as unique documents of social change in the Netherlands in the period 1991-2010, showing the failing social welfare sector in the 1990s (Karspel 2, with Ton Guiking, 1993), urban renewal in Amsterdam (Dichtgespijkerd, 2000), and recently the everyday life in a deprived neighbourhood in Schiedam (Rook, Gezag en Rummikub, 2010). Several of his films premiered at Beeld voor Beeld. In 2007, he was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Prize Commendation for his film A Hospice in Amsterdam. He had already started research for a new film on a village threatened by earthquakes caused by gas extraction in Groningen.
Steef taught his students in visual ethnography to engage in long-term participant observation with and without the camera, and he himself always spent one or two years in the field before he started to film. At a Cineblend event in 2009, he explained how he reached depth in his films and said: ‘You need to be there when people change, like when they are forced to move out of their house. They then become more expressive and reveal their personalities’.
Steef was a passionate filmmaker, teacher and programme council member and a sensitive personality. In the programme council, we will miss his warm-hearted engagement and his provoking statements in the discussions on films that would move, bewilder or infuriate him. He leaves behind his wife Liesbet and his daughter Maria. We will miss him terribly.
Eddy Appels and Sanderien Verstappen,
on behalf of the programme council of Beeld voor Beeld,
Janine Prins, Carinda Strangio, Ciska van Beek, Leonie van Zanten, Charlotte Govaert, Lea Zuyderhoudt, Sanderien Verstappen, Eddy Appels.