Mart de Jong

Mart de Jong is a filmmaker, illustrator and visual artist, living and working in Friesland. He works both autonomously and on commission.

For a long time, Mart has been preoccupied with a question that won't let go of him: how is it possible that we humans are capable of so much beauty and creativity, yet at the same time carry a dark side within us, in which that very same potential is used for extreme violence?

It is precisely on that uncomfortable border between beauty and violence that the themes of his work are situated. He is fascinated by the aesthetic with which violence sometimes presents itself. Why, after all, does a soldier enter the battlefield in a beautiful uniform, almost as proud as a peacock displaying its feathers?

In his graduation film 'Strijdlust' (Combativeness), Mart focuses on his relationship with his father, who has an endless fascination with war strategies. Now that war has come so close to home, it is increasingly a topic of conversation at the dinner table. Mart had to do something with that. In his graduation film Strijdlust, he explores, through plastic and cold-toned worlds, how his father manages to maintain an analytical distance from violence and war, while he himself struggles so much with exactly that.

Next year, Mart is setting up an independent study year to further develop his technical and filmic skills. In addition, he wants to learn how a more research-driven approach can find a place within the documentary and film world, where production-related and technical dilemmas often get in the way of intuition and experimentation, even though those are precisely the driving forces that set his artistic process in motion.