JAN HEIJS learned to love the cinema at school. Then, as a political science student at university in Amsterdam, he had a job in the box office of the Dutch Filmmuseum and watched hundreds of films. It was in Berlin, programming for the famous Arsenal cinema and helping organise the Berlinale section of the International Forum of Young Cinema, that he met Hubert Bals. Bals was the founder of the then-infant Rotterdam festival. It was under his tutelage that Heijs learned “to watch films as films, as cinema and not only as tools for other [political] purposes; and to appreciate film directors as artists, with all their problems, trying to make what they wanted to make.” Whilst still a film critic for De Volkskrant and editor-in-chief for the monthly De Filmkrant, Heijs became a Film Producer, making, among other films, City Life. This was a series of 12 short films by directors such as Kieslowski, Sen, Klopfenstein, Tarr and Agresti about their home towns. In 1992, he joined Ruud Monsters Jura Films and has produced a few dozen films, mostly documentaries, “because it’s still reality that is most gripping and contains most drama; and because I like to see films about real people.”

Heijs used De Filmkrant as a tool to help people develop their film journalist skills and now uses Jura Film to help young filmmakers realise their dreams, to bring their films to the international screen for an international audience.