Last Words: My Sister Yoka
Lucebert: Time and Farewell
Coming almost full circle to the source of his earliest inspiration, van der Keuken created in Last Words a tribute to his older sister, a subject of his very first artwork, the photographic study We Are 17. Yoka is seen in conversation the week before she died of cancer and then is resurrected by a timeline of photographs that have the force of working against her fatal illness. For the filmmaker this was more than just a portrait of Yoka, who was a practicing psychoanalyst: it represented for them both his sister’s “final project.”
This work is a triptych of three van der Keuken portraits on the influential Dutch poet and painter Lucebert (1924–1994), who was a member of the International Cobra Movement and a mentor to the filmmaker during his early years in Paris.