Many nationalities are represented in the street of Amsterdam where a Chinese-born photographer operates his photo studio. Like van der Keuken, To Sang works with his wife in creating his portraits of neighbors and customers. But his large-scale, painterly portraits provide a striking contrast to the aesthetic sensibility of the artist behind the camera, who films the Sangs’ artistic process.

This revealing portrait of Johan van der Keuken was made during the filming of To Sang Fotostudio. Director Gieling turns the tables (and the cameras) on one-man film band JVDK and his wife and sound operator, Noshka van der Lely. We are privy to van der Keuken’s singular journey through the “no-man’s land between reality and fiction” as he coaches his “actors” to achieve some sense of their unmediated naturalness, films retakes to achieve the striking compositions characteristic of his work, and carefully assembles the resulting footage, with an editor, into a finished film. Gieling fleshes out this case study with excerpts from earlier films to complete this enlightening encounter with an artist who devoted a lifetime to living with his eyes.