The Eye above the well
(Het oog boven de put)

In Kerala, India, Johan van der Keuken films various situations related to teaching and apprenticeship: schools of martial arts, dance, singing, a Vedic school, a theatre stage. As a counterpoint, the circulation of money is marked out by the itinerary of a local moneylender. Johan van der Keuken is a traveller, not a tourist; he films reality not the imaginary. Each journey, both near and far, takes him further in his search for a poem. Discovering what distances him or draws him near to the societies he encounters, the filmmaker confirms that in Kerala “there is only one world”; he highlights the difficulty of revealing the unicity of a world in which so much diversity exists, and rejoices that he belongs to it. MFM