The Past Is Our Future

Jelmer Wristers received a contribution for the realisation of his new film. The Past Is Our Future is a documentary about the discovery of lost civilisations deep in the Amazon. And how indigenous people and archaeologists work and live with each other.

Jelmer is a writer/director and producer from Amsterdam. He graduated from the University of Arts utrecht in 2016 - with a Bachelor in Audiovisual Media with the graduation film Das, which won the Dutch Film Fund's Wildcard prize and premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Since then, he has directed and produced several short films, both fiction and documentary, which have been screened at numerous festivals and aired on national television. In 2022, he was selected for the Apichatpong Weerasethakul Lab: Filming In the Amazon and is currently developing his first feature-length documentary film. As a producer, he co-founded the Amsterdam-based film collective No End Cinema, which aims to make independent films with like-minded filmmakers.