Experiencing Interruptions?

So It Goes

In this one-minute documentary Arjan Brentjes takes a side step from his ongoing animation work to tell a little family story.
In 1940 Truus lives in Rotterdam with her mother Aartje. In 2019, her grandson Arjan wonders what the first sunny days of May 1940 look like for them. He makes a reconstruction and concludes that there’s little he can add to it.

  • Arjan Brentjes
    Director
    Sand, Tempo, Hybris
  • Arjan Brentjes
    Writer
    Sand, Tempo, Hybris
  • Arjan Brentjes
    Producer
    Sand, Tempo, Hybris
  • Bart van der Schaaf
    Key Cast
    "Voice-over"
    Sand, Hybris
  • Arjan Brentjes
    Animation
    Sand, Tempo, Hybris
  • Arjan Brentjes
    Music
    Sand, Tempo, Hybris
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Experimental
  • Runtime:
    1 minute
  • Completion Date:
    May 21, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Netherlands
  • Country of Filming:
    Netherlands
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    4K digital file
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Galway Film Fleadh - One Minute Film Section
    Galway
    Ireland
    July 13, 2019
  • Filmfest Bremen
    Bremen
    Germany
    September 20, 2019
  • SEFF, Szczecin Film Festival
    Szczecin
    Poland
    October 27, 2019
  • Braunschweig International Film Festival
    Braunschweig
    Germany
    November 20, 2019
  • International Film Festival Rotterdam
    Rotterdam
    Netherlands
    January 24, 2020
  • Independent Days International Filmfest
    Karlsruhe
    Germany
    April 1, 2020
Director Biography - Arjan Brentjes

Arjan Brentjes started his professional life as a painter, and in 2008 he switched to moving images. Since 2010 he is dedicated to making short film, the last years mostly animation. Arjan often takes the viewer back to a movie style from the past, to look at our future from there. Thereby wittily commenting on the development of our technological society and the haughtiness of man.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film is a bit outside of my usual creations. It is made with some material that I had lying around for a while, a small piece of family history.
A few years ago I saw photos of a pre-war part of Rotterdam that reminded me of Amsterdam. I then started making a digital reconstruction of what that must have looked like for my grandmother and great-grandmother. Initially I considered making a video installation with this, but the ideas so far were too big to implement.
In the course of 2019 I remembered the recurring sentence, "So it goes" from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a book about the bombing of Dresden. I thought that this phrase could be the starting point for a very short film. I can make a more or less realistic reconstruction and look at it in wonder, but I can't add much else about the course of things, the meaning of it, or how the world came across to grandma Truus and her mother Aartje. And I can't ask them anymore. So it goes.