Private Project

So Loud The Sky Can Hear Us

So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us explores the identity of a group of football supporters of the Dutch team Feyenoord. This portrait unfolds a hidden world of faith, love, compassion and vulnerability. In the search for the 'lost voice of God', the monophony of old hymnes and stadium chants morphs into a new polyphony as a symbol for the diversity within Feyenoord.

  • Lavinia Xausa
    Director
  • Lavinia Xausa
    Writer
  • Arjen van Doezelaar
    Producer
  • Gert-Jan Kooreman
    Key Cast
  • Janneke Dijk
    Key Cast
  • Mirjam Dobber
    Key Cast
  • Monta
    Key Cast
  • Skillie
    Key Cast
  • Paul van Dorst
    Key Cast
  • Wesley van der Vall
    Key Cast
  • Edjo Frank
    Key Cast
  • Antonio Ponse
    Key Cast
  • Lawrence Lee
    Cinematography
  • Sharine Rijsenburg
    1st AD
  • Jesse Immanuel Bom
    Montage
  • Alberto Granados Reguilón
    Composer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental
  • Genres:
    Experimental documentary
  • Runtime:
    20 minutes 48 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 26, 2022
  • Production Budget:
    48,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Netherlands
  • Country of Filming:
    Netherlands
  • Language:
    Dutch
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • International Film Festival Rotterdam
    Rotterdam
    Netherlands
    January 26, 2022
    Dutch premiere
    Official selection
  • Lago Film Fest - International Festival of Independent Cinema
    Lago
    Italy
    July 22, 2022
    International premiere
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Lavinia Xausa

Lavinia Xausa was born in 1992 in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. She studied at the faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Bologna where she earned her bachelor's degree with honors in Visual culture and media studies in 2015. In 2017 she accomplished her master’s degree in photography at AKV St. Joost in the Netherlands.

She works, lives and struggles to learn Dutch in Rotterdam.
The center of her artistic practice consists in applying semiotics and sacred art research to an ongoing, participatory art practice, by involving groups of people on self-analysis and auto-recognition of their own role in history.

In 2021 she won the RTM Film Pitch awarded by IFFR for her project Truly, Madly, Deeply about Feyenoord identity. In 2020 she was selected for the HCA year program as artist in residence at Roodkapje (Rotterdam, NL). In 2019 she achieved the Stipendium for emerging Artists by the Mondriaan Fund. Her works have been shown at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Noorderlicht International Photography Festival, (Groningen, NL), Organ Vida (Zagreb, HR) and at TENT and Lantaren Venster (Rotterdam, NL).

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Director Statement

There is a vulnerable sense of love, faith, and belonging, hidden behind the group of Dutch football fanatics that, years ago, destroyed a monument in the capital of my country, Rome.
Reaching out, getting to know them, and collaborating together, helped me to debunk many of the prejudices I had towards them. It took me just a few steps outside my comfort zone to realize that Feyenoord is more than just a group of rough guys.

The subjects in the documentary are often unrepresented, sometimes marginalized identities, struggling to emerge in a world where toughness seems to be embedded in the main character of the city and the club, in this case, Rotterdam. The supporters 'fight' every day to establish their position towards the club and, more in general, life, overcoming isolation and prejudice.
The stories of a former harbor employee fighting eviction from his beloved home and neighborhood in which the stadium is located, a supporter fighting for LGBTQI+ awareness, and a former hooligan readdressing his life are just some of the narrations circulating in the film.
These subjects lead us on a journey that attempts to understand the diverse multitude of identities and voices that in the stadium always sound united as one. How plurality can be portrayed through such a strong sense of unity?

Fascinated by the way people live together and are represented in society, in my art practice I like to consider identity not as a genealogical phenomenon set in stone, but as an ongoing defining process that can change through self-analysis and imagination. Approaching the subjects and asking them to give an ongoing meaning to the identity of the club, help us to reconsider Feyenoord spyrit detached from the decadent myth of roughness.

According to Stuart Hall: 'Cinema is not a mirror held up to reflect what already exists; on the contrary, as a form of ongoing representation that enables us to discover who we are, to constitute ourselves as a new kind of subject, and to make that manifest'.
In my visual search to represent diversity within the group, the collaboration with the composer Alberto Granados became fundamental. Together we decided to turn the most established stadium chants of the club into a complex polyphony to be performed by a professional lyrical choir. Transitioning from the stern monophony of Gregorian and stadium chants into a polyphonic composition, represented my wish to idealize a football club more inclusive and diverse in the future.