Tomato? TOMATO? Food Chain Madness: Annemieke Hendriks at TEDxVienna

Annemieke Hendriks and her 'Biography of the Tomato'

As a Dutch journalist and author with a sociological background, Annemieke Hendriks is mostly operating from Berlin, especially along Europe's former East/West borders.

Annemieke Hendriks studied sociology and language sciences at Groningen University. In the eighties Annemieke learnt to know Europe's East/West borders, working some years for a German-Swiss-Dutch research project on civil rights at Freie Universität related Berghof Stiftung für Konfliktforschung (West-Berlin).

In those days Annemieke's West-Berlin intellectual and arty circles were not interested at all in the Wall which divided the city and in the people at the Eastern side. And so she herself wasn't. Ashamed of this, she started, as soon as the Iron Curtain was torn down, reporting and publishing intensively from Central and Eastern Europe, about East/West relationships and on European integration themes. And she never got enough it.

She lectured Sociology and Cultural Studies at the Journalistic Academy Windesheim Zwolle during eight years, in the mean time running the small theatre, cinema and photo exhibition house from Groningen University. Moving to Amsterdam, she stepped over to journalism herself, working besides as the text editor of Netherlands Film Archive.

From 1990 onwards she writes features for Dutch and other European quality papers and magazines; during the last fifteen years fulltime -- from Berlin again.

Annemieke has published seven non-fiction books since (literary and documentary ones), and some more as co-author. Half of them are on European themes and the other half on cultural-historical and social themes.

Her elaborated interview book on pioneers of Dutch cinema, De pioniers, was awarded 2007 as the best film publication of the year in Dutch language. And her script for a long documentary movie, Meerzicht, received 1993 the prize for the best script at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The film has been realized and broadcasted.

Europe or film culture: It's always people that are in the center of Annemieke's stories. They are portrayed in their own environment, the readers can grow into their lives, enabled by the author to learn and understand their motives, thoughts and actions.

Some call this 'slow journalism', which is a wonderful description of the finest job on earth. At least, if you are interested in people all over the continent and beyond, and if you have definitely stopped caring about the scarce earnings such time-consuming journalistic work brings.




November 2, 2013 at Volkstheater Wien, Vienna, Austria.

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