Reports from the Tower of Yearning

During the COVID-19 pandemic, photographer and filmmaker Carel van Hees is forced to turn his apartment in Rotterdam’s RVS flats into his own little world.
The apartment, originally built as a home for working single women, is also known as the Hunkerbunker (the Tower of Yearning), now its residents’ lives are confined to their units. On the tenth floor van Hees meets Gerarda van Nimwegen, a 106-year-old woman who hasn’t left her apartment for the past five years.
During her long life she has survived many crises, including the Spanish flu, the poverty of the interbellum and the bombing of Rotterdam – all this without losing her sense of humour.

“Reports from the Tower of Yearning” is a loving tribute to a remarkable resident whose life has come to a halt in the apartment she’s lived in since the age of 44.

Photographer and filmmaker Carel van Hees approached me with this project almost out of a sense of duty. He had promised Gerarda he would tell her story and would not rest until he had done just that. But there was not a lot of money and not a lot of footage, so this would be a hard story to tell.
In the edit I decided to incorporate Carel’s photography and to make it just as big a part of the story. This not only solved the lack of visuals, but also made it a more personal film at the same time.