Three films made with people who spend their working lives behind a camera.

Steffi Reimers — Guilty Grounds
Foam, 2024. Client: Foam. Video: Maarten Kal.

Foam presented the first solo exhibition of Dutch photographer Steffi Reimers. In  she photographs the landscape of Aspromonte National Park in Calabria, ground that carries the story of the ‘Ndrangheta, one of the world’s most powerful criminal organisations. Curator Aya Musa asked me to make a video portrait of Steffi. I filmed her at her home and at work at the Netherlands Forensic Institute. The film ran at the exhibition and online.

Co Rentmeester — Witnessing Life
Foam, 2025. Director: Tom Dey. Camera: Maarten Kal.

Co Rentmeester left Amsterdam as an Olympic rower to become one of the defining photographers of the twentieth century, shooting Vietnam and the Watts riots for LIFE, then the Marlboro campaigns, then the frame of Michael Jordan that became the Jumpman logo and one of TIME’s hundred most influential images. Foam brought him home for a retrospective across six decades.

Hollywood director Tom Dey, who earlier made the short documentary Jumpman about Co (Tribeca 2024), hired me to film the trip, most likely Co’s last to the Netherlands. We filmed him at the museum and the rowing club where he started his career. Part of a larger documentary.

Julia Kochetova — War is Personal
Foam, 2026. Director, camera and edit: Maarten Kal. 

Julia Kochetova photographs the war in Ukraine from within. Her project War is Personal combines photography, poetry and sound, and won the World Press Photo Open Format global award in 2024. Foam showed it in Amsterdam in 2026. I made the video piece for the exhibition, built from an interview, her photographs, her private phone footage and her poems read aloud.