Radio Voorwaarts takes place on the eve of the eviction of an alternative community, home to a pirate radio station. We follow a single night in the life of an ensemble of misfits – squatters, artists, idealists and ravers – who gather one last time to simultaneously mourn and celebrate the end of their beloved space.

Director’s Statement

Radio Voorwaarts began after the loss of a real building, a place where there was space to create and do things differently without being crippled by the increasingly exorbitant rent prices in our hometown of Amsterdam. Losing this space prompted questions about belonging, urban renewal, and the survival of counterculture – which we set out to explore in a fiction film loosely based on real experiences.

The film employs a fragmented narrative in which its camera lets itself be led by the organic flow of the party. I was more interested in exploring a collectively experienced ‘sense of an ending’, in which the space and the community depicted end up becoming the protagonist themselves. It was important for us to create a community both on-screen and off-screen, and we worked together with local musicians, artists and activists, whose unique input was essential in bringing the space in the film to life.

Next to the short film, Radio Voorwaarts became a platform that showcases underground arts & music, with a particular interest on counterculture and its precarious place in hostile neoliberal environments.