Johan van der Keuken; Documentary Filmmaker

Johan van der Keuken, 62, Dutch documentary filmmaker whose last production chronicled his ill-fated worldwide search for a cure for cancer. Van der Keuken made his first film, “Paris at Dawn,” in 1958 as a student of photography. He gained popularity in the 1960s with black and white films about ordinary life in Paris and Amsterdam. Considered part fiction, part documentary, his work was most often screened in museums and film festivals around the world. Among those were the San Francisco International Film Festival--whose Persistence of Vision Award he received in 1999--the Rotterdam and Berlin film festivals and New York’s Collective for Living Cinema. Two of his movies, the 1986 “I Love Money” and the 1993 “Brass Unbound,” depicting Asian and African adaptations of American brass band music, were shown at Los Angeles’ Filmforum in 1998. A Variety reviewer likened Van der Keuken’s final film, “The Vacation” or “The Holiday,” to “an extended road movie,” with him roaming the world in search of a cure for his prostate cancer. He examined Eastern cures and spiritual approaches to Western medicine that took the film to Nepal, Bhutan, Mali, Brazil and New York. On Sunday in Amsterdam of prostate cancer.