The New Rijksmuseum Teaser Trailer (2009)

Teaser trailer for The New Rijksmuseum.

In 2003, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the most important museum in the Netherlands, closed for a major renovation. The plan was to reopen in 2008, but what was to take five years took ten, with massive budget overruns.

In The New Rijksmuseum filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk goes behind closed museum doors to document this exciting, difficult and sometimes painfully funny process. She captures the building as it was stripped to a bleak carcass, and as it is gradually renovated and restored to the grandeur of yesteryear.

Hoogendijk also introduces various curators as they prepare the layout of their new rooms with tremendous passion and dedication. We follow the caretaker, who looks at the building as if it were his child and protects it against intruders, and the architects who constantly have to adjust their designs. And we follow the museum directors Ronald de Leeuw and Wim Pijbes, who must deal with financial setbacks, bureaucracy and squabbles – not to mention the activist cyclists. In the end, 400 hours of material was edited down to a single film that takes the viewer to the apotheosis: the museum’s reopening in 2013.