Portretten Uit De Peel
Poetic documentary about the unique history of the Peel with a central role for the photos of master photographer Jacques Peeters.
Until the early 1960s, the swampy Peel region of Limburg and Brabant was one of the least populated and least developed parts of the Netherlands. For people who have little knowledge of the Peel, it is difficult to imagine that people lived not so long ago in huts of branches and peat.
Jacques Peeters was a photographer for newspaper ‘De Limburger’ for thirty years and regularly visited De Peel. He captured the landscape and its idiosyncratic residents in beautiful black-and-white photos, which regularly appeared in the newspaper. With those photos, director Wiek Lenssen sets off to look for the people who were so masterfully and genuinely portrayed by Peeters. In this way the unique history of the Peel region is unlocked, a region where traces of life in a raw, wild nature can still be found.