Josefin Arnell – Buurthuis 2, 2023

Buurthuis 2 begins with a vampire property developer planning to turn Amsterdam’s Wittenburg neighbourhood into a luxury spa resort. The developer enlists a wizard to spread chaos through De Witte Boei, the local community centre, but the neighbours organise resistance. Made with the centre’s staff and regulars, the film grew from scriptwriting workshops with Josefin Arnell, combining local stories with a Dutch fairy tale about the dangers of excessive wealth. The unexplained “2” gives the work the air of a horror sequel, extending Arnell’s recurring use of vampires and other monsters to embody social pressures. Beneath its camp fantasy, the film reflects on Dutch community centres, once intended to educate the working classes and on their place amid widening inequality and the erosion of housing and welfare provision. Storytelling offers a collective means of resisting how a neighbourhood is valued and remade.

Josefin Arnell is an artist and filmmaker. She develops narratives inspired by her personal experiences, situated at the boundary between fiction and reality. Through storytelling, she examines the social expectations that shape identities, particularly representations of femininity and the norms that govern bodies.