11. A short trip, big challenges

I'd managed to save up enough money over a few months for a short trip through Europe (call it a petit tour préhistorique). I would travel around for a month with two main goals: meeting indigenous people and finding time to write. After that, things got a bit rough for a while.

You might be wondering: why travel through Europe to meet indigenous people, rather than Africa, Australia, or elsewhere? Well, for one thing, I don't have the money for trips like that, and the rest of the answer needs a bit more explaining. The term 'indigenous' carries a lot of connotations. Although some people have joked with me that in Europe you find indigenous people in the local pub, the term 'indigenous' is generally used to refer to groups of people who were living in particular regions when European colonizers began expanding their empires from the 16th century onward. Usually accompanied by a good dose of horrific racism and violence, as we all know. These clashes involved both hunter-gatherer and farming societies. It's also a widely used label for the descendants of these groups, who still face a great deal of oppression and violence today. Think of the Navajo in the US, on whose land radioactive waste is dumped, or the Hadza in Tanzania, whose territory is increasingly being encroached upon by farmers. It's understandable, then, that some members of these groups hold very negative feelings toward industrialized societies and the colonial past, and it's wise to communicate about this topic with nuance.

Although caution is called for on this subject, in my view the injustices of both past and present aren't a reason to stop seeking any kind of connection at all. In fact, I've discovered that in recent years a trend has emerged in which Europeans seeking to reconnect with nature are increasingly welcomed at indigenous events and consultation structures. It was explained to me like this: Europe, too, once had hunter-gatherers who related to nature in a similar way, and later, for instance, Celtic farmers. But we've collectively forgotten this. We get a small hint of this past in the Netherlands whenever objects wash up on the coast from Doggerland. Either way, people are seeking that connection again and finding it in shamanism, psychedelics, or other ritual contexts. It's easy to dismiss such a pursuit as 'Westerners looking for something now that Christianity has fallen away.' It quickly brings to mind the New Age movement or the Bhagwan, and people active in the field have warned me about charlatans. But at their core, there's a really important point in movements like this: the search for balance with Nature. Although the earth has an enormous amount to offer, it's finite, and we can pollute and exhaust it. Maybe not within 500 years, but what do we do after that? When we look at hunter-gatherer groups, it's easy to be condescending about their technological backwardness compared to us. But they kept it up for hundreds of thousands of years, and it doesn't look like we can do the same with our current strategies. So there's a lot to learn.

I've been fortunate enough to meet several people who identified themselves as indigenous, in Australia, the US, and Europe alike. These were all very enjoyable encounters, and I got the impression that many of them are open to the kind of cultural exchange I'm looking for with my film project. Because, as I've written before, the lived world of the Stone Age is largely lost, and we have to fill the gaps in our knowledge as best we can. Ethnography offers a wealth of useful information here. The lifeways of more recent hunter-gatherers give us hints about life in the Stone Age that our industrial-scientific-agriculture-driven brains could never have come up with on their own. Ethnography also suggests enormous cultural variation, since no group is the same as another. My plan is to draw inspiration from multiple indigenous cultures when shaping the society in my next film, and I've had positive responses to this from the indigenous people I've met.

My entry into this world came through a professor of ecological ethics at Utrecht University, Liesbeth Feikema. Alongside her academic training, she has herself completed years of training in shamanism and has, moreover, travelled the whole world to get to know indigenous folks. She's given me hugely valuable coaching on this project, and for this trip she also gave me two golden tips: to attend a seminar by the Inuit shaman Angaangaq, and to get to know Romanie Wolftaenzarin. Romanie had walked the path of shamanism herself, and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I travelled to her practice in Amsterdam, but I shed tears over the self-insight she helped me find. And she also advised me to go to the KIVA festival in Italy.

KIVA isn't very well known, but it is interesting. Kiva – The Call of the Wisdom Keepers is a small movement, started in 1968, centred on bringing together the wisdom of indigenous peoples. At its heart is a 3-day ritual ritual honoring the bond with Mother Earth. The ritual takes place in a circular pit with a fire in the middle and, around the edge, four small altars of rocks for the cardinal directions. There are several rituals a day, each one followed by a sweat lodge. In between, all kinds of lectures and small workshops take place. The festival has travelled the whole world, including several editions in the Netherlands, and this year it took place in Italy, in the countryside between Tuscany and Rome. Attendance in my case was probably around 200 people, mostly Europeans. Elders had come from North America, South America, New Zealand, Mongolia, and more places besides. Each brought their own ritual into the circle to give thanks to The Mother, sometimes with dance and offerings, sometimes with song and musical instruments, each one mysterious and intriguing.

I had never seen anything like it, and it was without a doubt an inspirational experience for my Stone Age film. Because, necessarily, in my search for suitable puzzle pieces to build a picture of a Stone Age cultural society, I'm also diving into spirituality. Today's spirituality is, of course, of today, but it seems to me that spirituality is also a universal human trait. So today's spirituality can be seen as an echo of an original, primal spirituality, and studying it gives me hints I wouldn't find just by staying in books or heading into the woods on my own. Interestingly, the people behind KIVA claim that the ritual was taking place 3000 years ago. Though this is still quite far removed from the Upper Palaeolithic, perhaps something like it took place then nevertheless. Intuitively it seems closer to prehistoric rituals than, say, a church mass.

Still, I have to note that, even though among my friends I'm known as being somewhat dreamy, at KIVA I felt like a stiff corporate lawyer relative to the crowd. My own spirituality is closest to that of the Romantic poets, with a touch of Spinozism and 1960s hippie thrown in, but things like earth radiation and healing crystals, let alone personal gods or other spirits, I've never felt anything for that. And although I don't think mysticism and wonder are excluded by the exact sciences, the latter do have a large place in my worldview. So I felt something of an odd one out at this event. But the atmosphere was very open and I had a lot of interesting conversations. I even got the chance to ask an elder from Mexico for advice on my screenplay. Lady Nubia Esperanza Rodríguez García was kind enough to answer my questions about fertility rituals in traditional societies, and I gave her one of my mandalas as thanks.

Shortly after, I drove on to Austria, where I attended a multi-day seminar by the Inuit shaman Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq at the luxurious Seminarhof Schleglberg. I'd gone there on Liesbeth's advice; she'd assured me that Angaangaq was authentic and that I could learn a great deal from him. The Greenlandic shaman is indeed known as the spiritual leader of the Arctic region: he has visited more than 70 countries and spoken at international conventions on climate change and indigenous affairs, represented the Arctic region at the UN, and has met people like Nelson Mandela, Gorbachev, two popes, and the Dalai Lama. So it was rather special that his management team asked me to record an interview with him (they had learned that I was a filmmaker). Despite his résumé, Angaangaq turned out to be a very modest man with a good sense of humor (he laughed when I told him I'd built igloos as a child). And although he was genuinely elderly by now, I could clearly see what kind of powerful charisma he must always have had. He was full of wisdom and was always warm and understanding. I got an hour and a half alone with him, a unique chance to talk to him person to person, away from the small cult of followers hanging around him. During the seminars, which ran for three days, he spoke about world peace, about 'melting the ice in people's hearts' and about finding meaning in life. He alternated sharing wisdom with beautiful, haunting Inuit prayer chants. In those moments he was a religious figure. I was very glad I got to do the interview, because it let me see the non-religious side of him. It seemed to me that he was the religious figure for the people who needed that (the searching Europeans), while for others he could still just be an ordinary yet very inspiring man. Would a shaman in the Stone Age have had the same charisma?

On the subject of film, I actually had another noteworthy exchange with Angaangaq. Over lunch I got the chance to ask him what he thought of the classic documentary Nanook of the North (1922). He answered, "Good, but it could've been better." I also asked him what he thought of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2000), a beautiful epic based on an Inuit myth. It turned out he had personally convinced the National Film Board of Canada to fund the film. He thought my own film project was a very worthwhile initiative and was keen to lend it his public support.

I had just enough money left to rent a studio for a week or two at my friends in Les Eyzies (Dordogne). Here I finally found time to write on the screenplay again. The second version came to five pages, adding several months' worth of impressions and comments from archaeologists and indigenous people. It was already becoming much more of a text with a solid narrative arc, logically following scenes, and grounding in the science. In the little attic room of the studio I had a small table and a small window looking out on the orchard, some French baguette, and I needed nothing else. During a break, I would pay a visit to the National Museum of Prehistory and got the chance to go to Cougnac cave. The plan is to have the scenario in a shareable version by the end of the year so that I can start looking for producers and film studios. Once someone like that is seriously interested in the project, we can apply for funds and things would get rolling...

At Roc-St.-Christoph, a medieval village built into the cliffs and now an open-air museum, a Stone Age event was also held. The place was full of charming demonstrations of prehistoric craftsmanship. Not entirely by coincidence, I ran into a few of the flintknappers I'd met in Schöningen the year before, who had travelled all the way to southern France for yet another international flintknapping session. I was briefly interviewed here by a journalist from Le Parisien.

But after this, the fairy tale was briefly over again. The money had run out and I had to get to work. My new online job still had no projects for me, and my wanderlust meant I couldn't bring myself to take a regular fixed job somewhere. So it was back to odd jobs as a temp work at festivals, or helping renovate my father's house, and doing chores on a friend's farm. I moved back in with my father for a month and a half and let a friend sublet my studio in Utrecht. It was tough going, because after those long workdays I no longer had the mental energy to sit down with the project. That's when I'd feel off track and grow numb to it all. Some weeks all I managed was sending a few emails or reading a few pages. Some bright spots did come along though: I was a guest on the EXARC podcast and illustrator Marina Lezcano made an image to accompany the opening scene of the scenario.

Furthermore, experimental archaeologist Markus Klek officially joined the production team for The Eternal Seasons. Once the budget allows, he'll become head of the artifacts department. In the meantime, he's researching the material culture of the Magdalenian (roughly 21,000–13,000 years ago), the period depicted in the film. This research will make clear what kinds of artifacts we'll need to gather for the film's production later on. It sounds simple, but it's an important, concrete step forward!

But otherwise, June and July were mostly day labour and little substance. I was working toward something good, though: a friend of mine wanted to get rid of his camper van and was keen to sell it to me at a very reasonable price. Together with the repairs, it would cost me €3,500 to become the proud owner of a 2001 Ford Transit diesel van. That would finally take my travels to a whole new level. With a heavy heart, I sold my rusty Ford Mondeo, but the Transit more than made up for it. I could cook and sleep in it and park up wherever I wanted. My first destination became the UK, in mid-July.

The United Kingdom doesn't necessarily offer the highlights when it comes to the Palaeolithic. Everyone knows Stonehenge and other stone circles, of course, but mind you, those came from much later, from the farming era! My film is set 15,000 years ago, close to the end of the last Ice Age (12,500 years ago). There were people in England now and then during this period, only hunter-gatherers, but it was usually far too cold, and only a handful of drawings and decorated objects have been found. The two caves you can visit are Gough's Cave and Creswell Crags, neither of which is really spectacular compared to their French and Spanish counterparts.

Part of the reason I went anyway was my Canadian girlfriend, who had run out her tourist visa and needed to be outside the Schengen area for a while. I was also curious whether Wales had apt natural areas to film in. The British Museum, moreover, had a small Magdalenian collection, obtained in the days when such objects were still sold as souvenirs. I was allowed to come view them in a study room by appointment. We had planned to travel around for three months, taking our time everywhere. But unfortunately, the relationship ended, and my money had run out faster than expected. I was naturally pretty upset and no longer had any desire to keep traveling around there for that long. I decided to significantly shorten the trip. Against my own principles of slow travel, I rushed through all the destinations in two weeks. After Gough's Cave near Bristol, I drove on to Wales. Through a colleague, I'd gotten in touch with a very hospitable farming family, who welcomed me at their home for a day and took me out on a quad bike to the rolling grazing lands of their sheep. It turned out to be the most remote spot in Wales in terms of distance to a main road, right in the middle of the Brecon Beacons nature reserve, with fantastic rock formations and short grass stretching to the horizon. Sheep aside, it was a beautiful place to film, and I was told the local farmers definitely wouldn't mind bringing them in for a film shoot sometime.

Shortly after, I drove all the way to Newcastle to make a video with YouTuber Lindybeige, only to head off to the Sheffield area the very next day for a visit to Creswell Crags. Then one more night in London with a couple of friends, with whom I visited the Natural History Museum and the British Museum (the study session would come in late August). After that, the ferry back from Dover, and I was home again.

So much for my speeded-up trip through the UK. The breakup really shook me for a while, and it was nice to be able to recharge at home, but once I was back, life without a fixed income started to weigh on me. My feeling was that I couldn't properly keep going with this project with the constant undertone of running myself financially dry. My plans for The Eternal Seasons are already a bit quixotic at times, but that becomes even more true when I don't even know how I'll pay the rent in two months. At the time of writing, mid-August, I'm still figuring out how I want to approach things going forward. If I still don't have any projects at my online job in a few months, I really ought to start applying for something new. All in all, though, I've made good progress over the past few months, and the film has moved significant steps closer to realisation. And as soon as I've got my finances back on track, that will simply carry on.

August 2026