Fries Film & Audio Archief – Wintercompilatie (45min.)

Real winters are a beloved backdrop for film makers. The most beautiful film images of harsh winters in Friesland should not be missing from the Freezing Frames program line. The Frisian Film & Audio Archive (FFAA) has started digging in its rich collection for images of the harshest winters of the last century. It produces a range of iconic ice and snow scenes in which people play, enjoy, marvel, suffer and sometimes rise to great heights in an empty, white no man's land. The coldest winter was in 1963, with an average temperature of 3.4 degrees in De Bilt and on January 18 the harshest Elfstedentocht ever. But more than just the Elfstedentocht was filmed in that incredible winter: car rides over frozen lakes, spectacular drifting ice, snow fun, plodding snow shovels, prestigious short track races, frozen limbs. The winters of the 1940s were also notorious: 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947. All four Elfsteden winters and cold hunting grounds for filmmakers, then largely working in black and white. During these years Bart Tromp made his beautiful documentary series Wintersport in Friesland, in which many aspects of Frisian winter life are discussed, including the oldest images of ice hockey in the province. And then of course the winter of 1979, with an epic snowstorm in mid-February. Half of Friesland disappeared in the snow and got cut off from basic necessities. They are the best represented days in the FFAA's collection. Anyone who had a film camera went out with it.

Freezing Fryslân Frames is a compilation of the coolest winter images of Friesland. The overview spans a period of eighty years. It starts with the oldest images from the FFAA from 1917, when the third Elfstedentocht was held, and ends with the last Elfstedentocht in 1997.