Sandra of the Tuliphouse

The film "Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State" takes Christiania, an anarchistic community in Copenhagen, Denmark as its point of departure. The project follows the fictitious protagonist, Sandra, who settles in the Free Town during a summer, adapting to her new surroundings with unusual curiosity.
Starting off from the bastions and moats, factories and drill grounds, all part of the old defense of Copenhagen, and the 1971 squatting of the military base and foundation of the Free Town of Christiania, Sandra muses on what she sees. Her reflections mingle with factual information, historical events, personal reminiscences and random everyday experiences: the rise and function of pirate cities in 17th-century Europe, the invention of heroin, the concept of 'utopia', the history of the Danish flag, the reason why men's clothes are buttoned left side over right, the motorcycle gang wars in the1980s, local anecdotes of Christiania, opera, armour, her experiences as an exchange student in the United States, bears and the poem Beowulf. In this way Sandra actually constructs her own history of Denmark.
Sandra's voice accompanies the images as an almost hypnotic voice-over monologue, and the visuals and the sound track alike are characterized by an astounding wealth of detail and signification. At first, the many subjects referred to by Sandra seem like an erratic stream of information and events. Close inspection, however, reveals that all the sequences are linked to form a fine-meshed web of significance in a carefully spun narrative and the overwhelming and seemingly random wealth of material underpinned by a carefully calculated structure.
With Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State Matthew
Buckingham and Joachim Koester examine the mechanisms determining how we construct history. They stress how the strictly linear and "official" history may not be the most precise and meaningful version. Instead they create, through Sandra, an alternative model where many different histories exist at the same time. Histories which all consist of a more or less random series of experiences and events filtered through intuition, reminiscences, feelings and personal histories.