The Oude Kerk has outlasted everything around it. Amsterdam's oldest building began as a medieval parish church, expanded chapel by chapel as the city grew rich on trade, and passed to Protestant worship at the Reformation, when its images were removed and its interior stripped to bare stone and timber. That austerity is now its strength: an immense hall of white walls and slender columns beneath one of the largest medieval wooden vaults in Europe, the floor paved with thousands of gravestones marking generations of Amsterdammers, including figures close to the city's greatest painters. The film explores the vault, the organs, the surviving stained glass and the misericords, then steps outside into the surrounding streets, where the church is ringed by the bars and windows of the red-light district. Now used for exhibitions and concerts as well as worship, it is a building whose contradictions are the story. Filmed in 4K.
