Louis van Gasteren

Louis Alphonse van Gasteren (20 November 1922 – 10 May 2016) was a Dutch film director, film producer, and artist. He was born in Amsterdam. He is the son of actor Louis van Gasteren Sr. and singer Elise Menagé Challa, and the brother of actress Josephine van Gasteren. Van Gasteren trained as an electrician. He worked for the Dutch Polygoon newsreel company in Haarlem, Netherlands in 1949. In 1951 he started his own film production company Spectrum Film. He made his debut with Brown Gold, a film about cocoa and chocolate, in 1952. In 1983 Van Gasteren won the Dutch Film Critics Award for best documentary as well as the Golden Calf for best picture for Hans: Het Leven Voor De Dood (Hans, Life Before Death). He received the Golden Calf a second time in 2003 for his documentary The Price of Survival. Van Gasteren was a visiting professor in the United States at UCLA and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Van Gasteren lived in Amsterdam and was married to Joke Meerman. At the end of his life he was the oldest active filmmaker in the Netherlands.