The Dutch BarBara Hanlo gratefully took advantage of the swishing of the branches when the weather turned on the Disibodenberg in Germany, where she searched the ghost of the medieval visionary Hildegard van Bingen in a monastery ruin.

A wind rose is the dramatized report of Hanlo's "pilgrimage" to this place with alternating images of the highway and a performance by the artist Anet van der Elzen in the monastery ruin. The film ends in an abstract image of a "sand ball" a glowing circle that can serve as a vanishing point, but also as a seed of a new beginning. A wind rose is bathed in a radiant, very vigorous green: the color of fertility. In recent years, Hanlo has specialized in the chemical "coloring" of black and white photos. She recently released a book about it under the title Colored black and white. Through the Egyptian goddess Isis, Hanlo pays tribute to the magic of the alchemical process in this writing, but she also accurately describes the course of events in a collection of recipes.

Karel Doing asked Hanlo to use her research for Rainbow Stories - and Hanlo found that a challenge. In her previous films, such as the writing portrait of her uncle Jan Hanlo, and that man I am (1991), she gained a lot of experience with low budgets, but a no budget film was new to her. "As Karel speaks about his ideas and implements them, I find that very endearing. The risk of damage is greater in his studio than in a laboratory, but it does give him the freedom to own the equipment to print.

Doing and Hanlo took many experiments together for the chemical coloring of A wind rose. "It's quite easy to color films by printing them through a filter," says Hanlo, "but putting them through a bath of chemicals is a vulnerable method. You work with the original images and you never know how the color intervenes. As a bathtub I used a piece of PVC gutter, one meter long. A Super 8 movie fits right in there. At least if you carefully put it in loops. "

Doing: "To check the effects, we always made prints in between, and often we treated the same images a number of times, so that she could choose from the results and we could adjust the treatment. Sometimes you get a very regular glow, but the image can also solarize, so that it looks half negative half positive ".
Hanlo has used such distortions to support her story. The spots and clouds of color give A wind rose an unreal atmosphere, as if Hildegard von Bingen's "vision of the living light" radiates over the highway and the monastery mountain.