Jim Kroft is one of my dearest friends, and an especially talented one as well. Music, videography, and photography are the fields where he excels the most, but I have a feeling if I were to catch him with a paint brush in his hand, I would be equally awed.…
Leo is a filmmaker, writer, director, and cameraman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I had the great pleasure of meeting Leo and his wonderful wife Mabel at the International Film Festival Ierapetra on Crete in 2018 and we got along brilliantly right from the start. Leo was running with his…
In today’s episode I will be speaking to Danny and Laura Seiler, who got stuck in the Moroccan desert during the first lockdown. For two months, they and their two beautiful daughters, lived in an oasis where they were stalked by a scorpion, painted an entire swimming-pool blue, and built…
Yellow Van Stories is a podcast hosted by the photographer and filmmaker Bastian Fischer. In the show, he speaks to artists from all over the world, exploring the value of culture in times of crisis and how it has the power to bring us all closer together. Yellow Van Stories…
Amjad Ramadan was born in Homs, Syria, in 1995. He left Syria due to the civil war and fled to Turkey in 2012 at the age of 17. He lived in Kastamonou for 4 years where he enrolled at the local university to study journalism. Due to Amjad's financial decline,…
Erik Penny is a US songwriter, musician and painter who has been living in Berlin for more than 12 years. Erik grew up in El Paso, Texas, where he started his musical career as a bassist at the age of 16. A while later he started a course in painting…
Mabel is a Brazilian psychologist working at INCA - Instituto Nacional de Cancer, the National Cancer Institute, in Rio de Janeiro. INCA is a public service within the SUS network - SUS stands for Unified Health System. It's not a single hospital, actually, it's an institute that behaves as an…
Today we are going on the road with an old acquaintance and Yellow Van veteran: musician and filmmaker Jim Kroft, one of my greatest friends and record-holder in consecutive days spent in Fonsi with me. His documentary film “A Conversation With America” is available for free on YouTube right now.…
Oska Melina Borcherding is a director, actor, dancer and musician from the beautiful city of Berlin. I got to know Oska during the Ierapetra Film Festival on Crete in Greece, where he was running with his short film “Giagia” (which is Greek for “grandmother”). It is a beautiful film about…
Olga Stefatou is a visual artist and curatorial consultant. She recently moved back to her native country Greece after working with Qatar Museums as photography specialist for two years. In her practice, Olga works with mixed media and mainly with photography. She investigates the idea of freedom and its connection…
Shelter and housing is taken for granted for most of us. And when we speak of lockdown we generally think of it as an isolation within our own very comfortable four walls. But what about our fellow humans who are not fortunate enough to have a place of their own,…
Xiao graduated in 2005 with honors in chemistry from Caltech and subsequently worked as a research technician at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT and has an MD-PhD from the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Memorial Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program in New York City. At the moment, she is finishing up her 4th clinical year…
Engeli Haupt was born in South Africa and grew up in the capital Pretoria. She studied linguistics at UNISA, the biggest university of the country, that counts amongst its alumni Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. 16 years ago Engeli moved to Mexico due to her love for the Spanish language…
George is an author, a radio DJ and presenter, a musician, photographer and filmmaker. But above all he is a traveller, exploring the shared essence that makes us all human. His thirst for the world and its people is hard to quench and the moments of connection and mutual exchange…
Thomas Hinterberger is a solo ballet dancer at the Opera National Du Rhin (ONDR) in Mulhouse, France. He got his diploma in ballet dancing from the Academy For Dance and Music in Munich, Germany, in 2001 and he holds a professorship in classic dance and music since 2018. Born in…
Erik is an author, publisher, moderator and podcast host from Berlin, Germany. He has published an impressive amount of work, ranging from travel guides, travel books, short story anthologies to magazine articles and more. He is also the founder of Weltwach (which roughly translates to world awake), a German online…
Claudia is a camera assistant from Munich in Germany. And, above all, my "baby" sister. For close to ten years now, she has been honing her craft in film and cinema, steadily rising up in the camera ranks. Her passion and joy are absolutely infectious, despite the obvious stigma of…
In our first episode of the new season, our guest is film director, screenwriter, and creative producer Mariia Ponomarova (1991, Kyiv). Mariia studied film directing and screenwriting at Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema & Television in Ukraine graduating cum laude in 2013. Focusing on character development in film…
Teza Soe is a Burmese visual storyteller with a doctorate in photography, who received her PhD with a project focusing on the role of women in Myanmar society. After reading the preface to her thesis, I felt that it would be a much better introduction than I could ever hope…
Chiara is an Italian visual storyteller based in the UK in London. In her work she explores identities, relationships and gender issues. She is an active member of Women Photograph [https://www.womenphotograph.com/], a non-profit launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of women* and nonbinary visual journalists. The roots for her…
Oleksii Isakov holds a Master in Intercultural Communication Studies and a Bachelor in Linguistics and Translation Studies. His main focus is literature and film. He was born in Odesa and has been living in Germany for the last ten years working at the European-University Viadrina [https://www.europa-uni.de/en/index.html] in Frankfurt a.d. Oder…
With us in the Yellow Van this week are Dafna Rachok and Ivan Shmatko. Dafna Rachok is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research seeks to understand how vulnerable groups in Ukraine respond to existing HIV prevention and treatment programs and how their…
Today we come to you with the, for now, last episode about Myanmar. The initiative Print For Crisis, which has been on the road with us for the last four weeks, has come to an end and we thought it would be a nice opportunity to have a small retrospective…
Gayane Arushanian is a multidisciplinary artist from Kyiv. She is the founder of the School of Experimental Art in Kyiv and the G-ART STUDIO in Zaporizhzhia. Gayané is not only an outstanding artist, but she also has a Master's in Urban Construction and Design and Economic Cybernetics from the Zaporizhzhia…