MEnna Laura Meijer’s documentary is an intriguing, if distinctly chilled, look at the different ways people Netherlands are coached in personal growth and mindfulness. The film is a series of tableaus, with the various study sessions and meeting groups filmed from a distance in a fixed camera position, very rarely cutting close-up. The film washes each scene with invigorating cold, clear light and there is elegant visual and compositional sense in every frame.

We see quarter-life crisis coaching and leadership training with horses; people learn emotional focus and centering by lying in a barnyard petting very clean pigs. Cops learn not to react to provocation through role-playing. People learn to own their emotions so that their emotions don’t own them. There’s tree climbing to overcome fear and (eminently sensible) tutoring in fall prevention for seniors.

But curiously, the most powerful moment comes when a sports psychology lecturer shows some coaches a very moving motivational video created by former hockey star Marc Lammers, about British athletics star Derek Redmond who s tore a hamstring at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the 400m semi-final. -final. Limping in agony, the sprinter insisted on trying to get around the track, eventually crossing the line in circumstances that made him and his family a legend long after the winners had been forgotten.

This video, with its emotional button pressing, couldn’t be more different from Meijer’s coldly detached approach – and yet it actually overshadows the rest of the film. The coaches watching were clearly smothered; I myself was suffocated. For the rest, it is certainly well done: but the question of knowing whether these people are really changing, slowly or not, remains an enigma.