Jan-Willem van Ewijk

Jan-Willem van Ewijk was born in Delft in the Netherlands in 1970. He spent his childhood years in the Netherlands and California, where he developed a keen interest in aviation and space exploration after seeing Star Wars. He moved back to Delft in 1989 to study aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology and graduated as an aircraft designer seven years later. Before he started making films, Jan-Willem has worked at Airbus, Beechcraft and Bombardier Aerospace. He was also a strategy consultant for Monitor Company and was involved in the start up of Antfactory, a dot com era investment firm that grew to a global network of 14 offices and over 200 employees in less then two years. Late 2002 Jan-Willem quit his job and and started writing the script for a full length feature film, "Nu.". He founded Propellor Film to support production of the film and attracted his old university friends, former colleagues and family members as cast and crew. The film was shot in the evenings and weekends during the summer of 2003 in over 40 locations in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Soon after, money ran out and Jan-Willem took on a full time job to finance post production. Over the next three years he struggled to complete the editing of the film. "Nu." was finally released at the 2006 Dutch Film Festival, where it received an honorable mention. It went on to win the grand prize for best film at the European Independent Film Festival in Paris in March 2007 and was selected for the First Film World Competition at the Montreal Film Festival in September 2007. Jan-Willem was selected to participate in the Sundance Lab in June 2009 with his second feature film project "Land." which was later renamed "Atlantic." The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014 and was nominated for a Dutch Academy Award for Best Cinematography. In 2014, Jan-WIllem also started work on his third feature film "Sleep."