“The less you feel obliged to understand from the outset where the film is going and the more you allow yourself to understand nothing at all, the more easily you will ‘travel' within my films,” the erudite, charismatic Dutch filmmaker and photographer Johan van der Keuken once said of his aesthetically formal, socially engaged documentaries. “Part of his North/South series, The White Castle focuses on the impact of the West on the underclass-on the concrete realities of their daily life and on the way their existence is isolated and frustrated. Interweaving images of the Spanish tourist mecca of Formentera, a community center in Columbus, Ohio, and factories in the Netherlands, the film vividly illustrates the fragmented, alienated lives that the market economy produces and chillingly portrays what van der Keuken saw as ‘a conveyor belt (that) runs the world'” (Viennale 2007).