Netherlands

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A bored-to-death Dutch teenage girl from the sticks seems to be waiting for an adolescent-age Godot in Supernova, the second feature as a director of Dutch actress Tamar van den Dop, who here co-stars as the girl’s mother.

Resolutely arthouse in its approach, this adaptation of a novel by Flemish author Bo Van Ranst won’t exactly set the box-office alight anywhere but offers more proof of the directorial talents of van den Dop and the serious range and sheer star power of Gaite Jansen (The Cost of Sugar, Tricked) who essentially has to shoulder the burden of making teenage boredom look interesting. The film had its world premiere in the Generation sidebar at the recent Berlin Film Festival and should be appreciated at other festivals as well. It opened commercially in the Netherlands April 17.Read More »

After winning top awards in Montreux, Utrecht, and St. Petersburg for THE WAITING ROOM, followed by the Grand Prix at the Mediawave festival in Györ (Hungary) for THE GAS STATION, Jos Stelling completed his Erotic Tales trilogy with THE GALLERY. Stylistically they’re all connected: each is narrated visually without dialogue, each makes merry fun of an embarrassing erotic fantasy in a public place, and each features the same likeable fall-guy – Belgian actor Gene Bervoets – as the hero always ready and willing to strut his manhood like a peacock in heat. In THE GALLERY Gene finds himself the sensual object of a beautiful woman’s desire. So when, suddenly and unexpectedly, she begins to strip for his pleasure … one good turn deserves another … (IMDb)Read More »

During a traffic jam, a man flirts with another driver.

Jos Stelling (1945) made his debut as a director with Mariken van Nieumeghen in 1974. The film was selected for Cannes in 1975. Since then he has been writing and directing eight feature films. For his short film The Waiting Room (1996) Stelling was awarded a Golden Rose (Press Award) in Montreux, a Golden Gryphon in St. Petersburg as well as his fourth Gouden Kalf (GoldenCalf, the Dutch film award).Read More »

From IMDB:
User Review

“O be careful little eyes what you see . . .”
19 October 2001 | by Timothy Damon

This director is simply incredible. I saw Jos Stelling’s film THE POINTSMAN some years ago, and I’m not sure I would have believed a feature length film without the spoken word could be made. But he did it, and it was great! So then, would a shorter film in the same format be easier to make? You might think so. But Mark Twain once remarked (paraphrased) that he could do a 2 hour speech on most any subject with little advance preparation, but to properly do a 15 minute speech might take at least a week to properly prepare. Regardless, he has a wonderful time in a train station, mostly in the waiting room. The camera is mainly on a Casanova of a man as his gaze goes well beyond the personal boundaries of the women he is, . . . well, to put it bluntly, lusting after. It reminded me of the cartoon postcard of a slick-talking guy next to a woman asking her “Do you mind if I undress you with my eyes?” and she is thinking {‘well, I guess it’s better than having you touch me”] Whether or not this guy knows he’s gone beyond the bounds of propriety I’ll leave to your contemplation. But his come-uppance is quite delightful.Read More »

Synopsis

One of the Netherlands’s most adventurous filmmakers, Alex van Warmerdam specializes in creepy, fractured riffs on folk tales, and acerbic, surreal analyses of contemporary European society. His latest, Borgman, opens with a tribe of strange nomads being driven from their elaborate network of underground shelters. Their ostensible leader, Borgman, approaches an upper-middle-class home and aggressively begs for money. The infuriated husband, Richard, responds by beating the stranger senseless in front of his appalled wife, Marina. Soon after, Borgman infiltrates their lives — and Marina’s dreams — while Richard begins exhibiting his own increasingly erratic and violent behaviour. Then, Borgman’s associates begin circling the house. While somewhat related to the recent home invasion sub-genre, Borgman is primarily about the tensions, both economic and racial, inherent in modern-day society — especially the psychosexual tensions that characterize the bourgeoisie. Richard can’t help but look at his wife or his children as his property. Marina initially seems quite happy with her function as a trophy mother, but the moment the facade starts to crack she’s more than willing to consider the better offer. Driving the narrative arc and intensifying the disturbing tone is van Warmerdam’s refusal to place his characters morally. The open-ended nature of his allegory makes it feel all the more contemporary and unsettling, and therefore genuinely worthy of that overused term, Kafkaesque. ~ tiffRead More »

Synopsis
Explores how Zen Buddhist monks actively got involved in the Second World War and their position now regarding that participation.

“Zen and War” features Shodo Harada Roshi and other contemporary Zen Buddhist teachers speaking of their WWII predecessors’ collaboration in wartime atrocities for the first time on film. The impetus for this film came from Ina Buitendijk, a Dutch woman whose husband suffered severely under Japanese internment in Asia during the war. As a Zen Buddhist practitioner she wrote letters to Zen monastic centers, asking how Buddhist monks could have been involved in warfare.Read More »

synopsis

A woman walks a fine line between sanity and madness in a world of constant twilight in this impressionistic experimental drama from filmmakers Maartje Seyferth and Victor Nieuwenhuijs. Nellie Benner plays a young woman who works at a filling station and lives a life of emotional isolation. No one seems to pay attention to her, and she lives in a run-down flat that looks as if it’s decaying before our eyes. As the woman wrestles with the demons that are taking hold within her mind, she frequently confronts herself in the mirror, often while naked. An older man (played by Titus Muizelaar) who has seen the woman through her windows becomes fascinated with her, but his attempts to integrate himself into her world have strange and unexpected consequences, especially when a gun enters the picture. Shot almost entirely without dialogue, Crepuscule received its world premiere at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival.by Mark Deming
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Some family secrets cannot bear the daylight.
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Quote:
Believe the tale and not the teller., 10 July 2009

Author: The_Black_Rider from New Jersey

If Peter Greenaway presented his conspiracy theory to Rembrandt, the painter would probably laugh in the filmmaker’s face. Luckily art is subjective, and as long as you can make a decent enough case for an interpretation, it is legitimate. But Greenaway’s new film isn’t really about the conspiracy anyway; it’s about the image.

Greenaway famously believes cinema is an impoverished art form because it relies more on the text than on the image. “Just because you have eyes doesn’t mean you can see,” he says. He has been exploring this concept since the days of The Draughtsman’s Contract in which an artist naively uncovered an incitement to murder in his sketches. Here, Greenaway goes through every detail in Rembrandt’s painting and analyzes it. Why is Banning Cocq holding out his naked left hand? Where is the group portrait meant to take place? Who is hiding at the back? Didn’t we see all this in Nightwatching? Sort of. After a long stretch of commercial and artistic failures, Greenaway was clearly trying to reach out to the art-house crowds once again by mixing his exercise in art theory with the melodrama of Rembrandt’s love life. The problem is that Nightwatching is more of the latter than the former, and if there’s one thing Greenaway doesn’t do, it’s emotion. Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is indeed a rehash of the concepts of Nightwatching but the contrived story stripped away.Read More »