Netherlands

Presentation from the San Francisco Film Festival :
“Johan de Bakker is a first-rate baker, meticulous in his trade and exacting in his recreational pursuits which include balancing eggs, building towers of pebbles by the river and waiting stoically in the town square for the daily bus to arrive. Illiterate and hardly exacting in his social skills, Johan is a 35-year-old child and the enigmatic hero of this charming Dutch comedy. His slightly more worldly friends decide to play Cyrano and their ghostwritten love letters on his behalf provoke a woman’s visit “from foreign climes.” Set in a tiny village in the north of Holland, Egg takes its eccentric characters at face value and Israeli-born writer-director Danniel Danniel’s cheerfully deadpan approach is reminiscent of early Jacques Tati. Skillfully introducing the villagers through their mundane routines, Danniel weaves a whimsical fable based in limited realities where “more than one outcome is possible. With a talented cast, Egg succeeds as an offbeat comedy through understatement and authentic charm.”
—Richard PenaRead More »

A cinematic tribute to the Wadden Sea, the world’s largest, and most varied, uninterrupted inter-tidal area, extending along the coasts of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.Read More »

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Based on the struggle of young people in Goma (Northeastern Congo) against the prevailing Western reporting about war and misery, Stop Filming Us investigates how these Western stereotypes are the result of a skewed balance of power. Stop Filming Us creates a cinematic dialogue between Western perceptions and the Congolese experience of reality. While the Congolese perspective becomes increasingly clearer in the film, questions arise about the perspective of the film itself; is a white director able to make a film about the new Congolese image or is it primarily a story created by his own Western perspective?Read More »

Biopic of the life of the jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) who fled Berlin after the Kristallnacht in 1939 to live with her grandparents in the south of France. Salomon had a diary/comic style of painting and drawing and left a biographical body of nearly 1000 works, to which she collectively referred as “Life? or Theater?”. It depicts her youth in Berlin and her romance with a the mysterious Daberlohn against the backdrop of rising national socialism.Read More »

Michael dreams of future as a pianist but his music education didn’t go well. His brother Danny introduces him to Rotterdam gabber music . Danny’s drug business reaches international proportions and the brothers must fight for their lives.Read More »

Blonde Greet is an experienced and kindhearted prostitute in the red-light district of Amsterdam. Her friend Nel, another whore, lives on the second floor of her house and is exploited and abused by her pimp. When Greet meets the married Piet, they feel a great attraction to each other. Nel decides to find a husband and quit being a whore. Her life ends up changing; Greet’s doesn’t.Read More »

The famous Dutch singer Dries Roelvink is abducted after a gig in a local discotheque. He ends up in a mobile home right in the middle of nowhere amongst two of his biggest “fans”: Freek and Teuntje. They are a friendly but unattractive couple who are missing one major thing in their lonely lives: a child of their own. But regrettably, they both can’t have any children. Meanwhile Freek and Teuntje are trying to let their Idol feel comfortable in their mobile home and gradually it becomes clear to him why he has been taken there.Read More »

Five thirty-something men in as many separate segments struggle to grapple with the relentless absurdity of their respective existences.Read More »

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In 2003, the ambitious renovation of one of the world’s greatest museums began. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to a glorious collection including masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer, was supposed to reopen its doors in 2008 after five years of construction. But from the start, the project was opposed by unyielding bureaucrats and public resistance. The museum directors battled politicians, designers, curators and even the Dutch Cyclists Union as they struggled to complete the renovation and put its massive collection back on public display. Five years late, with costs exceeding half a billion dollars, the museum finally reopened.Read More »