Dutch

This film tells the story of one of the most incredible and, oddly enough, outside Russia relatively unknown events that took place in the Second World War: the blockade of Leningrad by the Germans. In september 1941, the three million inhabitants of the city were trapped like rats, without food or drinking water. In subzero temperatures people had to eat glue, leather soles, cats, and sometimes even their fellow human beings. When the city opened up again after almost three years, over a million people had died. The survivors were marked for life.Read More »

Quote:
Minimal miniature about a rehearsal of a play text by an actress and a directing actor.

The actress is amazing. An actress and an actor are rehearsing parts of the play Three Travellers Watch Sunrise by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The dialogues of the three travellers (Chinese) and the girl (Anna) are spoken by the actress as a monologue. The actor listens and sometimes gives the actress directions.Read More »

In a small, depopulated village of the Aude province of France, an elderly couple confides to the “vacationer”‘s camera their memories of the past: war, illness, death… 
The film is put together as a collection of autonomous images which, once combined, make up van der Keuken’s mental universe: family happiness, fragments of some of his earlier films, a homage to the saxophonist Ben Webster, two poems by the great contemporary poets Remco Campert and Lucebert, a portrait of the director’s grandfather, who taught him photography at the age of twelve… 
”One of those small masterpieces one encounters by surprise…” Jean-Paul Fargier, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1975Read More »

The entrancing love story of Billie and Lucas, a young Brussels couple. The film paints a candid portrait of the formative but also uncertain facets of every (first) love.Read More »

Synopsis:
A bitter-aged man reluctantly drives to Spain to pay a last visit to a dying friend, along with his wife who’s suffering from dementia. But as their journey unfolds, he slowly starts to soften up and rediscovers the meaning of love.Read More »

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Film of play about the original and witty eighteenth-century writer and academic Lichtenberg.

The film is based on the play Lichtenberg, Scenes on the Threshold of the Modern Age by Cyrille Offermans. While the protagonist Lichtenberg has several things in common with George Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) an experimental physicist and writer of the famous Sudelbücher as well as many no less infamous letters – no attempt has been made at accuracy. Several facts from the life of the historic figure have been incorporated into the character, but the latter remains the brain-child of the writer Offermans. From time to time Lichtenberg quotes writers he could not know, strictly speaking: 19th- and 20th-century authors. These are formulations of ideas emanating from his own work in a natural way.Read More »

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Every scene of the film comprises a dialogue between a man and a woman. The dialogues are fragmentary, in other words, the dialogue in one scene does not tie in with that of the next. In addition there is no development in the relationship between the actor and the actress towards a happy or unhappy ending. The dialogues are not only of substantial interest; it is above all material for the actors. The film balances on the boundary between portraying an intimate relationship between a woman and a man and the intimacy in the acting between the actor and actress. When an actor or actress hardly has any words in a scene, he or she portrays loneliness; when he/she has a monologue, then the attention is focused on speaking the text, on (the reflection about) being an actor.Read More »

A group of Dutch artists try to set up an erotic show in a Berlin nightclub. When the show flops, the group fades away into alcohol abuse and sexual excesses. The Virgin Mary manifests herself to the group and offers them happiness. But happiness is hard to find…Read More »

In January 1945, during the 2nd world-war, the Dutch resistance kills a collaborator in the street where the 12 year old Anton Steenwijk lives. The man was shot in front of his neighbors house, but is moved by them to the house of the family Steenwijk. Because of this, his father, mother and brother are killed by the Germans, and their house is set to fire. During his life, Anton meets several people that tell him more about what really happened on the night of the assault.Read More »