Discoveries from Netherlands World Cinema

A documentary about slutshaming.

Lona, a young woman who has no memories of her past, has been adopted by the rich industrialist Van Haaften. She is loved by Henri van Rhenen, a neighbour whose mother still mourns the loss of her daughter, who disappeared twenty years ago under mysterious circumstances. Lona has another suitor, Frans van Borselen, who hopes to marry her so that he can pay his gambling debts with her foster-father's money. Van Haaften discovers that Frans has been cheating at cards and offers him a revolver so that he can end his life honourably.

Young Dutch people talk frankly to director Kees Brusse about love, faith, sex and society.

Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf (1959) is on the threshold of an important year: his most recent photographic series, Hope, Grief and Rain appear to have given him an international breakthrough. His work has been criticized since the 1980s as being produced merely for its shock value, thus eliminating it as art. But now that important art dealers and museums all over the world are showing his works, and huge crowds are visiting his expositions, it seems as if his years of hard work will finally lead to serious recognition. Yet this is occurring, of all times, in a period of his life in which Erwin Olaf is contending with emphysema, a debilitating disease that obliges him to deal cautiously with his energy reserves. Whether his body can keep up with his work pace is uncertain.

In the dark shadows of the forest, the night animals wake up. A full moon breaks through the clouds, little eyes light up and a scream pierces the night air.

A woman plays with a bird as the camera's gaze is drawn to her legs.

Citizens of Canada were literally beaten, strip searched and left naked for hours. Women were sexually assaulted, journalists were illegally detained, and police were given broad powers that turned out to be not even exist.

Footage of the daily goings-on at the Baju-Asih mission hospital and the associated outpatient clinics in Purwakarta. Featured are, among others, the players of a korfball match and the Medical Director, Dr. Bremmer, at work in his laboratory.

In a recreated bedroom, Roaa, Zainab and Noe Noe, three refugee girls living in the Netherlands, draw and describe their self-invented fantasy monster, Cappi Don Liii. Reflecting on the monster and themselves, they talk about happy and less joyful memories, about growing up in an asylum seekers center – and the power of their friendship and fantasy.

An impression of the harsh winter of 1929 - one of the harshest of the last century. Van der Wel was director of the Rotterdamse Gemeentelijke Schoolbioscoop (Rotterdam Municipal School Cinema) and made many short educational films.

Guided by light — both abstract and concrete, a vital energy in the ecological environment — the work draws inspiration from natural states. It captures nature from a microscopic perspective, holding fleeting moments and connecting all senses with the living world. The images emerge through exposure — an encounter with light — developed with natural ingredients found on site. Sounds were recorded at sunrise and sunset; light-sensitive emulsions were coated and exposed under a new moon, in a park free of light pollution—an open-air darkroom. The film was created at Guandu Nature Park during the summer art festival of 2024 in Taiwan.

This is a reflection of & on class consciousness

An art curator who makes amateur drawings during dead time. He calls them Autocartoons, like Auto Portraits, or even Automatic Writings.

A filmic adventure of a man confronted with the basic ingredients for bread and how he gets entangled in a sensual fight.

Entangled in a dark dream, HIM finds HER- searching for the true meaning of happiness. When HIM begins to lose himself in his everlasting search, he is confronted with the truth about his reality.

Through a personal video diary we are witness of the last days of humanity when a horrible zombie virus is spreading.

The only North American crayfish that does cheer you up: this stop-motion copy of fabric. The exotic little animal is a huge plague in our ditches – the Dutch legislation being in a quagmire.

A 1918 city movie about Utrecht

In a family where birthdays invariably end in arguments or tense silences, Crissi decides enough is enough. She approaches her birthday as a design experiment, transforming the familiar gathering into an absurdist stage to bring her family's ingrained patterns to the surface and, in doing so, start a new conversation.

During the endless waiting in the Amsterdam AZC, gay Iranian Milad (30) tries to make the best of it together with his friends Arman (34) and Radfan (27). To get the residents in the AZC more in touch with each other, they decide to organize a poetry night. At the same time, gay Jurre (24) starts an internship at COA. He would like to do something good for Milad out of a sense of guilt about his privileges. When he hears about the poetry evening Milad and his friends want to organize, he decides to get involved, but soon finds out that his good intentions backfire.

The 14-year-old David is a talented breakdancer; his mother Mery supports him unconditionally in his ambition to reach the top. As a teenager, she fled her native Armenia, but the situation in her country still plays a major role in the family life. David wants nothing more than make up for what his mother lost. But he is also getting to an age where he starts to have doubts. Dancing and twisting, he looks for a way to make contact with his emotions.

A tailor fights an endless battle to reach his big love: the daughter of the wealthy family Vogel. This is harder than he thought, because not everyone is waiting for a low rider in house Vogel.

The first Dutch fictional film. This very short silent slapstick comedy featured famous Dutch comedians Lion Solser and Piet Hesse. Considered lost.

A man sits in his room. He is wearing clothes and combat boots. He listlessly sucks on a cat-shaped lollipop. The cat wears a red bow. A pineapple comes into play, later a porcelain horse. Outside, the train screeches through the snow. A version of the German folk song “Der Graf von Rüdelsheim” plays in the background.

A stand-up comedy set by the Dutch comedian Marc Scheepmaker, recorded live in Toomler in January 2007.

After 29 years at the assembly line, Peter is ready for retirement. A film about the art of saying goodbye.

Cycling Utrecht is number seven in the «Places and Monuments» series. As with all the other opus of this series, the live action images have been submitted to a process of digital processing in order to give them a greater temporal and spatial density and animation inserts were added to create points of intensity that tell you were to look. In this case, the inseted images of Tour de France are disputing the monumental pole with images of statue that are along the route of the race, and are put in tension with the normal day to day use of the bike that is a very important characteristic of this city.

#11 (Marey Moiré) is a film in which all images were generated by intermittently recording the movement of a line. It is a film about the discontinuity that lies at the heart of the film medium.

A documentary about the cinema Kriterion Roetersstraat en Studio K in Amsterdam.

Bunkers, mines and barbed wire are removed to recover the pre-war landscape.

Filmmaker Jan Willem van Dam made a film in Georgia, following the Revolution of the Roses in 2003, on the borderline of fiction and documentary. The film is based on 'the life and dreams' of Nini Sardlishvili, a sixteen-year-old Georgian girl. Nini tells about her life and dreams, speaks with two elderly women about past and future and walks among the ruins of a huge, burnt-out Soviet archive. She plays herself in the film, just like the other protagonist, Domestic Intelligence agent Gocha Ovashvili. He travels across the country in response to a remarkable appeal by a Georgian minister (appearing in a newscast), to ask people if they are criminals. During this futile and absurd quest, he meets mainly aged Georgians, including a shepherd and two monks, and admires the scenery.

'The Pinto Edition' is a dark comedy in which a couple score a bargain camper van but get more than they bargained for. Made for the 48 hour film project Amsterdam by a fully professional crew, this amusing short has almost no dialog, a great score, strong acting by a small cast and was much awarded. Created by new creative partnership Elwin Bes and Jasper Klimbie.

When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there's only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken. Enjoy the ride.

Tobias used to be a successful cellist. Following heart failure in 1997, his life took a dramatic turn. He was pronounced clinically dead and brought back to life with jolts of electricity. He was in a coma for several weeks and, when he woke up, he turned out to be physically and mentally handicapped. In this way, at the age of 39, Tobias found himself in a wheelchair and was no longer able to talk as a result of his brain damage. From that moment on, playing the cello was a thing of the past.

In the Netherlands, there are more bicycles than people, and in the city of Utrecht, they are everywhere. But for filmmaker Ella Aafjes, they are also constantly disappearing. Despite the evolution of the bicycle over 200 years, Ella remains stuck in a primitive cycle of loss, unable to keep a bike for more than a few months. The film explores "The Circuit"; an urban ecosystem where stolen bikes are sold and resold in a never-ending loop, turning victims into unwitting participants. Through a nostalgic and humorous look back at her "bike history," Ella documents her escalating war with Utrecht’s bike thieves.

Short documentary about life at camp Westerbork, based on the diary of the journalist Philip Mechanicus, supplemented with images by Rudolf Breslauer. Comments from the historian Jacques Presser. Mechanicus' diary starts on Friday 28 May 1943 and ends on Monday 28 February 1944, five days before he is put on a transport to Auschwitz where he is murdered seven months later (12 October) by the Nazis.

Jacky (18) deceives her blind mother(48), claiming she's in the talent class for the Limburg Majorette Contest. Despite lacking all dance skills, she must now work hard to maintain this lie as the contest approaches…

Short film directed by Robin Peeters.

Martyrs of the Anthropocene by artist Timaeus (Tim van Hooft) questions the relationships between people and the natural world in the Anthropocene. A digitally rendered nature and the narrator regale a myth with novel heroes: lichen and trees. These protagonists are the non-human martyrs of our age, adorned as they are with minerals and crystals that are exploited as resources in a world dominated by humans.

Short by Erwin Olaf and Frans Franciscus