Discoveries from Netherlands World Cinema

In true hard-boiled detective style, a rooster tries to find the thief of the egg that was stolen from his chicken. Soon all traces point towards the farmer. But before the egg can be saved from becoming hard-boiled itself, the rooster and his chicken have to fight the farmer's cat for it. Spectacular action, including a fight, a chase, and the birth of a new chicken.

Four cows think they're being blamed for the climate crisis, so they each react in their own way, leading to arguments and panic.

In this film, residents, workers in the metallurgical industry, peasants and Mapuches, talk about their expectations and their criticisms of the revolutionary process, reflecting in their comments and opinions the tensions that the country was suffering at this historical moment, a few months before the dramatic events of September 11, 1973.

Ariadne, a theatre actress, is seemingly trapped inside a room. Once she lets go, the room starts shifting.

The story of Anna Anderson who thought that she was Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar. This film is about memory, the nature of identity and a life remembered but not lived.

As a boy, Jamal was kidnapped from a rural area of Sudan to fight in a war he did not want anything to do with. A fight against his own people, which eventually took his leg and his freedom. While working on a prosthesis with filmmaker Pitou Schütz, Jamal explains how losing a leg brought him to the Netherlands. This results in a story, partly visualised through animation, about his flight from brute violence and his search for a new future.

An information film about the group of maritime patrol aircraft with the Lockheed P-3C Orion.

The tides in the Wadden Sea follow the rhythm of the moon, and the boat adjusts its course accordingly. The seagull follows the rhythm of man – it has become dependent on the fish waste that the fisherman leaves behind during the week, and on the weekends, when the fisherman is watching football, hunger threatens. Seagulls Scream on the Weekend provides an insight into the intertwined rhythms of the Wadden Sea region, and examines the relationship between boat, man and seagull.

Two men are working in a control room, managing a volcano. With all their buttons and panels they give the impression they manage these natural forces.

A short film that tells the story of the Polish Dawid, a homosexual guy who lives in a now former LGBT-free zone. He loves his city and has basically everything his heart desires. However, he is intimidated and threatened on a daily basis. And he's not the only one. Queer rights are being violated in Poland. How is it possible that these zones exist and how do you survive as a queer person in such a place?

Semaphore is a cinematographic installation that emphasizes a subdued and meditative state by submerging the audience in a world of pulsating and shifting shapes. The work is created from two basic compositional premises; pulse and feedback. The backbone of the composition is a stream of visual and sonic pulses, leaving its intervals to be explored and brought to life by a feedback generating a network, consisting of envelopes, gates, compressors, and masks. The intertwining layers provide the experience of an elaborate audiovisual time-space-continuum. Running almost entirely without input from the outside world, the system becomes a magnifier of its own rudimentary functions and algorithms.

Tragicomic documentary where director Hans Heijnen searches for the Dutch emigrant in foreign parts. The film focuses on a Southern-Limburg clan in California and shows how this small group stays loyal to the Dutch-Limburg traditions and habits. In the spirit of the long-gone 50s the emigrants visit the church every Sunday and arrange a weekly night of cards. Many things they are attached to do not exist in America, and tragically also not anymore in the country they left behind.

Almost ten years after Zeitung, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and the musician Alain Franco started off with those same building blocks to create Zeitigung. Against the backdrop of a changing world, and channeled through the bodies of eight young dancers, Franco and De Keersmaeker offer an updated version of their own earlier work. As a part of their strategy they invited the young choreographer and dancer Louis Nam Le Van Ho to confront his own writing with De Keersmaeker’s choreography; his contribution builds a bridge to a new generation of creators and choreographers, providing a different perspective on De Keersmaeker’s and Franco’s ongoing examination of the essence of dance and composition. Franco joins Rosas’s dancers on stage, performing the piece live on the piano. In a broad historical gesture, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schönberg, and Anton Webern stretches across the geometric principles and improvised sections of the choreography.

A 35mm found-footage hand-manipulated collage film focusing on the depiction of fear and revenge seen in commercial cinema. Manipulating our fear of mortality, it suggests we decimate what threatens us. The surface of the film material has been treated the same way: peeling, scalping, cutting and burning the images.

Short animated film about Blanca, who tries to fathom art. When a painting makes her laugh out loud, her father reprimands her: "It is not funny, it is Art", he says. Blanca feels it is quite complicated. So when is something art? How do you have to look at it? And is it allowed to touch art, for example? When she fails to figure it out, she decides to imitate museum visitors. With great consequences.

From memory, Gijzen draws the outlines of Italy on a sheet of paper. He places the capital within the boundaries, but still, something is amiss… In the second work, he plants a place-name sign in a city. These two works are part of Gijzen's quest for the relationship between public space and names. Are names decisive for spaces? Do they define a space? And if so, what happens if you exchange one name for another? With these works, Gijzen also undermines the claim to truthfulness of the TV/video image. (li-ma.nl)

Portrait of architect Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999). Van Eyck is the son of poet and journalist Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck. He talks about his childhood in London, his studies in architecture at the technical college in the Netherlands, and his philosophy regarding architecture and visual arts, in which the pursuit of harmony is paramount.

An edited play in which dark-skinned friends George and Eran, together with light-skinned singing duo Nordgrond, explore the (im)possibility of doing the ‘right’ thing, because there is always someone who feels offended, discriminated against, or treated unfairly. What is the state of racism in the Netherlands, and how can we engage in conversation about it? In the 2018 performance, George Elias Tobal and Eran Ben-Michaël, together with Myrthe Huber and Milan Sekeris from Nordgrond, make this major theme understandable and relatable by playing with the underlying mechanisms that everyone recognizes. Stimulating, provocative, and uncomfortable, full of humor and music.

A short film about butterflies that are irreverently pinned for display. Meanwhile, a diverse group of women speak up about their complicated relationship with beauty, as if they are suffering a similar fate. A mixed media animation made with paint and other analog techniques.

In this documentary, a filmmaker travels back to his native soil. The personal film deconstructs the caricature of the former, all-Dutch fishing village of Bunschoten-Spakenburg and at the same time illustrates in which ways this secluded community influences the identity of modern youngsters.

The documentary shows the rise of industry around the Eindhoven Canal, with personal stories from former employees. It also adresses the contaminated soil and the municipal restructuring, as well as the experiences of current residents and business owners.

A social-media based film intervention, made up of 6 short videos, meant to be looped to infinity.

Q-LoXXX: A Cannibal Myth is a performance-to-video piece enacting a collaboratively written creation myth. A volcanic island where all earthly species (extinct, endangered, and present) exist in a state of continuous mutation and becoming, Q-LoXXX is threatened by rigid and contaminated external forces, prompting its inhabitants to enact a cannibal sacrifice to restore the land’s cyclical and ever-changing nature. The project connects Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with queer resistance experiences and theory, breaking through static subjectivities and fixed identities. Developed through a long process closely involving a group of queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants, the project attempts to create an experimental utopian space and document the community’s process of world-making.

LAVABO HOLOCAUST opens in the jungle. Professor Giuliano Borsato (Martijn Jansen) and his assistant Sofia Barboni (Nana Hilarius) make their way through the – rather Dutch-looking – vegetation. Barsato has barely explained that they are searching for the secret of eternal youth when he is attacked by a zombie: "Damn, that hurts! Can you bandage me up?" In "28 Giorni Doppo," police inspector Gianfranco Girolami (Simon Alderliesten) and his eternal enemy Pupo Rigate (Dirk Jan Hendriks), a reporter for the Lavabo Gazette, are confronted with the consequences. The irascible inspector ("Nobody calls me a failed Baantjer!") witnesses the mysterious death of the brother of the recently disappeared professor during an occult séance. Elsewhere in the city, a masked man is tearing the entrails out of young women.

a character plays around with objects

When job-seekers Bas and Simone arrive at a strange office building to apply for a senior management position, they end up in a game set up by recruiter Ruben, who assigns them increasingly bizarre tasks they are morally and emotionally unprepared for.

A farewell to a tree is not too different from a good-bye to a human. The healthy elm needs to make space for a bridge in an urban park in Amsterdam. As the space transforms, different scientists reflect on their work with trees and green life: a space ecologist, an urban tree consultant and a dendrochronologist show their field of work in a poetic quest about what trees really are to us.

A short film inspired by Torborg Nedreaas’ Nothing grows by moonlight. Like the character in Nothing grows by moonlight, the protagonist of the film deals with issues such as departure, arrival, home, identity and solitude... following a 7-year-old lucid dream... transforming from the cityman to the caveman, taking refuge in the nature... becoming the perfect observer of the light... the watchman... the giant with hundred eyes...

Throughout 2024, as the conflict in Ukraine drags on, the leadership of European countries has been increasingly warning their citizens about a looming war with Russia—this time on EU territory. Even timelines are being mentioned: anywhere from two to eight years. But what lies behind these alarming statements? Is it a calculated effort to remind Europeans of the importance of supporting Kyiv? Or is the prospect of a war between Russia and the West truly real? If a large-scale war is destined to begin, then where, how, and why might it erupt? Lithuania, Finland, Poland, Estonia—journalists from Dozhd traveled across the European countries neighboring Russia to ask local politicians, experts, and military personnel the tough questions. They also sought to capture the sentiments of residents in these border regions, people who may be standing on the edge of catastrophe.

Four elderly LGBTQ+ individuals come together in a bright pink space. In this space, which is as much a living room as it is an archive, they share their life stories with each other. The short film is a hopeful, imaginative documentary about reclaiming spaces where the identity of older LGBTQ+ individuals is not accepted.

In the summer of 2023, the villagers of Beesel, Limburg are preparing for the Dragon Slaying event: an enormous spectacle that takes place once every seven years. This time, the malicious dragon symbolises a creation of the rulers to keep the people in their place. This documentary shows in practice how a village community, while visualising this metaphorical tale about good and evil, addresses thorny current social issues. How can we stay connected?

A documentary following the life of Herman ten Kate, a man who had a severe stroke 7 years ago and who has shown unparalleled determination to adapt to his new life. Once an accomplished mathematician, painter and lecturer, he is now limited by both his body and his mind. This film shows how his family have provided a backbone for him to live his life to the fullest, and how the worst situations can still provide a life of hope and positivity.

A stubborn former fisherman lives on his boat in a Dutch harbour, clinging to his old way of life as change, time, and his own limitations begin to catch up with him.

A short poetic film portraying a young Black woman’s quest for intimacy in a world where the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the political and the personal, the past and the present, become ever blurrier. The short film is an Afro-surrealistic reverie, poetically re-imagining our contemporary conceptions of relationships with the self and with imagined communities through a questioning of historically and culturally imposed views on Black people’s intimate lives in the diaspora.

Hole is the Bubble i Blew is a hybrid-documentary combining video, generative animation and composite imagery. It is a choral history of shared intimacy where days and nights loop as an apartment window emerges from a burning tunnel; from this window a small group of people share stories of platonic and erotic love through space and time that separate like oil on the surface of water. "Movements pulse into the void, actions become sentient, consequences wait for the morning that will never be."

Our alien overlords are not as competent as we thought.

Nationalistic news coverage of Queen Wilhelmina's return to the Netherlands after World War II (March - May 1945). With footage of her crossing the Dutch border at the village of Eede and visits to the western parts of the country: Aardenburg, Oostburg, IJzendijke, Middelburg Walcheren, Serooskerken to Oostkapelle, North Brabant (den Bosch), Eindhoven, Maastrich, Heerlen, and arrival at The Hague. She is welcomed by enthusiastic crowds everywhere.

As a forensic investigator at the Rotterdam Police, Natascha searches for evidence left by perpetrators at crime scenes. Natascha wants to be able to provide answers to the loved ones, despite the intense nature of her work. She witnesses gruesome things, which she tries to cope with in her free time by fully immersing herself in her model-building hobby. However, even in her hobby, her work resurfaces. Is creating miniature crime scenes her way of processing everything she sees in her job?