Discoveries from Netherlands World Cinema

Registration of the eight theatre program by the Dutch comedian Richard Groenendijk.

"If you can't come to Maastricht, we'll come to you," says Andre himself. "Come and enjoy the music on the big screen in the comfort of your local cinema." 2013 is shaping up to be Andre's most spectacular concert year yet - so don't miss out!

When anti-colonialist writer Anton de Kom returns to Suriname in 1933, he is brutally imprisoned. In jail, he finds a gateway to a mythological rainforest where he must find the inner strength to help his people by undergoing a life-threatening journey.

Melodrama about two brothers who are in love with the same woman.

An Homage to Tex Avery. Pixelation short from the Netherlands.

A man enters the elevator to go to his office late at night. An unidentified man asks him some multiple choice questions he'd better answer correctly.

Notorious documentary about pedophilia, composed around a performance of Bach's Hohe Messe by the North Holland Boys' Choir. Central are three pedophile men. One of them was a board member in youth and youth work for many years and thus came into contact with boys. Another portrays boys in Norway and the Netherlands and has a lot of success with his work. The fact that pedophilia is often misunderstood and tolerated less is shown by the story of the man who, after he told his environment of his or her nature, is absolutely no longer accepted. Actual sexual contact remains a rarity, but a visit to a performance of the Noord-Hollands Jongenskoor offers all three possibilities for the development of their feelings.

For two years the filmmakers followed Royal Antwerp FC closely, recording how the 'Great Old' fought its way back to the highest soccer league after more than 12 years. A film about hope and disillusionment, sadness and euphoria of a soccer club with a loyal and fanatical legion of supporters.

The circle of life. A mantis gets eaten by a frog, the frog is been swallowed by a stork while the stork itself is eaten by a crocodile before the crocodile gets shot by a hunter.

A documentary about Amsterdam's music and cultural venue Paradiso.

Every Sunday night, a small New York restaurant turns into a piece of Cuba. The tables are set aside to give way to a dance floor, which welcomes the immense fervor of Cuban exiles through the rumba.

A woman looks so profoundly through a raindrop that she experiences the impossibility of reality as a whole entity.

Rage against the machine: In a neighbourhood overtaken by gentrification, old contrasts with new. When a yuppie man can't unlock his electric bike, something snaps. Can he let go of his carefully crafted image?

On the seventh day, there was rest. Until... Harrie walked into paradise! And indeed, Harrie Vermeulen is back again! Once more with a wildly hilarious and uniquely funny comedy. As always, Harrie, with his reckless and frenzied way of doing things, keeps making the wrong decisions. Amidst fluttering butterflies, gracefully colored flowers, and babbling waterfalls, Harrie once again creates a colossal chaos. The fig leaves are too small, and that doesn't bode well for Harrie's ludicrous appearance in Paradise!

Father and son, Senior and Junior, try coming to terms with their war trauma by flatly denying reality in Flat Earth by Monique Verhoeckx. The character of Senior, played by Joris Smit, was inspired by the filmmaker’s grandfather who was a POW in one of the Japanese internment camps during WWII, where he was forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. He died from the effects a few years later. In this personal film, young veteran Senior lives on in a surreal monitoring space. On his monitors, he observes his now elderly Indonesian son Junior, and looks back in in time. When images from the war involuntarily return to him, Senior finds himself in contemporary Thailand while he re-experiences the war. Strong, contradictory emotions arise in him in relation to his son. Gradually, a hidden history is revealed.

An untamed explosion of sex and blood as a means of power in the relationship between man and woman, man and man.

From Spinoza's Ethica 82 sentences were selected without a strict coherence and re-assembled in seven components. Each component was filmed four times at least, in a different setting with different actors. Spinoza's sentences are taken as dialogues 'tout court', and not as a collection of opinions. Spinoza's style of philosophical thinking is presented as an activity in the first place, which is then revealed by each individual actor in his own way.

The King of the Waltz stages a spectacular anniversary concert in the Netherlands' most romantic city square. Hugely popular Dutch violinist and composer Andre Rieu regularly features alongside top rock and pop bands

Registration of the fifth theatre program by the Dutch comedy duo (Erik) van Muiswinkel and (Diederik) van Vleuten. Two old friends meet in a Dutch park.

Juuls mother is displaying a photo of her daughter as part of an exhibition. This leads to an argument.

The rise to stardom of former comedian Rob van Liempt, which came to a grinding halt during the '90s.

How would it be to suddenly loose consciousness? To loose control of your own body and life? That an attack is constantly on the prowl? Director Jef Monté knows how this feels as he developed epilepsy recently. In this documentary he follows a young woman who wants to live an independent life, but who is prevented from this because of her epilepsy. The film shows the struggle she must make to get control of her own life again.

In 2020, a rooster escapes in Békéscsaba, Hungary. For four years, the locals care for him as a beloved symbol of hope and unity – until his sudden, mysterious death shatters the community, replacing harmony with suspicion and division.

Recording of the Dutch musical. The story takes place in 1939, just before German troops invade Warsaw, on board the Nieuw Amsterdam, a ship of the Holland-America Line. The Jewish magician Benjamin Benjamins flees from the threat of Hitler's new regime. On the ship he meets stowaway Fanny Janssen. Benjamins helps Janssen to hide from the ship's crew, who know that there is a stowaway on board. Meanwhile, the news about the threat of World War II slowly seeps into the ship.

Habib tends his flock of sheep in a broad, rolling landscape, chain-smokes and every now and then catches a partridge. In the early 1980s he and his family had to flee as the Turkish army razed thousands of villages in the southeast of the country in an attempt to break Kurdish resistance. Habib has now returned to the village where he was born, and has started a new family, his first family having decided to stay in Istanbul.

The Russian model city Ж has been completely shielded from change and reality. A poetic film-essay, The Radiant Screen explores this Soviet utopia which is cloaked behind a smokescreen of plutonium waste. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has consciously – and unconsciously – remained closed.

La casa (ostinato crescendo) captures a series of stereotypical architectures used in mainstream horror cinema: from the abandoned house, to the imposing Victorian house, to the dollhouse. In the video, the outside images of houses seen from the outside, deprived of their direct filmic reference, are forced to show themselves as variations of the same element and reveal identical signs while the filmic element works towards the construction of a psychological tension and its unveiling.Formed by sequences of day/night, the video interplays features major elements like the camera angle and position, the sound, and the evocative power of the setting. The architectures buildings are ‘performing' like actors, evoking an imaginative narration beyond the ordinary.

Documentary about the political developments during the reign of Queen Wilhelmina (1898-1948).

One Note Symphony: Live In Tel Aviv sees the artist again in concert this time in collaboration with the 'Israel Philharmonic Orchestra'. On this occasion Alan said: Whenever I have the opportunity to play with a Symphony Orchestra, I always try to put into the setlist songs that we otherwise would not be able to perform live, such as the epic Silence and I from the album Eye In the Sky, for example. We also took this opportunity to play The Sorcerer's Apprentice from our latest studio album, The Secret. It is a new version of a well-known classic song written by the Frenchman Paul Dukas which originally appeared in the film Fantasia.

Rob takes a drag on a neighbor's crack pipe, his bills start piling up and one day, a letter arrives: his house is going to be repossessed. He packs a tent, gets on his bike and starts cycling.

The landscape in which we live has been around longer than we have. And it will still be there after our death. Not that the landscape always remains the same: every generation wipes out the traces of previous generations, and itself leaves new traces behind. This process has been followed for seven years with great detail, craftsmanship and without misplaced nostalgia on Super16 by Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. On the banks of the Netherrhine River, between the dike and the river itself, is a stretch of water meadow, Loowaard. In the derelict farmstead lives the last farmer who had cows here, there are remains of a brick factory that no longer has a function, and in the ground, remains have been found of an old Roman encampment. Until recently, the march of progress apparently had left this piece of land untouched. But now the meadows have to make way for the development of new nature.

When Lucien runs over a man with his tractor, he starts taking care for him. Despite his strange behaviour, the man seems to bring some sort of joy into Lucien and Martha's flattened marriage.

'FRANKIE15' tells the story about meaningful friendship, exploring sexuality and being young in Brussels. Frankie wants to lose her virginity before she turns 16, convinced of feeling more grown-up afterwards.

Xeno, Christine, and Bivak spend their days and nights together in dimly lit rooms cast in the glow of shadows by their computer monitors. The subculture of LAN Parties, IM'ing and hacking confuse Xeno's parents as to why their son spends so much time behind the screen with his friends. The friends rally around Christine as it is discovered she has cancer. Christine's cancer goes into remission as the friends make a pact one night at a LAN Party. Convinced she'll be the first to go, Christine and the others make a promise that whoever dies first in the group will have the others place a webcam in their coffin so the world can watch their corpse.

Paul & The Dragon is a short animated film about a nine-year old who is diagnosed with cancer. His doctor explains him that the cancer is like a dragon in his body that needs to be faught. As a true hero, Paultje, fights the dragon and wins. The film is for children with cancer and their parents. The movie gives support to the children and their parents in their battle with the disease. The film portrays children with cancer as a heros, whom have to battle an evil dragon that lives inside of them. In this exciting humorous metaphor, children can also learn about what kind of problems and issues can arise when a child has cancer. This visual representation of cancer may also help alleviate the fears a child may have, and help talk about what is going on inside their bodies.

Experimental short film in which 16 video clips are combined.

A personal animated story about being raised by two mothers.

Exelixis is a project that started with the exploration of evolution and its comparison with the biological phenomena in the fictional worlds of Pokémon and Digimon.

48-year-old former snowboarder Bibian Mentel has been living with cancer for 21 years, received the bad news no less than fourteen times that the cancer was back. The result: one leg amputation, five lung operations, three neck operations, four back operations and 74 radiation treatments. In March 2019 she ended up in a wheelchair due to one of the back operations. Despite all the operations and radiation treatments, there are still numerous metastases in her body. Although the situation seems worrying and hopeless, Bibian and her family refuse to let that rotten disease determine everything. Documentary maker Jesse Bleekemolen (22 years old) followed Bibian for a year with a very intimate portrait as a result of fighting spirit and her dance with death.

Harrie Vermeulen (Jon van Eerd) finds himself in a roaring and hilarious whirlwind of chocolate bonbons, barely managing to stay upright amidst the cocoa and swirling powdered sugar. The factory where Harrie Vermeulen works is in a sorry state. But there's good news. If Harrie manages to produce 7,000 boxes of bonbons by six o'clock that evening, a Russian delegation is willing to save the business. Harrie gives it his all, squeezing out one bonbon after another with squeaking and creaking gears. But will he succeed? The machines are heavily outdated and often stop more than they run. In a hysterical whirlpool of confectionery chaos, the most impossible situations arise one after another, ensuring the uproarious laughter that has become so familiar in Jon van Eerd's theaters. You'll never be able to eat a bonbon without a smile again.

Directors Willem and Tofik take a closer look at their own experiences and engage in conversation with other gays about their position in the gay scene. Where one consciously distances himself from strict expectations, the other seems to be losing out. Acting Straight exposes an uncomfortable truth. Pride may be their motto, but the fear of not being masculine enough has gripped many gays.

A documentary on the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Made by Istituto Luce, there is an understandable focus on Italian athletes, but it is the first Olympic documentary that describes the techniques of certain events.

The Year is 2012. Bin Laden is a political refugee in Brussels. Somehow, helped by the criminal underworld he becomes President of Europe. Europe, the new dictatorship, is an awful place of high security and closed borders . When the Afterman hears about the upcoming revolution, he returns from Russia to his fatherland. He accidentally joins a group of Lesbian freedom fighters.