Netherlands Film Festival: documentaries that make you look with new eyes

Bloody and hard to burn out of your memory are the police photographs Walter Stokman has incorporated into Scena del crimine about Naples and the mafia. What makes those images so unforgettable is not only the horror, but also the unreality attached to them. Razor-sharp, brightly lit, as if it was all staged. As if that girl in the immaculate white outfit just lay there for a moment on the ground. But really, she is dead.

Illustrating a burning issue with informative pictures and a catchy interview to go with it - there are plenty of such documentaries. But a film that makes you look at reality with new eyes, so to speak, is rarer. Scena del crimine, previously selected for the Venice festival, is one such film. Not a journalistic report, but seven sharply struck, tellingly photographed scenes that reveal the everyday dealings with life and death in the everywhere palpable shadow of crime.

This weekend, two more documentaries premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival that have a go. In the much-publicised The lie Robert Oey reconstructs the political drama surrounding Rita Verdonk's attempt to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her Dutch citizenship in 2006, which eventually led to the fall of the cabinet. Eye-catching is the startling addition of sung interludes, which included Rita Verdonk, Hilbrand Nawijn and Femke Halsema. Such unexpectedness is exactly what is needed to see such a heated news event as a tragedy of human inability. Pity only that The lie nevertheless became an unbalanced film, which at many other moments loses itself in details and ramblings that probably only the political incrowd can get excited about.

Better we hit it off with All My Tomorrows by Sonia Herman Dolz. Cancer research is the subject, and as boring as that sounds, the associative panorama Herman Dolz unfolds for us is impressive and even poetic. Brilliant is the idea of taking as an overture a simple black-and-white film in which a roughly eight-year-old boy at school gives a talk about cancer. Watching the mysterious machinery of life, the scientists too are children.