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NFF 2012 - Jos Stellings The Girl and Death enchants Golden Calf jury

The big question was how many of those seven Golden Calf nominations Plan C would manage to cash in. To everyone's surprise, this little crime comedy that attracted less than 7,000 visitors in cinemas had won even more nominations than The Heineken Kidnapping. That says something about the surprise effect of Plan C, made with great enthusiasm and without a Film Fund contribution. And perhaps also something about the rather limited competition from quality films this year for ...

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Art: alternative to mistrust and violence in Guatemala. #vvu

Theatre-maker Anouk de Bruijn (32) has been to Guatemala seven times since 1999. For the Treaty of Utrecht, she entered into an exchange project with the Guatemalan group Caja Lúdica. Together, they are committed to giving people a positive experience through art. Their project 'Hidden War' is about the lives of young people in Guatemala. 

Netherlands closes a special embassy

This week, the curtain officially fell on Theatre Emabassy, a club of inspired people who had Dutch artists collaborate with artists in developing countries such as Honduras, Bhutan and Congo. The performances that resulted were only sporadically seen in the Netherlands, but every now and then a project made a broad impression here too, such as 'Op Hoop van Zegen', played by real fishermen, but from Mali.

It was one of the first of the many funeral ceremonies on Wednesday (October 3),...

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Ed Spanjaard unleashes primal forces in Götterdämmerung Reisopera

The final applause after the premiere of Götterdämmerung stormy, is an understatement. It seemed as if the completely sold-out auditorium wanted to surpass the primal forces extracted from the Gelders Orkest by Ed Spanjaard. History was made here: on stage, by the soloists and choir, in the orchestra pit and behind the scenes, for six hours and 20 minutes.

NFF 2012 - All student awards go to the Film Academy

The Film Academy can be satisfied. The two juries that handed out the three student awards at the Netherlands Film Festival on Monday night had also looked at graduation work from other Dutch academies with a film section. But in the end, all the lucky ones were students of the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, as the Amsterdam programme is called in full. Katja Römer Schuurman in The Club of Ugly Children (photo...... 

NFF - 'The rules of Matthijs' mandatory curriculum for emergency workers

The crop of feature-length documentaries screened at the Netherlands Film Festival is good. They are extraordinary stories, sometimes startling, sometimes penetrating, sometimes fodder for much discussion, and almost all very beautifully filmed. We wish the jury much wisdom. The nominated documentary 'The Rules of Matthijs' is interesting for everyone, but should be compulsory reading for social workers,... 

'I am here': talking about the now during film class with the ISK #vvu

Documentary filmmaker Femke Stroomer and Sanne Sprenger will make two films in the coming year with two classes of the International Switching Class (ISK) under the title I am here. Part two of a report on this Treaty of Utrecht Community Arts Project.

The footballing boys in the schoolyard do not shout "come on with that ball!", but with heavy accent "can I have a loaf of bread from you? The whole team doubles over that exclamation. At the Internationale Schakelklassen in Utrecht, Dutch is n...

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Milestone in sight

We never actually pat ourselves on the back, but so once every few years it is allowed. For instance, when you are 'top story' within an hour on the global twitter story website 'storify.com'. Of course, we often have a sudden surge in visitors, and certainly last September was a top month with 15000 visitors, but something like this, more than 500 visitors in not even an hour.... 

NFF 2012 - Robert Oey impresses again with Negotiated

Every night at the Netherlands Film Festival there is an important premiere, and on Sunday it was Robert Oey's new documentary, about messengers and survivors. Killed shows a side of our military mission in Afghanistan that has received little coverage. 25 Dutch soldiers died there. The film is in a way a tribute to them, but... 

NFF 2012: premiere of George Sluizer's unfinished Dark Blood

Perhaps expectations were simply too high at the premiere of George Sluizer's 19-year-old, and now completed Dark Blood. Because, of course, it is entirely appropriate that the Netherlands Film Festival has taken the opportunity for a fine retrospective of Sluizer, one of the Netherlands' most distinguished filmmakers with the world as its purview. Maker of the blood-curdling... 

#NFF Opening film Nono sings away from dull realism

What a festive opening film it was! The Dutch Film Festival's choice of Nono, the zigzag child had of course to do with the fact that Dutch family films will be specially put in the festival spotlight this year. But even apart from that theme, it was an unmissable kick-off. Because we may like to grumble that the weather was not... 

'Collective copyright abuse is global problem'

A while back, there was fuss in the Netherlands about the BUMA, the club that collects copyrights for musicians and publishers. Money had been lost in speculation and a director was engaging in nepotism. These cases do not appear to be isolated. At least, they are also mentioned in an overview of all known cases of abuse of power and corruption at collecting societies worldwide.

From Ghana and Nigeria to Brazil, China and, indeed, the Netherlands and France: it ...

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Archives Wim Kan and Louis Davids not in dumpster

The Theatre Museum's entire collection has been saved. The archives of such luminaries as Wim Kan and Louis Davids, as well as 50,000 theatre reviews, 30,000 theatre posters, 146,000 photographs of 22,000 performances, 26,000 portrait photographs of 2,450 theatre-makers and an extensive audio and video collection will be housed at the University of Amsterdam.The move is possible now that the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), with its ever-money-hungry outgoing State Secretary for Culture Halbe Zijlstra, has not ...

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Götterdämmerung marks end and new beginning Reisopera

It is the first mass scene in Wagner's Ring: Siegfried leads Brünnhilde to the Gibichungenburg and Hagen summons all his men. From the side stage there is literally a deafening blare of horns, but conductor Ed Spanjaard lets it play on. And rightly so: the orchestra has a spark. The whole stage is filled in an instant and the choir swells in strength, louder and louder, ever louder, until the ecstatic apotheosis:

Gross Glück und Heil lacht nun dem Rhein

While the choir of...

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VARA honours Barbara Strozzi, tone poet at lonely level

No fewer than eight collections of arias, cantatas, duets and sacred works were published by Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). She enjoyed great prestige in the Accademia degli unisoni founded by her father, and lived off her compositions. Exceptional at a time when women were expected to become nuns or wives. From 1 to 5 October, her music will be heard daily in VARA's Composer of the Week programme on Radio 4, between 19.30 and 20.00.

Unfortunately, the cliché that whole vo...

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'Pearls' at the Leiden Cloth Hall is a boundless experience

'Pearls' is an exhibition with the limitlessness, fantasy and dreamlike vistas that come with a fairy tale. Associations with the pearl roll in all directions. Those who wander around in 'Pearls' forget for a moment everything to do with sober everyday reality. Pearls appear everywhere. The works of art accompanying this exhibition are scattered among the fixed... 

Gergiev Festival full of Sunday afternoon music

What could be the matter with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival - the official name to emphasise its international appeal anyway? As soon as you enter concert hall de Doelen, you immediately get the feeling that you have arrived at an ordinary, weekday concert, even though Valeri Gergiev is on the posters. No decoration of the large rooms... 

Artists paint artists in 'We, the Artists'

Unruly Gallery, a tiny underground art gallery on Amsterdam's Cliffordstraat, presents the group exhibition We, the Artists. Featuring portraits of artists created by other artists. How self-referential do you want it to be? Very worthwhile nonetheless. Unruly Gallery is one of the few artist-run galleries in Amsterdam with a refreshing do-it-yourself attitude. The gallery was set up by Niels Meulman and Adele... 

Culture Council knew about 'Hole of DUS'

Theatre company the Utrecht Games, city company of the Netherlands' fourth largest city, is on the brink of bankruptcy. It was recently revealed that the company led by artistic and business director Jos Thie has a deficit of €2.1 million. Correspondence that has since surfaced shows that it was already clear in May this year that problems were getting out of hand. That was a month after the Utrecht subsidy advisory committee issued its laudatory opinion, and a few weeks before the Council for Culture issued its very thrifty advice.

Magnesium by Sam de Jong best graduation film Film Academy (according to Dutch film press)

It is now official. Magnesium, with which Sam de Jong graduated as director from the Film Academy, was already praised in several publications earlier this year. So it did not come as a complete surprise that yesterday afternoon, during the drinks on the roof terrace of the Film Academy, the Kring van Nederlandse Filmjournalisten announced that Magnesium declared itself winner of the KNF Prize for best... 

Drama awards party in year of gloom

It had to be a party, because there has been enough shouting and complaining and it doesn't help anything anyway. After a year in which the theatre sector in particular felt the hard hand of Mark Ruttes happy crisis policy, awards had to be handed out again. So the already not-so-huge crème de la crème of the Dutch theatre world gathered again for the gala at Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg. It was a valiant attempt at optimism, while in the corridors it was also briefly revealed again that it was no ko...

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Der Schatzgräber II: Van Hove exposes core and weaknesses

"That fairytale world has never been my world," director Ivo van Hove declared before the premiere of Schreker's fairytale opera Der Schatzgräber. Remarkable, as Van Hove and his regular scenographer Jan Versweyveld were previously responsible at De Nederlandse Opera for Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Janáček's The Makropulos Case - also fairy tales rather than grand dramatic works.

Tchaikovsky's last opera is all about Princess Iolanta. Everyone knows she is blind, but keeps...

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Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Der Schatzgräber I: blistering music, freezing dry staging

The Netherlands Opera opens the season with a rarely performed opera by Franz Schreker, in which pagan and Christian themes intermingle. The gorgeous music is countered by the chilly direction, preventing identification with the characters.

At the end of the nearly three-hour Schatzgräber, the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and chief conductor Marc Albrecht were clapping the loudest at the Muziektheater last night. At his instigation, De Nederlandse Opera pulled out...

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VVD gets it right: theatre closed for two days

Quite a few VVD people were angry with us, because last year we caught the Rotterdam alderman for culture in a silly trick: she claimed that cultural institutions did not have to open during the week at all, because hardworking people only had time for art in the weekend anyway. In doing so, she flattened out schools, tourists, old people and part-time workers from the possibility of enjoying art on their own time, and thus also closed off the possibility of art institutions to open on a n...

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