Leo Bankersen has been writing about film since Chinatown and Night of the Living Dead. Reviewed as a freelance film journalist for the GPD for a long time. Is now, among other things, one of the regular contributors to De Filmkrant. Likes to break a lance for children's films, documentaries and films from non-Western countries. Other specialities: digital issues and film education.
The feature-length French animated film is on the rise. To emphasise this, Michel Ocelot, one of the pacesetters, has been invited as guest of honour by the Cinekid children's film festival. Tonight, he was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award, which he accepted with a modest protest. As an animation filmmaker, Michel Ocelot (1943) still considers himself an adolescent with much to discover.
The big question was how many of those seven Golden Calf nominations Plan C would manage to cash in. To everyone's surprise, this petty crime comedy that attracted less than 7,000 visitors in cinemas had garnered even more nominations than
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. Magnesium again. The Tuschinski Award for best graduation film, this...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As the internet becomes increasingly synonymous with big companies like Facebook for many people, the old ideal of an open and free world net is starting to fade.
Next year, the Netherlands Film Festival will have to face extensive budget cuts. Therefore, let's enjoy this year extra, was the recommendation with which festival director Willemien van Aalst closed the press conference presenting the programme of the 32nd Netherlands Film Festival this afternoon. Precisely in this time of economic headwind, the festival has chosen this year's The Promise
EYE is pulling out all the stops. This year, the final exam papers of the students of the Netherlands Film and Television Academy will get an ideal presentation in the largest auditorium of this new film centre. What is also new is that yesterday, immediately following the screening for press and relations, awards were handed out for best commercial (The End, Soon), best documentary (A Twist in...
Does live accompaniment with choir and orchestra make Kubrick's 2001 a different or better film? Not necessarily, but as an homage and event, it is a wonderful gesture. Even on the hard bucket seats in the Gashouder, it is once again a breathtaking experience. Last night, at the Gashouder on Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek grounds, finally revisiting Kubrick's science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. This...
Hear Vera Lynn sing as the atomic bombs explode in Dr Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick did wondrous things with the music in his films. Rightly so, the Holland Festival is making space for a special screening of 2001 with orchestra. Space ships to Strauss' waltzes, prelude to a Kubrick summer. Much has been written and speculated about the films of Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999),...
Tonight the queen may officially open the new home of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, last night director Sandra den Hamer did it herself in advance at an opening party for relations. In doing so, she spoke of a historic moment for film culture in the Netherlands. Seen from a distance, the building, conveniently referred to as "the new film museum", is most reminiscent of a...
Last night the awards for best short films were presented at festival Go Short in Nijmegen. Winner of the Dutch competition is Woensdagen by Aaron Rookus, a small feature film that approaches the heavily charged subject of sexual abuse in the most subtle way. What begins as an emotionally stunningly well-struck impression of eight-year-old Kris' weekly outing...
In the short Dutch film Ceci n'est pas un rêve, which premiered at the festival Go Short (Nijmegen, 14-18 March), the cityscape of Paris slowly transforms into a dreamscape. You could call it a surrealist documentary, in which filmmaker Amos Mulder has incorporated influences from early German film pioneer Walter Ruttmann as well as modern computer animation. With further...
You can hardly claim it was a surprise result, because for weeks - what shall I say, months - The Artist had been mentioned as a surefire Oscar favourite. Still, the crowning of this largely silent French black-and-white film that pays tribute to the end of the silent film era in Hollywood is proof that originality still counts in...
Towards the end of this Berlinale, it could be heard in the corridors that the Danish costume piece A Royal Affair about a nipped-in revolution was surely going to win the Golden Bear. However, the jury did not care about that and designated Caesar Must Die by the Taviani brothers as the best film. The jury chaired by...
Dutch film Hemel was chosen as best film in the Forum section for young cinema by the jury of international critics at the Berlin festival. This is a fine success for director Sacha Polak who delivers her first feature-length film with this drama about a young woman who has lost her way in search of love. Heaven, after a...
Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows...
Can a filmmaker born and raised in West Germany strike just the right tone in a film set in the former East Germany? I hadn't given this question much thought, but the Berliner Zeitung raised it in response to Christian Petzold's Barbara, about a Berlin paediatrician who, after requesting to go to the West,...
Timo Vuorensola has done it to him. Perhaps reading the name of this Finnish director and music video maker does not light up a light yet, but then you do not belong to the extensive internet fan club that has been closely following the genesis of the potential cult hit Iron Sky for several years. Its world premiere at the Berlin festival is now the...
The 62nd Berlinale opened tonight with Benoït Jacquot's Les adieux à la reine, a French costume piece that does not play by the rules. The dresses worn by Queen Marie Antoinette's servants get dirty and one of the main characters stumbles in her haste and passes out twice. As the film begins we write 14 July 1789, and the...
Smiling, she lets a boy film her with his mobile phone and she happily wriggles into lascivious curves in the process. But when he really wants to see her breasts she flinches. Yet later she will go much, much further and she gets staggeringly little in return. Jasna, the rebellious protagonist from Cliff (Clip), is a Serbian teen...
That Martin Scorsese's mesmerising Hugo was number one in the audience rating for a while at the Rotterdam festival is not so surprising. What is surprising, however, is the film that emerged as number two yesterday and has now ousted Hugo from first place: the documentary Back to the Square in which filmmaker Petr Lom looks at how things stand in Egypt after the...
Last night, Rotterdam festival-goers in Pathé's Hall 4 witnessed a small miracle. Some film fragments from 1906 by the legendary Georges Méliès were now shown in stereoscopic 3D for the first time. So that you could, as it were, imagine yourself present on the set of this French pioneer who was the first to understand that cinema is not there...
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