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The trans-drama Girl, Belgium's Oscar entry, is on a veritable victory lap. Filmmaker Lukas Dhont on the struggles of trans girl Lara, who is mostly an ordinary adolescent. On his personal struggle with stereotypes, and on his love of dance. "A place on the Oscar shortlist would already be very nice," he says.
The female composer, she continues to stir minds. My article following Mathilde Wantenaar's world premiere of Damocles unleashed a fierce discussion on Facebook. 'Why should women be given preferential treatment?" an angry man asked. 'All that matters to me is quality, not whether a piece of music was written by a man or a woman.' He got icky about the m/f discussion, which...
It is also never good or bad: the female composer is either ignored or arouses jealousy when her music is performed. For years, I felt my fingers calloused and talked my head off to put women composers on the map. I invariably came up against a wall of...
Until now, film education has mostly been a grab bag of initiatives. But now that the minister mentions it in her policy plan and extra money has been allocated, new steps can be taken. Towards a permanent place in the classroom? We ask Florine Wiebenga, head of education Eye, and Jeroen Stultiens, Film Teacher of the Year.
Dutch composer Jan van de Putte (b. 1959) invariably crosses the boundaries of music. Hesitant starts, silence, wide gestures and explorations of our subconscious are as natural in his score as resounding tones. Last autumn, he published his four-part song cycle set to poetry by Pessoa, in which he aptly stammers the Portuguese poet. On 8 November, his latest composition, Cette...
The theme of Puccini's 1900 opera Tosca is of all times. A cocktail of passionate love, political rebellion, lust and betrayal is centred around the person of Floria Tosca. Director Harry Fehr presents this story as a reality soap, with implicit commentary on our selfie culture. A nice find, but it is questionable whether it can bring the drama to life...
After years, my harping on the invisibility of female composers is starting to bear fruit. Thanks in part to the #MeToo movement, composing ladies are also finally being taken seriously and performed. The NTRZaturdayMatinee is even making them a spearhead of its programming this season. This post is more than a year old, and so may have been overtaken by time by now.Last Saturday, we sounded...
His parents worked in an institution for mentally handicapped people, so Jaap Robben spent many an hour as a child putting curlers into boxes. It formed the seed for his novel Zomervacht. 'I wanted to write an exciting book with a disabled person as one of the main characters, because you hardly ever read about that world.' Four years after his highly successful...
The chances of being helped in a museum by someone standing there unpaid, purely for her fun, have increased considerably in recent years. This is especially true for museum shops, museum cafés and cloakrooms - in short, anything related to commercial activities and operations. This is evident from a closer examination of the rather jubilant 2017 figures, which the Museum Association...
Three black men wash up on a small island. This threatens to throw a spanner in the works of the residents and their economic plans. So everyone prefers to pretend that nothing has happened. Archipelago of the Dog, Philippe Claudel's new novel, is a haunting book with lightness peeking through at times. The French bestselling author worries: 'Once, nuclear weapons constituted...
Dutch film's market share threatens to be dramatically low for 2018. At the NFF conference, Film Distributors Netherlands presents the plan to create a think tank to turn the tide.
On 3 October, the opera Harriet by Hilda Paredes will premiere, dedicated to legendary African-American freedom fighter Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913). In the mid-19th century, she escaped from a slave existence, after which she risked her life to free many peers via the so-called Underground Railroad. After years of wrangling, the US Department of the Treasury decided in September 2018 to take Tubman's effigy and...
Jan van de Putte (1959) dedicated four compositions to the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. The complete cycle appeared last autumn on the double CD Bamboleamos no mundo ('we waddle through the world'). The composer strikes at the heart of Pessoa's elusive texts with equally meaningful music. Van de Putte is one of the most original voices in the Dutch musical landscape and defies...
Small-scale film festival Film by the Sea specialises in book adaptations. It celebrates its 20th edition with an award for Sophia Loren and a Bergman retrospective. Artistic director feels it is now time for rejuvenation and is handing over the baton.
Accompanied by Asko|Schönberg, Katja Herbers sings parts from Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Reinbert's adaptation of classics by Schubert and Schumann. The poignant lyrics get a witty twist in the last song. In 'Röslein auf der Heiden', the 'victim' is not the fragile little flower from the original but Reinbert himself. "Und der wilde Knabe brach Reinbert auf der Heiden; Reinbert wehrte...
Robert Beck, the protagonist of Benedict Wells' debut novel Becks last summer, hopes, as a near-forty-year-old, to make his dream come true after all: a career in music. Wells (34) knows what it is to go all out to pursue your dream. He turned a difficult childhood into literature, and he became damn successful at it. Over the past...
Voted best VR experience in Venice, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang's Chalkroom is now available to experience at Eye. A flying dream in a beautifully designed labyrinth of worlds constructed out of language and characters. Anderson herself is coming too.
Good news from the cultural funds: 'diversity' is becoming a serious condition when deciding whether or not to get funding for your cultural thing. Of course, this will lead to discussion. To prevent people from falling back on the Jeroen Pauw argument (we want women on air, but there aren't enough good ones who want them too), the group suggests...
His short stories look deceptively simple, and every word is weighed as if on a gold scale. He therefore basically writes his very short stories from A to Z, without changing anything else. Portrait of writer A.L. Snijders. 'While my wife was dying, I unsuspectingly wrote a piece.' Elaborate You wouldn't expect it from...
In her novel Club Mars, writer Rachel Kushner shows what the life of an inmate looks like inside the four walls. 'I like to include people in my life who have been made invisible in our society,' she says. No mercy Thousands of women are incarcerated in Chowchilla, the jail that was the model for Rachel Kushner's writing of Club Mars. Kushner's...
Human rights organisations from around the world and thousands of filmmakers and artists express support for Oleg Sentsov, sentenced to 20 years by Russia. This Ukrainian filmmaker has been on hunger strike since 14 May. His life is in serious danger, according to the European Film Academy.
Dutch Director of Photography Robby Müller could paint with light. Averse to rules, he made an important contribution to international cinema. 3 July, he died at the age of 78 in his hometown of Amsterdam.
Because Evening, Anna Enquist's new novel, is a book full of pent-up exasperation and anger. Never before has she written so freely as with this book, without knowing where the story was going. "I would like to be able to be a bit angrier myself." After the poetry collection Hoor de staden and her memories of Gerrit Kouwenaar, A Garden in the...
In 2014, the world premiere of The Rise of Spinoza by Theo Loevendie received an enthusiastic reception at the NTRZaterdagMatinee. Rightly so, as Markus Stenz steered the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Groot Omroepkoor, vocal soloists and recorder player Erik Bosgraaf through the colourful one-act aptly. The live recording was recently released on CD, allowing the opera to reach an international audience as well. The now 87-year-old Loevendie...
'Love is poison' Mortimer sings to the king in the first scene of Lessons in Love and Violence. The military adviser denounces his relationship with Gaveston, whom he showered with favours while his subjects went hungry. 'Don't bore me with the price of bread' ripostes the king. Rather than worry, he treats his lover to poetry and music...
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