Only minimal recovery of Dutch film in good 2019 cinema year The Lion King best attended.
With over 38 million visitors, 6.5% more than in 2018, 2019 was a good cinema year. Unfortunately, the recovery of Dutch cinema is still minimal.
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'Wikileaks has never been caught at a single fault' - Iris ter Schiphorst writes Assange: Fragmente einer Unzeit
'There is an information war going on right now, which shows how important data is. The Assange case is the most poignant example of this.' Dutch-German composer Iris Ter Schiphorst wrote a piece about Julian Assange, the now controversially declared founder of Wikileaks. She is on a mission with this: 'Although Wikileaks has never been caught at a single fault, Assange has been accused of...
The masked truth in HBO's Watchmen
At a time when comic book movies, superheroes and alternative dystopian realities reign supreme, I feared the worst when HBO announced Damon Lindelof's Watchmen. Not having extensive knowledge of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book Watchmen myself, I found the 2009 film a disappointment. Lindelof is the man behind the infamous series Lost. Where with Lost, the viewer...
'It deals with a serious subject, but I also laughed a lot.' This is why Anne-Gine Goemans wrote a cheerful book about nuclear weapons
A cheerful novel about nuclear weapons, that was to be Holy Trientje. Writer Anne-Gine Goemans based the book on the true story of American nun Megan Rice, who - at an advanced age - managed to enter the United States' most heavily secured nuclear bomb complex with nothing more than a pair of concrete scissors. 'I thought it was so beautiful, brave and naive.' Hiroshima 'failure' Every...
Art cannot be exclusive enough. At Festival Noorderzon, everyone can experience it for themselves
Police sirens sound less frequently in Groningen than in a city like Amsterdam. When they sounded last Wednesday night, it was because residents of the premises behind the local art academy, Minerva, raised the alarm. Standing on the roof was not an owl, but an almost naked man shouting that he was going to rob the Coop. Mads Wittermans, the actor in question, had forgotten the...
Why Noorderzon's opening performance is a gem
Some critics thought the opening performance of Festival Noorderzon in Groningen was so bad it made you cry. Others were less negative. Those certainly have a point. But then you have to look beyond what you are used to. When Bear, the hero of Noorderzon 2019's opening show, is imprisoned in a tower, he laments his fate through an eloquent yet sad...
Colson Whitehead writes gripping book on cruelty in US juvenile justice: 'The system is still intact'
With his slavery novel The Underground Railroad, American writer Colson Whitehead broke through worldwide. His impressive new book The Nickel Boys is once again about a gruesome page in recent American history. Torture, rape, even murder: at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, it was the order of the day. For as many as 111 years, the...
Jeremy Dutcher on Amsterdam Roots: 'I think we can expect something very beautiful in the generations to come, as long as we keep singing our songs.'
It is, so in his normal clothes, a cheerful, spontaneous guy who walks up to me in the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet. Jeremy Dutcher the Canadian singer who is one of the main guests at this year's Amsterdam Roots festival, hardly shows any traces of the jet lag he must have undoubtedly sustained from his flight, which took off a few hours earlier...
Tryptich by Bryce Dessner is just a little too perfect to really hit home
The Americans have a word for it: production value. By this you can indicate that a performance is technically perfect. The sound is right, the stage setting is excellent, the costumes are all right, the lighting brilliant and the actors, singers and musicians: top notch. Even the extras are at their best. So a show with high production value can rely on little...
Naked men and black bronzing under philosophical veneer. Is Angelica Liddell overshooting the mark with The Scarlet Letter? (Why the Holland Festival can expect a riot)
That you cannot shamelessly treat a black man as a rutting primal beast and a faceless object for your unlimited lust fantasy as a white woman? Seems logical to me, but for Angélica Liddell, world-renowned performance artist, it is typical of the new puritanism that threatens free art. She now brings The Scarlet Letter to the Netherlands, a theatrical performance that is rather...
Morgan Knibbe does not shy away from heavy subjects: 'film is an empathy machine.'
In 2014, Morgan Knibbe (1989) made the short film Shipwreck, about the aftermath of a horrific shipwreck on the coast of Lampedusa in which 350 refugees drowned. Shortly afterwards, he made his first feature-length documentary, also about refugee issues: 'Those Who Feel the Burning'. This very impressive, original and visually strong film was one of the best Dutch films of the last...
'We can compete with Disney.' Why the long Dutch animated film is going to break through with Heinz and Bunuel
'Heinz' and 'Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles', both out on 18 April, signal an important development in the field of feature-length Dutch animation. A breakthrough is in the air. On stubbornness and co-productions, Anne Frank and Miss Moxy. And what else is on the horizon.
When people have seen war and violence in the face, stories are needed most: Shell Shock in Eye (why I want to see Taxi Driver again).
Calm and peace are but a thin layer covering the chaos of war and other violence in the world. In an extensive and richly varied themed programme, Eye shows how filmmakers have captured that in stories.
A lurid, ultimate act of love. Joris van Casteren writes a beautiful book about a man and his dead mother
Why does someone keep his mother's dead body in the house? In Moeders lichaam, Joris van Casteren sketches a fascinating and loving portrait of a man, his mother and a Limburg village. 'Did you hear that story about the man with his dead mother?' his former journalism teacher asked a few years ago. No, Joris van Casteren hadn't. Because he...
'A murder of a whore that involved all the high-ups.' Tomas Ross on the never-explained murder of Blonde Dolly from The Hague
How did the Hague prostitute Blonde Dolly make her millions? And why was her killer never caught, when it was abundantly clear who must have strangled her? That smells like a conspiracy, and conspiracies are like grist to writer Tomas Ross' mill. In Blonde Dolly, he tackles one of the oldest and most mysterious cold cases in the Netherlands. Until it...
'Look, there's someone letting his pineapple out!' How journalist Lex Boon fell in love with the queen among fruits
Everyone has seen them before, those pineapple plants from Ikea. Many people keep them in the room for a while, until they die and end up in the dustbin. But for journalist Lex Boon (35), the moment he received such a plant as a gift from his (ex-)girlfriend was a turning point in his life. He became hooked on the crowned fruit and flew...
Sacha Polak on the battered but strong woman in Dirty God, opening film 48th IFFR. Emotion is the motto this year
'Feel IFFR' is the motto of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam. The emotion behind the image and with the viewer as a guide for our interpretation. The opening film Dirty God is a nice test case. Director Sacha Polak explains why she wanted to make a film about a scarred woman.
Cinema sector recovers (narrowly), but Dutch film remains problem child (lists!)
The cinema industry presents its 2018 annual figures. Visits stable at 35.7 million, but Dutch film's market share dropped again, now to 11%. Half of the peak year of 2011.
Buying a carton of milk in Venice? Forget it. Writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer on his new novel and the future of Europe
'Caffè e acqua frizzante, per favore.' Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer orders a coffee and water from the waitress of bar 28 Erbe. It's late morning and the terrace in Piazza dell' Erbe, a stone's throw from the palazzo where the writer lives, is slowly starting to get a bit busier. Pfeijffer has now been living in the...
Netflix brings Roma to cinemas. Is this the end of the 'windows' system?
The riveting, Golden Lion-winning Roma immerses you in the Mexico of filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón's youth. Are we going to see it on Netflix, or in the cinema? Viewers have a choice that Netflix did not offer in our country before. In addition, the exclusive cinema window is also in flux.
Why it's good that De Nederlandse Reisopera is coming to you with Die Tote Stadt.
In 1920, Erich Wolfgang Korngold experienced triumphs with his psychological opera Die tote Stadt. The work was performed in more than eighty cities at the time, with unanimous critical acclaim. The opera then disappeared from the stage for a long time but is nowadays performed again sparsely. So it is good that the Nederlandse Reisopera is bringing this almost forgotten piece back to the stage....
'Our body is a battleground.' Why dying should become normal again, according to Erasmus Prize winner Barbara Ehrenreich
We work out at the gym, diet like crazy and get screened for diseases as a precaution. Modern man does everything he can to get as old as possible. Wouldn't it be better to come to terms with the fact that we are mortal, American writer Barbara Ehrenreich wonders in her book...
IDFA and education - Crossing the horizon with a documentary, plus a youth Top 15
IDFA 2018 is a great opportunity to take a look at what you can do with documentary in film education. Documentaries can resonate very well with children, is the experience of Meike Statema, head of education at IDFA.
Lukas Dhont on his acclaimed film Girl, about the trans girl who is an ordinary adolescent, and the love of dance
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.
'No faith in the system.' The second season of Netflix's Making a Murderer.
"Don't let Netflix tell you what to think". The Netflix documentary Making a Murderer caused a huge stir in the United States and the rest of the world in 2016. Society was divided into two camps: those who believed Steven Avery was guilty and those who believed he was once again innocent in prison....
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