His heart skipped a beat in 2005 when he saw an email arrive from his former Icelandic girlfriend. The mail revealed a truth that Tom Stranger had tried to push away for years: he had raped his girlfriend Thordis Elva. Their equally shocking and courageous story Elva and Stranger shared in a TEDx lecture and a joint book, 7200 seconds -...
Her debut novel became an instant bestseller in Spain. The Last Gift of Paulina Hoffmann by Carmen Romero Dorr is a novel based partly on her own family history about Paulina, who emigrates from Germany to Spain as a young girl because of World War II. 'About her past, her experiences during the war, my grandmother never wanted to talk.' A beautiful family epic, that is The Last...
Is production house Dansmakers Amsterdam losing its housing? Together with other institutions in the dance sector, it has made every effort to align and further develop the whole spectrum of dance facilities in Amsterdam. In 2018, for example, the joint plan Danswerf was developed and submitted as an application for a two-year development grant to the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK)...
The Utrecht Centre for the Arts is bankrupt after a long ordeal. It was cut back. There is no more room in the Netherlands' fourth city for a large, centrally organised music and culture school. Nor for pottery, painting and video filming. The city council has found a solution. For the soon-to-be homeless UCK students, the municipality thinks...
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.
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.
Searching for what I stand for and what path I should take, time and again I come across facts that confuse and amaze me. I live in a country where only a single woman is in De Volkskrant top ten most influential people - in tenth place, that is. Only three out of 100 young Dutch millionaires...
In the last century, we had Teleac. Teleac taught me to play chess. Quite extraordinary for television. Perhaps because I have associated television with 'learning' in that way from a young age, I am thrilled with the series made by VPRO with Martin Koolhoven. It is, for the first time in ages, television that stimulates the mind, that makes you think ...
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...
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...
The Flemish waffle baker at the Willy Wonka Wafl Factory in the Burton Cafe has seen all the Tim Burton films, he says from between a sleek hipster beard. 'Especially since you had to prepare the menu,' I say. The menu at the - temporary - Burton Cafe in exhibition space C-min includes: Charlie Chocolate Wafl, Scissorhands Wafl, Oompa Loopa Wafl, Beetlejuice...
Tightness. A feeling of oppression prevails when watching the new (mini)series from HBO's stable, Sharp Objects. The series launched this week, but I got to see a few episodes in advance. HBO's Sharp Objects is a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn, author of, among others, the exciting Gone Girl. With Sharp Objects...
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.
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...
That's at least one mistake you can make: booking for a Christoph Marthaler performance and then expecting something new to happen. Yet I did it, on my last visit to this year's Holland Festival. Someone had said that the Swiss playwright, who has been creating performances in which lost souls are...
First of all, the chairs have to leave the auditorium of the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Then some discomfort, those two hours that Octavia E. Butler's The Parable of The Sower lasts. At least it would make for some shared sorrow, and possibly some awkward swinging. Because the way things were going, that first night of Toshi Reagon's debut at the Holland...
Neues Stück 1 Seit sie - Ein Stück von Dimitris Papaioannou is a long title for an overwhelming piece, which Tanztheater Wuppertal is bringing to the Holland Festival this year. Nine years ago, on 30 June 2009, a month before she was to turn sixty-nine, Pina Bausch died suddenly. The world-famous and highly influential choreographer of experimental, haunting and unparalleled dance theatre left behind a...
Of course, we have Chriet Titulaer. But it kind of ends there. And to say we took those very seriously, back in the day? No. The future, and fantasising about it, is not really a thing in the Netherlands, at least not with the big publishers and broadcasters. A writer dealing with science fiction will never join a big...
The miracle happened right at the first location. On a bare piece of dune in front of beach café Oscars there are rocking benches. From one of those benches I looked, swaying, over a slope of marram grass, then a couple of terraces and beyond that the sea. As it was a weekday, but summer warm, some bathers had already settled into beach chairs. Crowded it was...
Alí Calderón has written quite a body of work, but I didn't hear much of it during my stay at Poetry International. However, the poem 'Democracia Mexicana' did come along three times. A formidable poem, as it ends with a rotting baby corpse, so not for the soft-hearted among us. Democracia Mexicana is Calderon's hit poem. Like pop singers can make a hit...
The lectern. The lectern. The paper holder, if possible with its own light, which, shining upwards, draws stern shadows of the reading glasses on the poet's face. It is the kind of necessary evil that every poetry or literature festival has to deal with. Only the powerpoint is missing to make it a boring seed onion conference. Poetry International Festival Rotterdam has in...
More operas and classical concerts are offered in Dutch theatres and concert halls. More theatre was also offered for young people. Nice developments, but the increase in supply (3 per cent) did not directly lead to a proportionate increase in audiences. That increased by only 1 per cent. The number of spectators for theatre and cabaret even fell. Therefore.
The Drenthe village of Erica was rocked on the last weekend of April by the cosy noise festival Pitfest. And that attracted a motley mix of people. I walked around there for a day. A golf cart zooms across the roundabout of the 4-star resort in the outskirts of the Drenthe town of Erica. To the right of the tarmac are tightly mowed golf courses, to the left is a plot of land...
Poets Danez Smith and Patricia Lockwood once broke the internet with their virtuoso wordplay. Smith with a frothy tirade about ineradicable racism and police brutality in America (Dear White America) and Lockwood with a heartbreaking/funny poem about her rape (Rape Joke). Both have outgrown their hypes. They have secretly been doing a fantastic job for years, using Twitter, YouTube, paper and stage...
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