Pieter van Huystee

Hidden World

He is the last in the village that knows how to communicate with the ancestor spirits to keep the harmony and prevent misfortune. Since Amoksi is getting old, it is time to transfer his ancient know how to his son Michael.

Instant Dreams

There could hardly be a more telling contrast between the analog and digital eras than the beautifully blurry memories captured in a Polaroid picture and the thousands of pin-sharp photos on an iPhone. In this ambitious visual essay, Willem Baptist explores the visionary genius of Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Even today, all sorts of people are keeping his instant dream alive. Former Polaroid employee Stephen Herchen moved from the United States to Europe to work in a laboratory developing the 2.0 version of Polaroid. Christopher Bonanos, the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, tells us, "When I heard Polaroid would stop making film, it felt like a close friend had died." Artist Stefanie Schneider, who is working with the last of her stock of Polaroid film, is using the blurring that occurs with expired film as an additional aesthetic layer in her photographic work.

Maria, I Need Your Lovin'

In "Maria I Need Your Lovin", we follow Mary's search for love. In a quickly edited style you as a viewer rumble through eight years of Mary's life. Will she eventually manage to create her ideal situation; a stable household?

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role.

Home

Cyriaque Kouenou was forced to leave his country and fled to the Netherlands. Staying there he has now entered his fourth year on a surrealistic trip with no end in sight, with stopovers in a tent camp, an empty church, an old office building and a former prison. A no man's land where you are stuck after being told that you aren't allowed to stay but also can't be sent back.

Wolflady

Producer Oscar Holleman (Within Temptation an Krezip) instantly recognizes 21 year old Sharon Kovacs as a talented singer. Even comparing her voice to Amy Winehouse. The movie is a documentation of them recording during two very hectic years.

Borders

A film about borders and border checkpoints, poetically following the people that come into contact with them - one way or another. Borders is about men and women dreaming of a better life in Europe and the high price they often have to pay for it - if they succeed at all. Without taking an immediate moral stance, the film follows the route that many immigrants take from the heart of Africa to the centre of Europe, stopping at each border: Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal , Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, France, Belgium, and finally, the Netherlands.

Wilders, the Movie

A look at the Geert Wilders effect.

The New Rijksmuseum

At the end of 2003 the main building of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum has closed, in the words of managing director Ronald de Leeuw, becoming 'the most conceivable art museum'. The Spanish architects Cruz and Ortiz signed for the big design; in 2008 the modernized museum would open with a pioneering museum concept. Moviemaker Hoogendijk followed the first four years of what is called the biggest Dutch cultural operation in history.

Bikkel

The touching life story of Bart de Graaff, the prematurely deceased founder of BNN, incorporating interviews, archive footage and extracts from cartoons of his idol, Tintin.

Yvette

Director Simonka de Jong follows sixteen-year-old Yvette from Nieuwegein in the last eighteen months of her eventful secondary school years. On the face of it, Yvette is a tough girl: she wears Lonsdale clothes, hangs around the schoolyard smoking and indifferent, and argues with her classmates, who are unable to place and simply will not accept her racism. Yvette clearly does not know what to do with herself and appears to have two faces. She can look like a hardcore Lonsdale girl, but with her hair loose and in the intimacy of the living room she is just a shy adolescent girl with her own dreams and desires.

Joaquin Sabina - 19 Days and 500 Nights

They still carry his house keys with them, Joaquin Sabina's old friends. It does not matter that the Madrid-based singer, who is adored throughout the Spanish-speaking community, changed the locks to his house years ago. After the brain haemorrhage that hit him in 2001, Sabina suddenly could not bear the dozens of friends anymore that invaded his house. This was a raw deal for them, as the interviews reveal that director Ramón Gieling had with them. As in Gieling's previous documentaries, he created a cinematographic form for the interviews, which he consistently applies. Friends and former lovers are introduced in a minutely reconstructed copy of the living room they were expelled from. In the real living room, they used to lead a loose life without thinking about the health risks.

Haven, Roaming Through the Night

Nocturnal life in the partly deserted dock area of Amsterdam. Director Marjoleine Boonstra encounters lone wolves, leading secluded lives in makeshift shelters, and people that work as pilots, night watchmen or skippers. According to a young pilot `it was actually like a dream', working by the IJ river at night. And this is what it looks like: a dream world. Between interviews, Boonstra makes her camera glide through the area, along the quay, across the water, along cranes, containers and sea-going vessels. A world of lamps, reflections and shadows. In this landscape of stone and metal, an extraordinary group of individuals lives and works. For example, an English woman cleans up a submarine for a party, a refugee from former Yugoslavia has created a place for himself and a night watchman has to `see to it that that boat stays where it is'. Peaceful music emphasises the relative quiet, in which the interviewees reflect on their lives and the harbour.

Arna's Children

Juliano Mer Khamis' documentary on his mother, Arna, an activist against the Israeli occupation who founded an alternative education system for Palestinian children.

Quicksand

For all Frits, a farmer's son, knows, his mother died when giving birth to him. He and his father make up a strong team. In the literal and figurative sense, because his father not only teaches him to milk the cows and hunt, he is also the coach of his soccer team. The happy tide turns when the boy turns eighteen and is scouted as a promising soccer talent. Suddenly, Frits's future is no longer with his father on the farm, but on the green grass of the Nijmegen soccer club NEC. His son's splendid soccer career may be the crowning glory of the farmer's hard work, but he is afraid he will also lose his only child. Desperate, he reveals the lie with which he raised his son. Frits is bewildered and makes a dramatic decision.

Johan Cruijff - En un momento dado

Johan Cruijff - En un momento dado is a 2004 documentary film by Ramon Gieling on the life of Dutch footballer Johan Cruijff.

Desi

Desi is a young girl living in Amsterdam with an unconventional family situation. A portrait of a remarkably strong girl.

The Red Stuff

The Red Stuff: The True Story of the Russian Race for Space is a film about the first heroes of the cosmos from those early years of Russian space travel. Who were the people behind these first successes? Unique archival material reveals the bravery and the unsurpassed stamina of the cosmonauts. What is true and what is false in our view of Russian space exploration? How do those involved look back on their work and their enforced role in the Soviet political machine? Now that the military secrecy and national propaganda of the Soviet Union has crumbled, see the real story of the other side of the space race.

Crazy

The haunting experiences of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers are woven together by the powerful influence music has had on their endurance, survival, and memories of war. This documentary is filled with close-up interviews, scrapbook photographs, video clips, news footage, letters read aloud, and other recollections, as different generations of Dutch peacekeeping soldiers recount the trauma of bloodshed from Korea to more recent events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Their trusting, and often disturbing, personal revelations resound most poignantly when they talk about the single pieces of music that each found powerful enough to keep insanity at bay.

Felice… Felice…

Tragic love story about the photographer and explorer Felice Beato who travelled back to Japan in 1895 to seek his former wife O-Kiku. On the way he describes in a nostalgic letter to his brother how much he yearns for his lost love O-Kiku and how impotent he feels in an ancient Japan subject to rapid change. The journey takes him to Nagasaki and Moji, Onomichi, Mount Fuji, Yokohama and Tokyo. Places he once visited with his beloved and where he now no longer understands the people. Felice...Felice... is inspired by hand-coloured nineteenth century photos taken by e.g. Felice Beato, Sjimooka Renjo and Baron von Stilfried. In this film, shot entirely in a studio, the photos depict Felice's journey. Awarded the Golden Calf for Best Feature film in 1998. (NFF)

O Amor Natural

O AMOR NATURAL is a documentary film about the erotic poetry of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the 20th century, the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987). The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a household name in Brazil, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as he feared they would be deemed pornographic. In this celebration of his poetry and sensual vision, elderly residents of Rio read his poems and comment on their graphic, voluptuous imagery with tremendous candor and enthusiasm.

Brass Unbound

Documentary shows brass bands from Nepal, Surinam, Indonesia and Ghana.