Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.
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.
The story is the search of the young Moszkowicz looking for his identity within his Jewish family, he wants to part with his inner demons and wants to break with the negative patterns in his life. In a country where 75 percent of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, the Moszkowicz family of lawyers stood out as a unique Jewish success story.
Director David de Jongh represents the life Otto Frank in his documentary Otto Frank, the father of Anne. The film deals with various facets of Otto Frank’s life: his youth in Germany, including his military service during the First World War, his marriage to Edith Holländer and the birth of their daughters Margot and Anne, their flight to the Netherlands, the time in hiding and the deportation to Auschwitz, his life after the Second World War and his dedication to the diary and the ideals of his daughter Anne, and his second marriage to Fritzi Geiringer. The documentary features many photos and film images, as well as interviews, including new ones, with people who knew Otto Frank. His stepdaughter Eva Schloss is one of the interviewees. The film is produced by Pieter van Huystee Film.
Juliano Mer Khamis' documentary on his mother, Arna, an activist against the Israeli occupation who founded an alternative education system for Palestinian children.
A look at what happened after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was filmed in the Romanian village of Glod. It follows the life of one girl who longs to escape the poverty as foreign lawyers arrive with the promise of suing 20th Century Fox for millions of dollars.
The wind blows almost permanently on the craggy coast of Northern Spain. While the legendary storm blusters, old villagers play cards and discuss the history of the scandalous relationship between Pepet Tremolls and the much younger Rosa Campos Del Amor, in the days of Franco's dictatorship. Tremolls was found dead on Christmas Eve. Suicide, people said. Or was it Rosa's resentful lover? 'The best distance to a beautiful young woman is the biggest one', the coroner concludes who examined Tremolls' body at the time. The gentlemen try to find out how the two lovers got to know each other and how intense the stormy relationship must have been. Jumping back and forth in time, the relationship and its players are expounded, alternated with images of the tranquil village, the wild nature and the wind that sweeps through the trees and stirs up dust on country roads.
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.
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.
On All Saints’ Day, the Spanish pay tribute to their dead: a day of reverence and remembrance. Nevertheless, beneath the serene surface lie unhealed grief, thundering silence and ever-burning political conflicts. In the southern Spanish village of Frigiliana, time has not healed the wounds from the Franco era. Even now the murder of a villager in 1952 divides the community.
The film tells the story of two friends who want to disappear from life. While their country Belgium is falling apart, two lost souls cling to each other.
The pig is unclean to some, tasty or sweet to others. The pig Dorus grows up in the backyard of free-range butcher Gerard Zwetsloot. They walk around the village together and are local celebrities. After two years, Dorus is ready for slaughter and Gerard is faced with a difficult choice: the pig or the meat. A story about a pig and a butcher that shows how ambiguous our relationship with animals can be.
The Congolese-Belgian artist Baloji looks at Congolese pygmy wedding traditions.
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.
Visitors to the temples of modern art in global cities will be familiar with the white cube gallery space. But when one arises in the middle of a Congolese palm oil plantation, the effect is deeply disorienting. Furthermore, it draws attention to the often overlooked ties between colonialism and the art world, for example, through the multinationals that now proudly sponsor these Western museums. This Congolese arts center is part of artist Renzo Martens’s unorthodox plan to jump-start the local economy. Former workers at the plantation make sculptures that are reproduced in chocolate, and then exhibited in New York. The plantation workers, most of whom earn a dollar or less a day, use the profits from this successful exhibition to buy back the land confiscated from them by Unilever.
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.
In the 1940s, Alima decides to flee from an arranged marriage to work as a nanny for a Dutch family. Through all her new impressions and thoughts, she looks critically at colonial society and her own position.
A look at the Geert Wilders effect.
They were called ‘the golden generation’, the young Yugoslavian soccer players who won the Junior World Soccer Championships in 1987 in Chile. They became world-famous and today play in Rome, Milan and Madrid. But the country they represented in Chile no longer exists. Director Vuk Janic talks with soccer heroes like Zvonimir Boban and Sinisa Mihajlovic and visits the neighbourhoods they grew up in. Via the soccer, he tells the story of the disintegration of his country. The supporter riots in 1990 during the match between Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb heralded the imminent war. Shortly after, the team fell apart. Seven years later, as national players of Croatia and little Yugoslavia, they compete in two charged qualification matches for the 2000 European Championships. Soccer is not war, but the war is never far away. The first match in Belgrade has to be cancelled due to NATO bombings, and the two national hymns are drowned in deafening whistles from the audience.
Emma Westermann's documentary shows the final six months in the life of Dutch animation grandmaster Gerrit van Dijk. Every night, he makes one drawing for his last animation films. A cinematic testament to one of the most distinguished Dutch film artists of our times.
