Year: 2016

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 52 min (112min)

In WIM, documentary film maker Lut Vandekeybus takes you on a journey through the energetic, poetic and complex universe of her brother, the lauded choreographer and director Wim Vandekeybus. It is a spirited portrait of an impressive career.

Year: 2015

Format: HD

Runtime: 45 min

Images of asylum seekers and world leaders regularly make the front pages of Dutch newspapers. In this way, press photographers largely determine our image of reality. In Image Hunters we see Elmar and Serge creating the images.

Now that everyone has a mobile phone with a camera, the work of the press photographer is under pressure. Elmar van de Marel and Serge Ligtenberg are renowned press photographers and are followed in the documentary Image Hunters.

Elmar van der Marel sees little distinction between news, documentary and street photography. This combination gives him a distinctive style with which he has won the Silver Camera three times in succession.

Where Van der Marel takes pictures of Amsterdam illegal immigrants, Ligtenberg in turn hunts for politicians. He photographs them at arrivals, greetings and at many other times.

Year: 2014

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 02 min (62 min)

A French encyclopaedist tries to complete his life's work beyond death. N is a story of an unusual obsession. Hovering between dream and reality, this magical film plays on the confrontation between the Western mind and African spirituality.

Year: 2014

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 04 min (64 min)

The story of a top Dutch racing pigeon who ends up in Beijing, told from the perspective of the bird.

Year: 2014

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 12 min (72 min)

SEE NO EVIL portrays the daily life of three famous elderly apes who spend their days in retirement homes; a movie-star, a scientist and a crippled. We have watched and taught them for many years, as they have watched us. A sometimes bitter, poetic recapture of the intriguing relationship between Chimp and Man, as ‘remembered’ by the protagonists.

Awards:

Viktor, Best Film, Dokfest München

Nominated for Big Screen Award, IFFR Rotterdam

Special Jury Prize Dokfest Gdansk

Bellona Foundation Special Prize Message2Man, St Petersburg

Year: 2014

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 16 min (76 min)

In 1994, eleven-year old Leonardo dreamt of becoming a soccer player to escape the slums of Rio de Janeiro. As a result of a documentary, he made his dream come true. Twenty years later, Leonardo, now a star and a millionaire, returns to the people he left behind. The sequel reflects on a question: what does it mean when a film takes over your life?

Solo; out of a dream portrays the life and history of Leonardo.Twenty years ago, he was the main character in the Award-winning documentary Solo; the law of the favela.

In 1994, Leonardo and Anselmo were 11 years old. They lived in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, were the best of friends and dreamt of becoming professional soccer players. As a direct result of the documentary, Leonardo came to The Netherlands at the age of 14, to play for topclub Feyenoord. He went on to play for Ajax and top teams in Europe, became a star and a millionaire.

During the 2014 World Championship in Brasil, the filmmaker and Leonardo return to Rio de Janeiro. Together, we go look for Anselmo and other people from the documentary. Against this backdrop, Leonardo evaluates his life and gradually a personal tragedy emerges. Thus, the film reflects on the question what it means when a film takes over your life.

Solo; out of a dream is about boyhood-dreams, ambition, sacrifices, fate and inevitable loss.

Year: 2011

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 12 min (72 min)

While the multicultural dream seems permanently over for our southern neighbours and xenophobia increases, dramatist and writer Neske Beks’ allegiance to her Flemish people and family remains unabated in her documentary debut. In the 1970s, Beks grew up in a small suburb of Antwerp, in a warm working-class family. Her dark skin made Beks an outsider in her foster family. In this colourful family chronicle, she examines how the ideals of those years were replaced by the gut feelings of the extreme right. This happened in her own family, too, half of whom cast a vote for Vlaams Belang. Beks’ toughest relationship is with her dad, who already switched to the far-right Vlaams Blok party when Beks was still a teenager. And still, Eigen volk is definitely not a reckoning or character assassination, but a personal quest for the universal issues that unite us or drive us apart.

Year: 2011

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 30 min (90 min)

THE URKER MEN'S CHOIR HALLELUJAH

(HET URKER MANNENKOOR HALLELUJAH)

Documentary with passionate singing from 'Het Urker Mannenkoor Hallelujah'. They sing in beautiful harmony, sometimes deafeningly loud, while the silence that follows is breathtaking. The feelings and thoughts of the choir members are hidden in that silence.

In the year that the Urker Mannenkoor celebrates its 100th anniversary, documentary maker Kees Brouwer - whose entire family lives on Urk - follows the choir while the men reveal their thoughts in this film. The stories of the Urkers are moving; from a drowned fisherman and the challenge of committed sins to love luck and the murder of an Urker boy.

The lives of the men are captured in the singing of the spiritual song. The choir is the place where all stories are coordinated and sound in harmony. Talking together is not possible, singing together is. Even in Paris, where they give a blistering concert on the occasion of their anniversary. And they prefer not to receive applause, because it is not human work.

Also known as Hallelujah, between storm and silence.

Year: 2008

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 16 min (76 min)

Beyond the game is set in the world of incredibly popular cyber games and portrays several top players in the run-up to the World Championship.

Protagonists are an Asian and a European player, known in the cyber world as Sky and Grubby. Sky is 20, comes from China and is world champion in the game Warcraft. Grubby is 21, comes from Holland and is the former Warcraft world champion. The film portrays the lives of these two top players on the way to their final duel, as it were a hypermodern western.

Awards: Prize for artistic success, Dutch Filmfund

Year: 2008

Format: HD

Runtime: 1 hr 15 min (75min)

Documentary about an 103 year old sjamaan in the North-east of India who descends every day into hos own grave to wait for death.

Awards: Regards Neufs, Visions du Réel, 2009

Year: 2006

Format: HD

Runtime: 58 min

The documentary begins with spectacular sfx-footage of how water swallows The Netherlands. In Before the flood it is soon clear that fiction is rapidly becoming reality. Renowned Dutch actor Pierre Bokma coolly plays a man who as a boy was home alone with his baby brother during the flood disaster in Zeeland. The men of the Schieland and Krimpenerwaard polder board anxiously keep an eye on the water levels in the polders and a Dutch scientist explains how he, inspired by the warnings in Revelations, made wind analyses and concluded that in the near future Europe will be facing life-threatening super storms. The saddening scenarios are intercut with poetical and terrifying archive footage that bears witness to the destructive power of the water: from crumbling polar caps to churning floods that wash away everything that lives.

Awards: Eco Award, Istanbul

Year: 2000

Format: HD

Runtime: 52 min

Nor his donkey is the last part in a tv documentary-series about the Ten Commandments. In the Pyrenees, France, a donkey is on its way from the top of the mountain to the valley to do the shopping for a sheperd who is obliged to stay with his herd. On his way, the donkey leads us along three stories related to 'covetness' (i.e. the Tenth Commandment):

1: Two weeks after the death of her husband, a widow receives a love-letter of a man she refused to marry forty-five years before and never saw again.

2: In London, a personal shopping assistant in a fancy warehouse develops a shopping addiction and commits suicide after being discovered.

3: In Toronto, the annual meeting of the Mars Society is held. Plans are discussed for the future colonization of the Red Planet.

Year: 1995

Format: 16 mm

Runtime: 55 min

Fifty years after the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 'Nagasaki Stories' seeks the personal and reveals the private recollections of some of Nagasaki's inhabitants, who survived the bomb.

We meet Mr. Kyushiro Kusakabe, a former reporter who lost his mother and wife, and who now, 50 years after the catastrophe, is travelling from Tokyo to Nagasaki, together with his sister-in-law. They speak about their memories of everyday life in prewar multi-cultural Nagasaki. By the time the two travellers reach Nagasaki we have come to know a municipal civil servant who tried unsuccesfully to map the area that had been ruined during the war, a former kamikaze pilot awaiting his death in a hospital, two sisters whose father had been a kimono tailor who went bankrupt when the war changed clothing habits, and a photographer who started his career the moment the A-bomb destroyed his hometown.

Their stories are balanced by home movie fragments which never literally illustrate yet do comment on, and sometimes poetically colour, the memories they speak of.

Year: 1994

Format: 16 mm

Runtime: 54 min

In the slums of Rio de Janeiro, the favelas, soccer might be the only chance to escape from the omnipresent atmosphere of violence and crime. Ten or eleven-year old boys who play soccer on the streets dream of a future as a professional soccer player, of a real shirt and a real club. 'Solo, the law of the favela', focuses on this dream of a number of boys against the background of the everyday life in the favela, at the time of the Soccer World Championships in the USA. Main characters are Leonardo and Anselmo, two eleven year old friends, who play soccer together in one of the clubs of the favelas. One day it looks their dreams come true. On that day Anselmo forgets his shoes and Leonardo has to make a choice.

1994: the World Cup is playing to an audience of billions, but Jos de Putter heads to the slums of Rio de Janeiro, to follow the children whose only dream, and only escape, is sport. Twelve-year-old best friends Leonardo and Anselmo hope to leave their reality of poverty and violence by playing soccer. When a scout for a professional club appears, their hopes seem answered, until only one is offered a contract. Solo is fascinating for its insights into the hope that sports offer to youth, and how it's taken away.

Awards: Joris Ivens Award IDFA 1994

Year: 1993

Format: 16 mm

Runtime: 1 hr 10 min (70 min)

'It's been a Lovely Day' is a portrait of a traditional dutch farmer's family, made by their son. The documentary focuses on the last year of the parents'work on the farm that has been passed on from one generation to the next for more than a century. Now, they will retire without a successor. The film observes without any explanatory comment but in an outspoken cinematographic style a traditional way of life that is disappearing throughout Europe. The film begins at 6 a.m. , January 1st, 1992, and ends in a foggy and lonely landscape twelve months later. In between it shows the last harvest, the now anachronistic choreography of an old farmer on his land, the typical slow conversations about the weather, the silent accepting of changing times.

Awards:

City of Utrecht Prize, 1993 (best debut of the year)

Chosen as best Dutch film of the year by readers of the Volkskrant and association of Dutch Film critics, 1994 .Chosen as one of the 16 best Dutch films in film history, part of official Dutch Film Heritage, 2007