SEE NL #18

Greenaway, Polak and 3 Dutch feature debutants in Berlin EYE to honour Kentridge with exhibition Vanessa Hennemann talent guru IFFR Live world prems for Gieling and Groothof Abbey Hoes Shooting Star

Issue #18 January 2015 IFFR/Berlinale issue Download the free app for iPad and Android

Index

View from the edge COLOPHON

6-7 Cross-border accord A DutchGerman production treaty will be signed at Berlinale 2015. See NL talks to Netherlands Film Fund head Doreen Boonekamp 8-9 Lusting for life and death Saskia Diesing’s coming-of-age, assisted suicide drama Nena is selected for Berlinale Generation 10-11 Breaking free Tallulah H. Schwab’s Confetti Harvest, about a precocious 12 year-old girl, yearning for escape, also selected for Berlinale Generation 12-15 Eisenstein in Berlin Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato is selected for Berlin competition 16-17 Emotional drive In Sacha Polak’s Berlin Forum selection Zurich, a woman discovers that before her husband’s death he was leading a double life 18-19 Cover story: Play it again Sam Young Dutch director Sam de Jong’s debut feature Prince is selected for Berlinale Generation 20-21 Berlinale 2015 Dutch selections at this year’s event 22-23 The X factor Dorien van de Pas, of the Netherlands Film Fund, talks about the plethora of emerging Dutch film talent 24-25 Talent connector Highly successful Dutch talent management firm Henneman Agency talks to See NL on the occasion of its 10th birthday 26-27 Market forces The newly streamlined CineMart is still the first port of call for independent producers looking to raise co-production finance

28-29 A passion for music Ramon Gieling’s Erbarme Dich: Matthäus Passion Stories, an ode to devotion, screens in IFFR Live 30-31 Other side of the tracks Remy van Heugten’s IFFR Tiger competition Son of Mine (Gluckauf) is about modern outlaws living a tough existence in an impoverished part of the Netherlands

Manfred Schmidt – Exec Director of Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung

32-33 Life during wartime In Marinus Groothof’s The Sky Above Us, worldpremiering in IFFR Live, three inhabitants of Belgrade try to survive the NATO bombings of 1999

Judging by the line-up of Dutch films in the international festival circuit, and the many popular titles over the past years, the Netherlands has a strong and unique output despite its relatively small size and population. The films are without compare when it comes to the art of filmmaking and storytelling, and the people behind those projects rank among Europe’s top industry professionals.

34-35 IFFR 2015 Dutch selections at this year’s event 36-37 In the zone The success of EYE’s education programme Moviezone continues into the digital age 38-39 Dutch daring Roel Reiné’s sea-faring epic The Admiral, about Dutch maritime hero Michiel De Ruyter, launches internationally at the EFM 40-41 The not gone girl Claudia Landsberger may be stepping down as head of EYE International but she will continue to be a major presence at the key international film events

But all good ideas and the best creative people cannot work properly without the backing of public funders, and with the Netherlands Film Fund the Dutch industry has a very solid and open-minded partner.

42-43 Frieze frame South African artist William Kentridge is the subject of an ambitious EYE exhibition to run April to late Summer 2015

As a frequent participant at Dutch festivals and markets - particularly at the Holland Film Meeting - I have become friends with many Dutch filmmakers, producers, screenwriters and funding colleagues. I see an ever-stronger similarity of interests between producers from our respective countries working on a highly international and global level.

44-45 Funky shorts Dutch short films at Clermond Ferrand 2015 46-47 Short cuts News from the Dutch film industry 48 Picture profile Abbey Hoes: Shooting Star

Cover still: Prince Director: Sam de Jong Script: Sam de Jong Production: 100% Halal See page 18

Still: Alice Cares See page 33

2

See NL is published four times per year by EYE International and The Netherlands Film Fund and is distributed to international film professionals.

There have been roughly 15 Dutch-German co-productions – either majority or minority – that MDM has supported over the past ten years, ranging from documentaries like Victor Kossakovsky’s Vivan las Antipodas! to feature films such as Zurich by Sacha Polak (which will premiere in the Forum section of the upcoming Berlinale) through to children’s films like Mischa Kamps’ Tony 10.

These are all high quality collaborations that result from our long-term good relationship with the Dutch filmmakers, producers and funders that we will gladly continue in the future.

Together with the Netherlands Film Fund we have created a new co-development fund for children’s films which we will launch at Berlinale 2015. Children’s films especially have always played a major role within MDM’s funding programme as our region is a centre for children’s media in Germany.

At the same time, the Netherlands is one of the strongest markets for children’s films, both in terms of content and production. With the new fund we want to join forces and foster the collaboration between Dutch and German film professionals in their joint efforts to develop exciting and charming children film stories. Stories that will find their audience in both countries - and beyond.

Editors in chief: Claudia Landsberger (EYE), Jonathan Mees (Netherlands Film Fund) Executive editor: Nick Cunningham Contributors: ­Geoffrey Macnab, Melanie Goodfellow and Manfred Schmidt Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper Circulation: 2450 copies © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International 2015 CONTACT Sandra den Hamer CEO EYE E sandradenhamer@eyefilm.nl Claudia Landsberger Head of EYE International E claudialandsberger@eyefilm.nl EYE International PO BOX 74782 1070 BT Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 589 1400 W www.eyefilm.nl Doreen Boonekamp CEO Netherlands Film Fund E d.boonekamp@filmfonds.nl Ellis Driessen International Affairs Netherlands Film Fund E e.driessen@filmfonds.nl Jonathan Mees Head of Communications Netherlands Film Fund E j.mees@filmfonds.nl Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfonds.nl

©KeyDocs

3 View from the edge: Manfred Schmidt – Executive Director of Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM)

3

Eisenstein in Guanajuato “It was hopefully going to be a recognisable cinematic portrait of ten days in the life of a very great filmmaker, but there was to be no worshipful genuflection.”

Peter Greenaway

See page 12

The Admiral

Photo: ©Submarine

“We’re not afraid of water in the Netherlands. When you can do it for real why would you do it in a studio or in a tank?”

Klaas de Jong

See page 38

Eisenstein in Guanajuato Director: Peter Greenaway Script: Peter Greenaway Production: Submarine (NL), in co-production with Fu Works (NL), Paloma Negra (MX), Edith Film (FI), Potemkino (BE) Sales: Films Boutique

The Admiral Director: Roel Reiné Script: Lars Boom, Alex van Galen Production: Farmhouse Film (NL), in co-production with Ciné Cri de Coeur (BE) Sales: Arclight Films

4

5

Co-pro agreement

Cross-border accord Co-production treaties are notoriously tricky to negotiate and ratify. There is a huge amount of pen pushing and bureaucracy behind them - and then you have to coordinate the diaries of the Ministers involved so that they are both available to sign the treaty documents and plan the event with the embassies. But all being well, the Dutch-German treaty will be launched at this year’s Berlinale, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

Speaking in early January 2015, Doreen Boonekamp, CEO of the Netherlands Film Fund, sounded optimistic that that the treaty would finally be signed on the Saturday midway through Berlin. “All the signs look good,” Boonekamp says.

“These kind of treaties take a long time!”

The Film Fund boss also makes it very clear that the ties between the Dutch and German film industries are drawing ever closer and that the Dutch will be a major presence at this year’s Berlin.

One new initiative that will be announced formally during the festival is a cross-border development fund. The Netherlands Film Fund is partnering on this in the first instance with Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM). The aim is to support the development of original children’s films at an early stage. “That was something that

came up as a plan while (we) were working on this (Dutch-German) agreement,” Boonekamp explains.

“We have done several coproductions on children’s films with Germany. They, on their side, have been designing national policy in collaboration with all the regional funds for stimulating their children’s films.”

collaboration to be set up at a much earlier stage,” comments Boonekamp.

MDM’s executive director Manfred Schmidt is in accord. “With the new fund we want to join forces and foster the collaboration between Dutch and German film professionals in their joint efforts to develop exciting and charming children film stories,” he outlines.

“Stories that will find their audience in both countries and beyond.”

Boonekamp came up with the idea for the new development fund. At recent festivals, Monique Ruinen, one of the Film Fund’s feature film consultants and a specialist in youth film, has been sounding out colleagues to assess the enthusiasm for such a scheme. The response was positive. MDM, which has already been involved in several Dutch co-productions, was a natural partner. The first application round is likely to be spring 2015. It is envisaged that if the pilot projects go well, further money will be invested in the scheme in the future.

What’s unusual about the new initiative - which other regional funds may also later join - is that it is focused on the development of children’s movies. Both the Dutch and the Germans excel at “youth” movies and have worked successfully together in the past on numerous projects. The difference with the new fund is that they will be partnering at the very inception of new projects. In doing so, they are responding to the wishes of the producers themselves.

“When we co-produce between two countries, usually, the funding comes in during the production phase. What we really wanted to do was to push the creative

When they finally go into production, the aim is for supported films to be distributed in both countries. The initial investment is relatively low - both the Dutch Fund and the MDM are putting in €50,000.

Meanwhile, Boonekamp is heartened that there is already strong evidence of “much more international interest to collaborate with the Netherlands” since the introduction last year of the country’s long awaited new cash rebate. “The incentive also gave an extra impulse for co-production between the surrounding countries - including Germany,” she stresses.

‘We want to set up the collaboration at a much earlier stage’

Still: Surprise by Mike van Diem, a Dutch-German co-production

6

7

Berlinale feature presentation

Lust for life and death Saskia Diesing

Saskia Diesing’s coming-of-age, assisted suicide drama Nena won best director award at the Netherlands Film Festival. She talks to Melanie Goodfellow ahead of its screening in Berlinale Generation.

When filmmaker Saskia Diesing was just 12-years old, her father, who was severely ill with multiple sclerosis, told her that he could no longer stand living and wanted to kill himself. Still a child, Diesing could barely comprehend the idea of committing suicide when there was so much to live for.

“The conversation threw up existentialist questions I hadn’t considered before,” says the filmmaker. “He tried to kill himself on several occasions in different ways. Every attempt failed. It was a desperate situation.”

Some 30 years later, that conversation is at the heart of Diesing’s award-winning feature Nena, supported by the Netherlands Film Fund. Set against the backdrop of a provincial town on the West German border in 1989, the film

revolves around 16-year-old Nena as she deals with her paraplegic father’s desire to die just as she is falling in love for the first time, and embracing life with teenage abandon. “The film is not strictly autobiographical but the conversation I had with my father is the source. You could say because I couldn’t help him then I’m trying to help him posthumously with this film,” says Diesing.

The filmmaker recounts how she wrote the synopsis for the picture in a fury over 48 hours, after the Netherlands Film Fund rejected a previous project in the final selection round. “I was so disappointed and angry at the same time that I wrote it in two nights.

Somewhere this story has been there in my self-conscious all the time,” she says.

On agreeing to support the development of the new project, the Fund advised Diesing to collaborate with another writer due to the personal nature of the source material. Diesing approached successful novelist Esther Gerritsen whose novels include the recently published Roxy as well as Thirst, Superdove and Craving. “The idea of Esther just popped out. The fund was like ‘Good luck with that because she doesn’t do film,’ but I thought, ‘Ok, I want to try it anyway’.

She was enthusiastic from the very first moment and we’ve since become very close friends.”

“Esther creates these quirky, sometimes amoral characters, who have a hard time fitting into society,” adds Diesing. “There’s also a humour in her writing which I like. The tone of the film was difficult to find. I wanted to strike a balance between gravity and lightness. We spent a lot of time tossing the dialogue back and forth.”

Up and coming young Dutch actress Abbey Hoes, who is the Dutch Shooting Star at the Berlinale this year, plays Nena. “Abbey’s unbelievable. It’s a tough role for a young person,” says Diesing. “I had seen her in a TV movie a couple of years ago in which she played a 14-year-old who was dying of cancer.

I couldn’t stop crying. I wrote the role with her in mind and was so happy when she agreed to take the part.” Alongside a best director award for Diesing at the Dutch Film Festival in September, Hoes also clinched the best actress award for her performance.

The film, a Dutch-German co-pro between Amsterdam-based KeyFilm and Cologne-based Coin Film, was shot in the German border town where Diesing grew up with her German father and Dutch mother before they divorced. “Euthanasia is a controversial issue in Germany and I was actually surprised that we were able to get money for this sort of story so I am very curious to how German audiences will respond to the film,” concludes the filmmaker.

‘I wanted to strike a balance between gravity and lightness’

Nena Director: Saskia Diesing Script: Saskia Diesing, Esther Gerritsen Production: KeyFilm (NL), in c ­ oproduction with Coin Film (DE) Sales: Mountain Road Entertainment 8

9

Berlinale feature presentation

Breaking free she admits she was immediately fascinated by the subject matter.

She had a grandmother who grew up in a similar background. “I felt immediately - wow! This is great. I want to do it,” the director recalls.

Tallulah Scwab

Yes, Tallulah Schwab reveals to Geoffrey Macnab, she is indeed named after the classic American actress, Tallulah Bankhead.

“It was my father’s fascination with film,” the director explains of her exotic Christian name. Her mother was a production designer and her father was a huge movie fan who had always wanted to pursue a career in cinema. (His mother, though, insisted that he study medicine.)

At the age of 41, Schwab has made her feature directorial debut, thereby fulfilling one of her father’s ambitions in the process. Confetti Harvest, supported by the Film Fund, screens in Berlinale 2015 Generation Kplus, following its successful Dutch release late 2014.

Confetti Harvest is based on the best selling novel by Franca Treur.

It’s about a precocious 12-year-old girl growing up in a very strict Protestant background in a rural community in Zeeland during the 1980s. The girl has a vivid imagination and a yearning for escape.

Production company Column Film brought the project to Schwab and

What intrigued her about the novel was its sense of balance. The author wasn’t caricaturing the religious community or exaggerating its zealotry. She was respectful of its culture, even if she did acknowledge the constrictions placed on the young girl. “There are so many rules and so many different groups within the Protestant church. Every single tiny group has a totally different set of rules!” Schwab notes.

The film doesn’t try to depict the girl as being “in hell and trying to get out.” Instead, Confetti Harvest accentuates the beauty of the locations (what the director calls the “Vermeer tones” and the “soft yellow of the corn”) and tries to show the loyalty and affection the girl feels for her community. “But sometimes what you love holds you back. There is an enormous amount of courage needed to go against that or to decide for yourself, ‘I need something else.’”

When it came to casting, the director was looking for someone perched between childhood and adolescence - a girl who would have innocence, vulnerability and also a measure of defiance. “In that group, you have to have long skirts. I

Confetti Harvest Director: Tallulah Schwab Script: Chris Westendorp Production: Column Film Sales: Mountain Road Entertainment

10

11

wanted her (the main character Katelijne) to be a type who wasn’t comfortable in a skirt - a little bit of a wilder one.”

At the casting sessions, actress Hendrikje Nieuwerf made an immediate impression. “She was so smart and intelligent and she had that vulnerability but was also really quick in talking back.” Nieuwerf, the director enthuses, is a “marvellous actress” who, in spite of her inexperience, understood fully the subtleties of her role. “It was a lot of fun working with her because she is such a funny girl.”

Schwab acknowledges it has been a long journey toward her first feature. “I’ve just been doing the things that were interesting and fun and came on my path.” The experience of shooting a feature wasn’t so different, she suggests, to shooting a TV movie or short. “But I was fantastically excited I could do it.”

Her partner is fellow filmmaker Martin Koolhoven (the acclaimed director of such recent films as Winter In Wartime and Schnitzel Paradise). No, they’re not competitive with one another. “I feel it is very inspiring. We are obviously very interested in the same things. We love watching films together and discussing them. We’re never on each other’s turf because we are both directors - and directors are not on each others’ sets.”

Berlinale feature presentation

Eisenstein in Berlin

Peter Greenaway’s Dutch feature Eisenstein in Guanajuato has been selected for Berlinale competiton. The director tells Geoffrey Macnab of a lifelong fascination for one of cinema’s founding fathers.

Peter Greenaway discovered the films of Sergei Eisenstein by accident when he was seventeen in 1959 in an East London cinema.

The first film that caught his attention was Strike, made in 1925 when the Russian director was only 27. “When I asked around about this extraordinary film and filmmaker, most people said surely I meant Einstein not Eisenstein,” the British director recalls. “The same mistake occurred frequently.

“A crowd of Rotterdam journalists in 1929 rushed to the airport to greet him off a plane from Zurich.

Their faces fell in disappointment when this Russian stranger got off the plane. To his credit Eisenstein was always amused at the misidentification – a joke against himself which he was happy to share with Einstein.”

“And a curious use of side-stepping metaphor and associative poetry – all of which I came later to understand as characteristics of montage, cinema of comparison - film by association – an “only-connect”cinema, cinema at long last not a slave of prosaic narrative but hopping and skipping about with serious purpose to run like the human imagination runs, making everything associative till everything past, present and future, old and new, both sides of the wall - like Cubism - is involved and embraced.

Amazing!”

Greenaway had found his first cinema hero. He has run and rerun the Russian master’s films ever since, consumed everything he could in translation that he wrote and published, and followed all the news about him that seeped out of

Russia in bouts of unexpected liberated knowledge. He has also repeatedly visited his library in Moscow, the sites of his filmmaking in Odessa and St Petersburg, his place of forced exile in Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, his father’s art nouveau architecture in Riga.

‘I’d never seen such serious-purpose earlycinema films before’ Now, Greenaway has made his very own Eisenstein movie, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, which will screen in competition at the Berlinale. The film focuses on the Russian’s years in Mexico and is produced by Amsterdam-based production outfit Submarine. It was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.

Greenaway has long had strong ties with the Dutch industry. He was invited over to the Rotterdam Film Festival by Kees Kasander in the early 1980s - and Kasander went on to become his regular producer. At a time when British broadcasters and public funders turned their back on the British director, the Dutch were always open to his filmmaking and have supported many of his films over the last three decades. The Netherlands Film Fund is a regular backer of his work, which has often had Dutch themes (for example Nightwatching) as well as Dutch cast, crew and locations.

Photo: ©Submarine

Peter Greenaway

The young Greenaway subsequently steeped himself in Eisenstein’s work and that of his Soviet contemporaries. “I had never seen such serious-purpose early-cinema films before – the Americans seemed showy and sentimental, the Germans extravagant and unbelievable, the French too self-regarding and literary,” Greenaway states. “Here in Eisenstein was serious purpose and fast-moving self-conscious cinematic intelligence – no film in American early cinema moved as fast – a great many shots – and surprising violence of action and a fascination for violence itself.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato Director: Peter Greenaway Script: Peter Greenaway Production: Submarine (NL), in co-production with Fu Works (NL), Paloma Negra (MX), Edith Film (FI), Potemkino (BE) Sales: Films Boutique 12

13

“Eisenstein was endlessly curious, had an imagination like an elephant sponge (he later bequeathed his brain to the neuro-psychologist Luria) and he was hit hard with emotional traumas of sex and death in Mexico.”

Photo: ©Submarine

So what did Eisenstein discover in Mexico? “The fascination with the endless stimulations of sex and death – Eros and Thanatos,” Greenaway suggests. “I believe abroad, away from Soviet conspiracy and paranoia and all that dialectical materialism which no-one really understood how to define, leave alone how to support, away from the deadening hand of Stalinist Russia, and essentially being alive in the living-in-the-present country that is Mexico, he emotionally matured, learnt cross-identifying empathy and his later films demonstrated as much.”

14

Greenaway’s original idea was to make a documentary about Eisenstein in Mexico whilst he was making his film Que Viva Mexico.

“But I am always suspicious of the so-called truths officially offered by the documentary,” the director explains his change of tack.

“There surely can be no such thing as History, there can only be historians. History is unvisitable.

Every documentary has a vested interest which erodes and distorts a belief in any sort of truth - so we transformed those documentary concerns into a feature film where I

can hope to get at some verities by you knowing that I am purposefully inventing.”

The film was held up while Greenaway sought to find the actor who “would temporarily give me his heart, soul, brain, body and prick in the services of the depiction of a very human, very emotionally and anatomically naked – vomiting, shitting, weeping, fucking, sweating, howling Eisenstein.” Enter the Finnish actor Elmer Bäck.

This was never going to be a hagiography. “It was hopefully going to be a recognisable cinematic portrait of ten days in the life of a very great filmmaker, but there was to be no worshipful genuflection.”

‘He was endlessly curious, had an imagination like an elephant sponge’ Last year, Greenaway won a BAFTA for outstanding British contribution to cinema. He already has a CBE. There is a sense that the British are belatedly acknowledging the part he has played in film culture over the last 50 years. The Dutch have supported him for many years but even their faith has sometimes wavered.

He wryly observes that he was told

by Dutch film producers, Dutch

15

financiers, and Dutch film distributors that this film on Eisenstein was not commercial enough. “All that gossiping and complaining stopped instantaneously the moment (Berlin festival director) Dieter Kosslick accepted us in competition at the Berlinale,” From then on, everyone told him he had made “a wild and daring film”.

“The Dutch are consensus people: they always need to get someone else to make an opinion and then they all stand in line echoing that opinion,” he comments.

Greenaway knows his films have “a reputation for being different and difficult.” However, after making around 80 of them over the last half century, fifteen of them features, he hasn’t wavered in his belief that “a filmmaker cannot really truly make a film customized for anyone else.

Such a calculation is an absurdity and also an act of arrogance.”

Berlinale feature presentation

Sacha Polak

Photo: Bas Losekoot

Emotional drive

Sacha Polak talks to Melanie Goodfellow about her new film Zurich ahead of its premiere in Berlinale Forum.

Filmmaker Sacha Polak’s second feature Zurich, supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, is a searing portrait of grief revolving around a woman who discovers her late husband was leading a double life.

Like Polak’s debut feature Hemel, about a sexually promiscuous young woman grappling with her fear of intimacy, Zurich centres on an equally intriguing and complex female protagonist. “It’s a really sad love story with a really, extreme female character,” says Polak, who developed the script closely with screenwriter Helena van der Meulen, who also wrote the screenplay for Hemel.

Dutch singer-songwriter Wende Snijders, known to her fans simply as Wende, plays Nina, a professional singer whose life crumbles when her larger-than-life, lorry-driver husband Boris dies in a road accident, leaving her behind.

Set against a no-man’s land of

motorways somewhere between the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, Zurich follows Nina as she hangs out in lorry parks and service stations, searching for traces of her husband; agonising over the mystery of his second, secret existence, and occasionally seeking comfort in the cabs of other truck drivers. “The storyline grew out of a news article about a female paediatrician who hung out in lorry parks at night and gave drivers blow jobs but it developed into something totally different,” reveals Polak.

The director went on a road trip of her own with production designer Jorien Sont as part of her research for the film. “We went to truck driver festivals and stopped off at roadside bars. We met a lot of people, asked lots of questions and took a lot of pictures,” explains Polak.

It was van der Meulen’s idea to work with Snijders. She showed Polak an episode of the TV show 24 Hours with… in which a celebrity and interviewer spend 24 hours locked in a room together. “I immediately found her fascinating. I liked her and thought it would be great to do something with her,” explains Polak.

Snijders puts in an accomplished performance opposite German actor Sascha Alexander Gersak, recently seen in the German Guantanamo Bay drama Five Years, as Matthias, a truck driver with whom Nina embarks on a

passionate affair. Without spoiling the plot, Polak and van der Meulen have devised a clever two-part structure that will keep spectators piecing together the full story right up until the end.

Amsterdam-based producer Marleen Slot of Viking Film produced Zurich, with Germany’s Rohfilm and Belgium’s A Private View as co-producers. Slot previously produced Polak’s short film Brother (Broer) while at Amsterdam-based Lemming Film, where she worked for seven years before setting up Viking in 2011, as well as the director’s 2013 auto-biographical doc New Boobs.

Polak has strong ties with the Berlinale. Hemel premiered in the Forum in 2012, where it won the FIPRESCI prize, and Zurich was developed with the support of the festival’s Berlinale Residency programme, which Polak attended alongside directors Ireland’s Rebecca Daly, Iranian Rafi Pitts and Israeli Samuel Maoz.

As Zurich starts its festival circuit, Polak is already deep into the development of her third feature, Vita and Virginia, selected for this year’s CineMart (see p22). It is based on a screenplay adaptation by Dame Eileen Atkins of her theatre play of the same name about the love affair between Vita Sackville-West and writer Virginia Woolf.

Zurich Director: Sacha Polak Script: Helena van der Meulen Production: Viking Film

16

17

Berlinale feature presentation

Play it again Sam Sam de Jong

Young Dutch director Sam de Jong has enjoyed a meteoric rise since his graduation short Magnesium was chosen for Sundance 2013, reports Geoffrey Macnab. Now his debut feature Prince opens Berlinale Generation 14plus.

The subject matter of Magnesium was brutal. This was a film about a young gymnast awaiting an abortion. Its “engaged storytelling” (as the director describes it) caught the imagination of American audiences. A second short, Marc Jacobs, a coming of age film about a young Moroccan kid who never sees his father and is desperate to own Marc Jacobs sunglasses, was also well received – and selected for Berlinale Shorts 2014.

Now, de Jong has US agency support (through UTA) and has completed his debut feature Prince, an equally hard hitting drama, this time about a troubled teenager. “I started reflecting on Magnesium which I liked as a short film and as a grad movie but I didn’t think it was the tone of voice I wanted to pursue as a director,” de Jong comments on what

led him to develop and make Prince.

“All my previous work is within the realm of social realism. For Prince, I wanted to go way beyond that.

It started out as a social realist story with non-professional actors from a poor part of town. It evolves into a more surreal piece of work.”

The film starts from a conventional enough premise. It is about four kids growing up, wanting to be rock stars and wanting to “have respect and status.” The early scenes are shot in downbeat, documentary style but as de Jong tries to reflect the dreams of his characters, the style changes. “It becomes more like a music video in a way,” the director suggests. “For instance, when he gets new shoes and feels super cool, we are almost in a Grease-like musical vibe where we are steadycamming and spinning 360 around him.”

In Prince, De Jong elaborates, he wanted to begin in a sober, Bresson-like way but then to make the film “more dynamic and dark and more dramatically lit” as it progressed. De Jong has always moved easily between documentary and drama. Prince has elements of both. One of its main actors, Ayoub Elasri, is the same boy who appeared in Marc Jacobs.

The film was made through Amsterdam-based production company 100% Halal, with whom de Jong has worked since his film

school days. “They were young guys just starting their company and I had just started filmmaking. We connected.” Prince received backing from the Netherlands Film Fund through its new low budget scheme.

‘It evolves into a more surreal piece of work’

De Jong enjoyed working quickly and on a small budget. “I liked the energy and that you had no time to doubt your decision,” he states.

“It was a very stimulating way to work because I felt completely trusted by them (the Fund). They gave me good feedback on the script. Their vision is to give as much freedom as possible, even to give us the possibility to fail or experiment.”

The feature was also supported by global youth media company VICE Media, which is helping to devise an online campaign for Prince in advance of its release in June. And with the film only just completed, de Jong is already working on several new movies, he confides.

Still in his early 20s, de Jong is quickly racking up credits. Alongside other young directors like Morgan Knibbe and Sjoerd Oostrik, he is part of what some are billing as a “new wave” in Dutch cinema.

“I think there are a few young filmmakers standing up and making new things that are becoming pretty interesting. I definitely feel there is a new generation coming up and, of course, I feel part of that,” the director declares.

Prince Director: Sam de Jong Script: Sam de Jong Production: 100% Halal in co-production with VICE Media

18

19

Production overview Overview

Dutch films Berlinale 2015 Panorama

Culinary Cinema

Confetti Harvest

The Summer of Sangaile

Sergio Herman, Fucking Perfect

Dir: Tallulah Schwab Sc: Chris Westendorp Prod: Column Film Sales: Mountain Road Entertainment. Growing up in a strict protestant community Katelijne and her environment struggle to accept her love for stories and reading.

Dir: Alante Kavaite Prod: Frailita Films (Lithuania), Les Films D’Antoine (France) Dutch Co-producer Viking Film Seventeen-year-old Sangaile is fascinated by stunt planes but afraid of heights. But then she meets Auste who, unlike Sangaile, lives her life to the fullest.

Dir and Scr: Willemiek Kluijfhout Prod: Trueworks Sales: Fortissimo Films Top chef Sergio Herman decides to close his 3-Michelin-star restaurant Oud Sluis.

A revealing story about perfection, ambition and sacrifices.

Nena

Giovanni and the Water Ballet

Necktie Youth

Dir: Saskia Diesing Scr: Saskia Diesing, Esther Gerritsen Prod: KeyFilm (NL), in co-production with Coin Film (DE) Sales: Mountain Road Entertainment. A painfully funny family-drama about with illness, suicide and unconditional love.

Dir and Scr: Astrid Bussink Prod: Een van de Jongens Sales: NPO Sales Ten-year old Giovanni has a dream: he wants to compete in the Dutch Synchronized Swimming Championships, which is seen as a typical girls sport...

Dir: Sibs Shongwe-La Mer Prod: Urucumedia, South Africa Dutch ­ co-producer: 100% Halal Desperate for distraction, Jabz and his best friend September go on a drug-fueled joyride through the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg as they try to deal with the memory of Emily, a girl who live-streamed her suicide one year ago.

Competition

Forum

Generation 14plus

Generation Kplus

World premiere

World premiere

World premiere

International premiere

Eisenstein in Guanajuato

Dir and Scr: Peter Greenaway Prod: Submarine (NL), in co-production with Fu Works (NL), Paloma Negra (MX), Edith Film (FI), Potemkino (BE) Sales: Films Boutique 1931. Greenaway explores the mind of a creative genius facing fears of love, sex and death during ten passionate days that shaped the rest of the career.

Zurich

Prince

Dir: Sacha Polak Sc: Helena van der Meulen Prod: Viking Film. In a desperate attempt to leave the past behind, Nina wanders along Europe’s motorways.

Slowly it becomes clear that Nina’s drive to hang around in the truckers’ scene is a result of the pain caused by the ultimate betrayal that has befallen her.

Dir and Scr: Sam de Jong Prod: 100% Halal in co-production with VICE Media A troubled teenager attempts to conquer the love of his life by becoming the baddest boy on the block.

World premiere

Minority co-production World premiere

Cha Va Con/Big Father, Small Father and other Stories

Dir and Scr: Di Phan Dang Prod: VBLOCK Media (Viet), Acrobat Films (FR), Dutch Co-prod: Volya Films (NL) Desperate tales of life and love in 1990s Saigon.

World premiere

A Hole in My Heart

Berlin Co-pro Market Dutch Project The Hero

Dir: Antoinette Beumer Scr: Marjolein Beumer Prod: Rachel van Bommel, Koji Nelissen of Millstreet Films After a woman and her family fall victim to a series of seemingly coincidental violent attacks, she recognises her attacker in an old photo of her late father. This leads her towards the truth about what happened to her father in WWII.

Dir and Scr: Mees Peijnenburg Prod: 100% Halal Short fiction film. A few years ago Henri lost his brother in a road accident, this event confronts him with issues about mortality and the fragility of life.

20

21

Talent development

The X factor Dorien van de Pas, head of New Screen NL and consultant Talent Development at the Netherlands Film Fund, talks to Nick Cunningham about the plethora of emerging Dutch film talent.

It is some achievement for a small to medium-sized European industry to secure five feature selections and one short at Berlinale, a festival second only to Cannes in terms of influence and prestige. What’s more, three of these feature selections are directed by first-timers. Saskia Diesing’s Nena, Tallulah Schwab’s Confetti Harvest and Sam de Jong’s Prince screen in Berlin Generation.

Meanwhile, Berlinale Forum has chosen Zurich, the second film of Sacha Polak, while the short film A Hole in My Heart by prolific mid-twenty something Mees Peijnenburg is selected for the festival’s Generation plus section.

Add to this the IFFR 2015 selection of debut features Between 10 and 12 (Peter Hoogendoorn), Son of Mine (Remy van Heugten) and Marinus Groothof’s The Sky Above Us, as well as Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s spectacular wind-surfing odyssey Atlantic, selected for Toronto 2014, and one can conclude two things.

Firstly, that a quality-laden production outlook seems secure for the Netherlands industry.

Secondly, that at an executive level, the right decisions are being made to allow the development of vital and energetic film talent.

The Netherlands Film Fund runs a number of funding initiatives designed to allow new writing and directorial talent to emerge. The Oversteek scheme, a collaboration with the Media Fund and the broadcasters VPRO and NTR, funds the production of two films by first or second-time directors to the tune of €860,000 per film per year. Within the scheme, the cinematic signature and vision of the filmmaker are essential criteria. Saskia Diesing’s Nena and 2015 IFFR Tiger film Son of Mine are Oversteek films, as have been numerous landmark films from the Netherlands’ recent past, such as Sascha Polak’s Hemel and Urszula Antoniak’s Nothing Personal.

The Fund’s newly expanded Wildcard programme supports maverick film talent straight out of film school, offering them complete creative licence to go forth and make a film wherever, however and about whatever they want, unsullied by any form of external interference.

Two fiction Wildcards, each valued at €80,000, are offered, as is one animation Wildcard (€40,000) and three documentary awards, each worth €40,000. Such is the standard of Wildcard recipients, it was (maybe) inevitable that, at some point, one of their films would be selected for a major festival. Step forward 23-year old Morgan Knibbe, whose Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, an extraordinary ode to the plight of refugees entering Europe, was selected for IDFA 2014 main

competition and was nominated for the festival’s top prize.

The Fund’s low budget funding scheme selects three (as of 2015) projects per year, releasing €200,000 in funding for each. This amounts to 75% of the film’s budget. Sam de Jong’s Berlin selection Prince was one such selection. “What I like about Prince is that it is really unique and different, and is a film of the now,” stresses the Fund’s New Screen NL head Dorien van de Pas. As with Sam de Jong, A Hole in My Heart director Mees Peijnenburg also made a short that was screened at Berlin 2014 (Even Cowboys Get to Cry). “This is interesting as those two young men are both in Berlin two years in succession, which is rather unique in the Netherlands.

A Hole in the Heart, for which the Fund gave post-production support, is shot in black and white and is very poetic. Mees tells urgent stories, but the form is always different.”

“There is a lot of talent emerging in the Netherlands,” van de Pas continues, including young upcoming producers. “It is great that the Fund can offer various opportunities to support their projects to give them more and more chances to succeed. They are given a lot more freedom and I feel that their creative and energy levels are boosted, which is good for the development of Dutch film culture as a whole. We can all be very excited.”

Still: Mees Peijnenburg’s A Hole in My Heart

22

23

Sector report

Talent connector

Quizzed on how she first got into the talent agent business, Henneman replies with a laugh: “It’s very simple. I fell in love with an actor.” The daughter of artists, Henneman reveals she had originally planned to go into law.

“I’d watched my parents struggle and wanted nothing to do with the arts. After school I enrolled to study

law. But there’s a saying in Dutch, ‘Blood creeps where it can’t go’.

[But] I couldn’t see myself as a lawyer at 22, so I went to film school.”

Despite graduating with top honours from the London Film Institute, Henneman eventually decided directing was not for her.

“I loved directing but the people I knew there who have since made it were so focused. I felt my strengths were elsewhere. I made the intuitive but rather unhip decision to go back to do a Masters in Entertainment Law,” she explains.

Henneman then started managing the contracts of her now husband, the popular actor Daniël Boissevain, who she met when he auditioned for a film she was directing. “Bit by bit other actors came to me asking if I could help them too and that’s how it all started,” says Henneman, who went on to work for Features Creative Management for eight years before founding Henneman Agency in 2005.

Today, her company represents more than one hundred top Dutch talents, ranging from actors and presenters through to directors – such as Mijke de Jong, Ben Sombogaart and newcomer Shariff Korver, whose debut feature The Intruder premiered at Toronto – as well as writers and composers.

In a strategic move, Henneman branched out into representing writers and directors a few years

ago, as a way of getting involved in projects early on in their genesis.

Her initial aim was to secure more work for the actors on the agency’s books but the move has resulted in the company increasingly packaging projects from scratch.

Recent productions initiated at the agency include Anne de Clercq’s upcoming Jack Orders a Brother. De Clercq co-wrote the screenplay with another Henneman client, screenwriter Anne Barnhoorn.

Now, after a decade successfully focused on the Netherlands, Henneman is increasingly keen to work across Europe. Under the European Talent Network initiative due to be announced at Berlin, Hennemann Agency will combine forces with Spiel-Kind and Team Players to create a one-stop shop for producers who want to source European talent. “There’s increasing demand for European actors with the rise of series like Game of Thrones, Vikings and even Marco Polo set against non-US backdrops,” says Henneman.

She also wants to explore the European remake market, citing the 2007 Dutch film Love is All which was also adapted for German and Belgian cinema audiences. “I’m looking for projects which can be shot on relatively small budgets and then be remade,” says Henneman.

“I know some people object to remakes but I see it as doing different versions of the same play.”

‘I loved directing but knew my strengths were elsewhere’ Photo: Minke Faber

Dutch talent management firm Henneman Agency will celebrate its 10th birthday at the Berlinale.

Founder Vanessa Henneman talks to Melanie Goodfellow about future plans.

The 65th Berlinale promises to be a busy edition for Vanessa Henneman, founder of leading Dutch talent management firm, Amsterdam-based Henneman Agency. Aside from feting her company’s 10th birthday in style during the festival, the talent agent will also make her first official outing as Benelux’s new representative on the board of the EFA, having been elected in late December to replace outgoing Luxembourg producer Jani Thiltges.

She’s also set to co-launch a panEuropean initiative, the European Talent Network, in co-operation with German agency Spiel-Kind and Danish counterpart Team Players at Berlin. In addition, her company represents the Netherlands’ Shooting Star Abbey Hoes, star of Saskia Diesing’s Nena (see p6).

Vanessa Henneman

24

25

Co-production focus

Market forces CineMart head Marit van den Elshout explains to Nick Cunningham how the newly streamlined event is still the first port of call for independent producers looking to raise co-production finance.

‘We focus even more on content and the strongest potential partnership’

One should never tire of stressing the enduring influence of CineMart, ‘the mother of all co-production forums’, as it is colloquially, and regularly, referred to. It is an event that has, since its first edition in 1983, revolutionised the process of independent film finance and has, throughout this period, helped fill the prime selection slots of all the major film festivals with daring, innovative, though-provoking, shocking and heart-rending films.

Following the down-sized ‘less-ismore’ principle set in 2014, this year sees 24 projects in selection.

The reasons for this reduction are obvious. With a plethora of rival and/or complementary co-pro platforms selecting ever-increasing numbers of projects, the chances of success become more limited.

So the number was reduced, and a more vigorous assessment was made of each project’s prospects of coming to fruition.

“In Europe, especially nowadays, there are a lot of projects being fed into the market which can’t all be super-strong,” confirms CineMart head Marit van den Elshout. “If we are lucky, 70% of these films are

made, and if we are doubly lucky then some of those films will find a distributor, so I think it is really our responsibility to look at our formula and to determine what we are doing with these selected projects.”

“Therefore we decide to focus even more on the content of the projects and the strongest potential partnership. Sometimes it can be a bit passive just to wait for the meetings to come along. Now we want to work a lot more closely with the projects and by mapping their goals, expectations, and potential partnership, hope to make their days here in Rotterdam as effective as possible.”

The 24 projects are diverse, ranging from a 3D project from France on Merce Cunningham to a Phillipines zombie film, to the latest project from Belgian provocateur Koen Mortier (Ex Drummer, 2007).

In addition, there are two Dutch films in the 2015 CineMart selection and three with minority Dutch involvement. Internationally acclaimed photographer Erwin Olaf’s feature debut A Shining Flaw promises much, a re-telling of the life of Casanova, the world’s most renowned lover, as seen through the eyes of his first love, the disfigured Galathee. “It is very intriguing that this well-known photographer is moving into the film world with his really strong visual background,” comments van den Elshout. “It’s an

Rotterdam Lab of IFFR

26

27

Eyeworks project with a relatively high budget for CineMart standards, and it is interesting because of what Olaf can bring to the project.”

Dutch directing doyenne Nanouk Leopold returns to CineMart with Cobain, scripted by the project’s producer Stienette Bosklopper. The duo have worked together on all of Leopold’s films, most recently on It’s All So Quiet which opened Berlin Panorama in 2013. Cobain tells the story of a boy who, when his drug-addicted, newly pregnant, mother refuses to clean up her act, decides to save his unborn brother.

“Stienette’s script is very well written and very emotional and dark, but there is wit as well, and light and humour. I am very excited about it,” asserts van den Elshout.

The three Dutch minority co-pros are led by Vita and Virginia, co-produced by Viking Film and directed by Sacha Polak (see p14).

The film is a study of the close friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. “It is an extremely interesting opportunity for a Dutch director who is still early in her career to work on a big UK production,” says van den Elshout.

The other Dutch minority co-productions are the Greek The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea by Syllas Tzoumerkas (Dutch co-producer, PRPL’s Ellen Havenith) and Nathalie Teirlinck’s Tonic Immobility (CTM Pictures).

IFFR feature presentation

A passion for music Like a number of his previous films, Ramon Gieling’s feature length doc Erbarme Dich: Matthäus Passion Stories, screening in IFFR Live, is an ode to devotion.

Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion is one of those core pieces within the classical repertoire to which people turn for solace and psychological fortification.

In his feature length film Erbarme Dich: Matthew Passion Stories, selected for IFFR 2015, director Ramon Gieling finds an army of witnesses who will attest to this, articulate advocates who are willing to explain how the music has affected them so fundamentally.

These range from noted opera director Peter Sellars and conductor Simon Halsey to a dancer, a grieving widower, a painter, a soprano and a daughter whose existence was guaranteed because her mother changed her mind about a forced miscarriage when she heard the music. “The consolation in (this) music is that it is even sadder than you are,” explains Sellars.

Gieling took a similar approach to his core material in both About Canto (2011 IDFA competition), about the devotion inspired by Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato for four pianos, and the 2004 IFFR Tiger competition film En un momento dado, in which supporters of Barcelona FC speak of their

adoration for the club’s talismanic player and manager Johan Cruyff.

But Erbarme Dich… is an altogether richer film, mannered and stylised and lit in dramatic chiaroscuro, and one in which the performers play to an audience of homeless people.

Gieling developed the idea of playing to the homeless while shooting his feature documentary Home, about refugees living in the centre of Amsterdam.

“I wanted to go a step further with the Bach film and step out of reality in the sense that I tried to create my own universe within a non-existing world,” the director stresses. “So the oratorio is performed in an old, abandoned church, recreated in the studio and based on the one the refugees occupied in Home. When I filmed with the refugees, I thought that if we played the music for them then I could really comfort them, and do something other than for the rich people who normally sit in the first two rows at a classical concert.

“The dispossessed, the homeless, they are the people that really suffer.

St Matthew’s Passion is a story about suffering. The homeless may not be crucified but they do suffer without knowing why, so I thought it would be very interesting to see the reflection of the story of suffering on the faces of those wounded people.”

Gieling maintains that whenever he approaches a new project he is

determined to do something he has never done before, as much to stave off boredom as much as anything else. In this film therefore he created what he calls ‘long lines,’ extended travelling shots which play in visual counterpoint to the music’s lachrymose tones. He also commissioned a new translation of the text so as to make the words sound new.

‘The homeless are the people that really suffer’ “When I film I always try to personalise the subject,” Gieling continues. “When I heard the Ebarme Dich aria (one of the central arias within the Bach oratorio) the first time 30 years ago, of course I was knocked out. I had never before heard such a piece of music in my whole life. It has a melody line that really hits your nervous system. It sears open old wounds, old scars, but in a bittersweet way, not in a violent way. I think that is the paradox of music. It wounds you and it heals you at the same time.

“This is really music from heaven, but not in a sentimental way, and I can only wonder how Bach can write these notes and these melody lines.

It is timeless. For me it was like it was written yesterday. Or maybe it was written tomorrow.”

Nick Cunningham.

Erbarme Dich - Matthäus Passion Stories Director: Ramón Gieling Production: KeyDocs Sales: Doc & Film International

28

29

IFFR feature presentation

Other side of the tracks ‘We film it how we feel…’

Remy van Heugten

Remy van Heugten’s Tiger selection Son of Mine is in a very different register to his previous film, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

Valentino (2013) was a romantic comedy. By contrast, van Heugten’s new film is a gritty social/psychological drama about a father and a son, “modern outlaws” living a tough existence in an impoverished part of the Netherlands. “This is a story that has been in me for quite a long time,” declares van Heugten, who co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborator Gustaaf Peek.

Son of Mine, he explains, is a deeply personal project. The story “comes really from inside.”

Photo: Ivo de Bruin

In the film, the father Lei (Bart Slegers) is a man in his 50s who ekes out an existence any way he can. He has a debt to a crime boss (Johan Leysen) but little chance of paying it off. His son Jeffrey (Vincent van der Valk) is prepared to go to extreme lengths to help him. “It is basically all bits and pieces of stories I actually experienced myself or witnessed,” claims van Heugten.

Van Heugten is from a middle-class background and doesn’t claim that his life has been anything like as tough as that of his protagonists.

“I was quite on the sideline in a way but I had my feet in it once in a while,” the director says of the brutal world inhabited by his characters. “I grew up in a little village and you know that in these little villages, everybody meets each other - high class, low class, middle class, it doesn’t matter. We were all together all the time.”

Some of his friends were drawn into drug dealing and petty crime.

“There were a few that went to school, like me…(and) there were a few that died actually.” The director ended up living in Heerlen, a small city near the German border that has a reputation for its criminal underworld. It was within a mining area in which the mines had closed resulting in high unemployment.

We don’t think of Holland as a class-divided country but van Heugten points out that there are parts of the country with very strong divisions between rich and poor.

“We film it how we feel,” is how the director describes his collaboration with cinematographer Mark van Aller. “Where we started was to make the film very real.” They were also looking for contrasts: the lyricism in the industrial landscapes and the sense of menace that can sometimes be felt in seemingly idyllic rural settings. “That was the

Son of Mine Director: Remy van Heugten Production: Bind

30

31

basis of the cinematography - to constantly play with the beauty and ugliness of this place.” And casting was key. Van Heugten wanted only actors who “felt deeply emotionally involved with the story.”

Son of Mine was acquired at script stage by distribution company Wild Bunch Benelux (now September Films). The film will be given a Dutch release early in 2015. The director acknowledges that international audiences may not pick up on the dialect and accents of the characters or on some of the references that give the film its intense local flavour. Even so, he is confident that they will appreciate the rawness and emotional authenticity of the film.

“These people who live there speak this dialect,” the writer-director underlines. He adds that he hopes the film will show viewers “another part of Holland” than that traditionally shown on the screen. “There are a lot of social problems that no-one knows.”

The film was made through production outfit Bind Film and supported through the Netherlands Film Fund’s “Oversteek” scheme that gives almost complete creative freedom to the directors of low budget films that they have backed.

It’s a film that has been made “without any compromises” - and that’s precisely how van Heugten hopes to work in future too.

IFFR feature presentation

Photo: Jelena Jankovic

Life during wartime Marinus Groothof

For his feature debut, Marinus Groothof turned to the politically divisive decision of NATO to bomb Belgrade in the late Spring of 1999, action which ultimately led to the withdrawal of the Yugoslav military from Kosovo and put an end to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Nick Cunningham reports.

In Marinus Goothof’s The Sky Above Us, world-premiering in IFFR Live and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, the citizens of Belgrade are terrified every night by the shock and awe spectacle of their capital being bombed. Amidst the fear and carnage, three core protagonists discover that they must create their own reality in order to hold on to their sanity.

The fates of actress Ana and Sloba, a technician, are linked to the Radio Television Serbia building, a ‘legitimate’ NATO target. As for Sloban’s co-worker Bojan, he finds his own kind of refuge in Belgrade’s nightlife, and his romantic involvement with two women detracts from his fear of the war, and the bombs.

The project was born out of Groothof’s short film Sunset from a Rooftop which was short-listed for the 2010 Academy Awards. Groothof and producer Sander Verdonk of CTM Pictures pitched the long project at the 2010 Holland Film Meeting Co-production Platform, where it picked up the Kodak NPP Development Award. It was subsequently pitched at CineMart 2011.

‘Each character is forced to redefine who they are’ “The film is about the battle to keep your identity in a time that asks you to define yourself,” explains Groothof. “Each of these characters is forced to redefine who they are and what they stand for. Each of them tries not to get involved with what is happening around them but they cannot ignore it. They have to deal with and re-evaluate their lives.

Because the time around them demands that from them.”

The Sky Above Us is a film almost devoid of happiness. Couples fight and colleagues squabble and youths dance dementedly in makeshift nightclubs, while popping ecstasy pills. If love can be found, then it is on the rooftops as the bombs rain down and as the sirens sound. As actress Ana notes: “Fear can really fuck you up.”

The Sky Above Us Director: Marinus Groothof Production: CTM Pictures (NL), in co-production with Entre Chien et Loup (BE), Art & Popcorn (RS), Heretic (GR) Sales: Docs & Film International and Heretic Outreach 32

33

Anti-NATO protest is expressed in many ways throughout the film, most strikingly as the protesters stand on one of the arterial bridges across the river, acting as human shields. Ana (in the film a recognized actress) continually refuses her boss’ requests to address the protesters as she believes this is for pro-government (pro-Milosevic) purposes. “During this period, state companies poured out their employees to guard the bridge, day and night. It was a very patriotic thing to do,” points out Groothof. “And they were spoken to by all kinds of public figures, including actors and actresses, and they would chant ant-Western stuff.

But Ana doesn’t want anything at all to do with this. She just wants to go on with her acting, and wants nothing of the war in her life. And she doesn’t want to be a tool of the state. She just wants to be a woman who lives her own life.”

Groothof stresses that the most satisfying part of the filmmaking process was in the writing of the screenplay. “Most of the shaping was in the writing. Most of the editing was in the writing. Of course you focus more when you are physically editing out stuff that may not be necessary, or which takes attention away from what your story is really about, but I had the feeling in this film that the most creative part was in the writing. I loved that phase - but it’s also the hardest phase.”

Production overview Overview

Dutch films at IFFR Tiger Awards Competition

Limelight

IFFR+

World premiere

World premiere

World premiere

European premiere

World premiere

Dir: Remy van Heugten Scr: Gustaaf Peek Prod: Bind. Drama about the oppressive relationship between a father and a son who are struggling as modern outlaws.

Dir, Scr and Prod: Melanie Bonajo A film about ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew that could have the same significance for our day as LSD had for the 1960s.

Dir and Scr: Kris Kristinsson Wedding day: “the happiest day of your life”? That’s questionable.

Dir and Scr: Sander Burger Prod: KeyDocs. Can a robot build a human relationship in order to meet future care demands for elderly who are lonely and suffering from dementia?

Tiger Awards shorts

Dir and Scr: Jan-Willem van Ewijk Prod: Augustus Productions, in co-pro with Man’s Film (BE), Endorphine Prod (DE) Sales: Fortissimo Films. An epic journey from Morocco to Europe by windsurf. Festivals: TIFF, Busan IFF, Dubai IFF

World premiere

Night Soil – Fake Paradise

Hearts Know * the Runaway Brides

Atlantic.

World premiere

Alice Cares

Conducting Boijmans Photo: Keydocs

Son of Mine

Spectrum

Dir and Scr: Sonia Herman Dolz Prod: Interakt. A compelling film showing us unique moments in the working life of a charismatic museum director.

World premiere

Time and Place a Talk with My Mother

World premiere

World premiere

12 Months in 1 Day

Between 10 and 12

Director, Script and Prod: Roy Villevoye Sales: LIMA Amsterdam As Papuans build a traditional sculpture for a deceased family member, the filmmaker has a business conflict elsewhere.

Dir and Scr: Martijn Veldhoen Prod: Dutch Mountain Film (NL), co-pro with PVH Films.

During the 1950’s an artist’s family moves in to an unheeded Amsterdam canal house.

Director: Dré Didderiëns Script: Lies Janssen Production: Zuidenwind Filmprodukties A film about the intensity of life, dealing with loss and the inner struggle of a remarkable young man.

Dir: Margot Schaap Scr: Margot Schaap, Johan Sonnenschein Prod: Een van de Jongens. Three New Year’s Eve party goers drift away not for 24 hours but for an entire year.

Dir and Scr: Peter Hoogendoorn Prod: Keren Cogan Films (NL), Phanta Film (NL) Between the hours of 10 and 12 a piece of news stops a family in its tracks. (Venice Days, Thessaloniki Int’l Film Festival)

Dir: Rosie Stapel Prod: Rose is Rose Film Sales: Daan van der Have. An 85 year-old pruning master and gardener chat about food, the weather and the world, sharing their knowledge of horticulture.

World premiere

World premiere

Dir and Scr: Marinus Groothof Prod: CTM Pictures (NL), Entre Chien et Loup (BE), Art & Popcorn (RS), Heretic (GR) Sales: Doc & Film International and Heretic Outreach. As NATO bombs Belgrade three people try to retain their sanity while dealing with their fears.

Dir: Erik van Lieshout Scr: Erik van Lieshout, Suzanne Weenink, Inge Hardman Prod: Popov Film. A hyper-personal epic about the artist as a worker, about the balance of power between producer and filmmaker and about the collective versus the autocracy of the artist.

Voice-Over

Bright Future

My White Shirt

World premiere

World premiere

Portrait of a Garden

World premiere

Blinder

Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice

World premiere

The Life of Jean-Marie

Erbarme Dich - Matthäus Passion Stories

Director and Script: Tim Leyendekker Production: absent without leave Consisting of 6386 photographs representing all the objects and characters featured in the English translation of José Saramago’s novel Ensaio sobre a Cegueira.

Dir and Scr: Daan Veldhuizen Production: Viewpoint Productions Sales: Illumina Films Two worlds meet at the crossroads of their respective desire; the one longing for authenticity, the other for modernity.

Director: Peter van Houten Script: Peter van Houten Production: Anna-Zharkov-Film There is Heaven and there is Earth / There is God and there is Man / Yet how does one live? Jean-Marie shows us how he does it.

Dir and Scr: Ramon Gieling Prod: KeyDocs Sales: Doc & Film International. An audience of the homeless listen to St Matthew’s Passion as creative luminaries relate their special relationship with the music of Bach.

The Sky Above Us

Work

Photo: Keydocs

World premiere

34

35

EYE education

In the zone EYE’s education programme MovieZone is becoming ever more adventurous in the digital age. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

Manon Sandee, senior project leader education at EYE, is one of the figures behind the ongoing kids’ media revolution. Part of her job is to alert youngsters to the riches available within the EYE building, which has its own museum and cinemas, as well as a huge archive that includes books, films, stills, posters and other memorabilia.

Sandee entered media education at the Dutch Institute for Film Educ.

“Twelve to 18 years old is a very nice age. It is the age where children develop themselves, and discover the world around them - and their place in it,” is how Sandee describes the lure of working with youngsters.

“It’s a very difficult target group to reach. That is also what I really like.

Every time you have to find new ways to reach this target group.”

One reason kids are such an elusive audience is that their tastes and enthusiasms change quickly as they migrate from platform to platform.

One moment, Sandee notes, they’ll like facebook. The next it will be snapchat. Sandee’s job at EYE has been to come up with new ways to reach this audience. One successful initiative has been interactive online series Max & Billy’s Drill Machine Girl. This was a collaboration with producer Jeroen

Koopman at NewBeTV, and has been picked up for online broadcast

by France 4 in 2015.

The 10 episode series, nominated for an International Digital Emmy Award, was available on the online platform serie.moviezone.nl. The idea was to offer the young viewers the chance to explore movies in depth: to watch them but also to learn about their history and the techniques behind them by clicking on special videos and text links. Max & Billy’s Drill Machine Girl should be a pleasurable experience in its own right but it should also encourage critical thinking. Young viewers watching it will realise that movies don’t just happen by themselves. They need to be scripted, designed and edited. To date, the series has reached 690,000 viewers on Dutch broadcaster Veronica within the 13-19 age range.

Sandee acknowledges that moving to EYE’s sleek new modernist headquarters has been an inspiration to her and her team. “For me, it (EYE) felt like a new organisation.

We had freedom in our work.”

For all the breakthroughs that MovieZone continues to make, it is a source of frustration to Sandee and her team that film education is still not part of the national curriculum in the Netherlands.

“We’ve started a lobby of course… not only EYE but also many other film organisations,” Sandee says of

the ongoing efforts to make the Dutch government take film culture more seriously. “We find it very strange,” she suggests of the refusal to recognise film culture in schools.

Visual language, she points out, is “such an important way for communicating, especially for youngsters.”

Sandee is already plotting several new initiatives. She and her team are already involved in Bardo’s Filmgebeuren, a follow-up to Max & Billy’s Drill Machine Girl. “Actually, that series is even more successful because it is a YouTube series and even more interactive,” she notes.

The series, consisting of six episodes, has posted and average of 60,000 to 70,000 views per episode, and the short film, which resulted from the series, has already reached over 100,000 online views on YouTube and 159,000 views on Veronica. EYE is collaborating with NewBeTV on another series.

MovieZone will shortly be launching a new fundraising drive. “We always have to find extra financial ways of doing what we do,” the EYE education project leader stresses.

Nonetheless, if Sandee wants to measure the success of the initiatives she and her team have already hatched, the evidence is there in the very big digital footprint that Max & Billy has left behind.

‘You have to find new ways to reach the 12-18 target group’

MovieZone’s Bardo’s Filmgebeuren

36

37

Feature profile

Dutch daring Klaas de Jong

Roel Reiné’s sea-faring epic The Admiral, about Dutch maritime hero Michiel De Ruyter, launches internationally at the EFM in Berlin. Producer Klaas de Jong talks to Melanie Goodfellow.

The Admiral revolves around a daring raid by the Dutch Navy in 1667 on England’s biggest naval base of Chatham, during which it destroyed 13 ships and towed away the flagship Royal Charles.

“Many British people don’t know about this episode these days but it’s an important moment in Dutch history,” comments producer Klaas de Jong. The Dutch staged the pre-emptive attack in response to fears that England’s King Charles II was about to renege on signing a treaty to end the Second AngloDutch War over sea and trade routes. A resumption of the conflict would have weakened the fledgling Dutch Republic, which was under pressure from infighting between republicans and royalists. The Admiral focuses on Michiel de Ruyter, one of the most famous and skilled admirals in Dutch maritime history, who masterminded the raid.

De Jong began developing the €10 million project in 2007, shortly after finishing family movie Storm Bound, about a teenage boy shipwrecked shortly after he joins the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. The production had whetted his interest in Dutch maritime history and also taught him a lot about the tricks of the trade for staging films set at sea. “It took us five years to work out the angle to tell his story. We wrote more than 20 scripts,” says de Jong.

The resulting script combines the palace and political intrigues on either side of the English Channel at the time with spectacular sea battles capturing the raid.

De Jong said he approached Los Angeles-based, Dutch director Roel Reiné because of his track record in making action films. Shortly after making the award-winning The Delivery in the Netherlands in 1999, Reiné headed to Hollywood because he wanted to make action pictures.

His films include Man With Iron Fists and the Death Race series.

“He’s built a successful career making action pictures but it’s difficult for him to do drama. Over here in Holland, I had no problem finding directors who could do drama but very few of them had experience shooting action scenes – and the sea battle scenes scared many of them off,” says de Jong.

“Every one was very sceptical about Roel’s ability to pull off the drama

because he doesn’t have a track record in that, but one of the strongest parts of the movie is his direction of actors,” he adds. “The Netherlands’ top actors are singing his praise on the Internet. Even the art-house types who’ve seen it are asking, who did this?”

The battle scenes were shot off the Dutch coast using a system of pontoons and replicas of ships from the period and up to 5,000 extras at times. “We’re not afraid of water in the Netherlands,” laughs de Jong.

“When you can do it for real why would you do it in a studio or in a tank… Roel used four cameras and we ended up with 36,000 shots.”

Popular Dutch actor Frank Lammers plays de Ruyter opposite Charles Dance as King Charles II. Other Dutch cast include Barry Atsma as Johan de Witt, the Dutch statesman who helped orchestrate the raid, and Derek de Lint as the traitorous royalist figure of Johan Kievit who eventually fled to England.

US sales company Arclight Films will unveil the film to international buyers at Berlin’s European Film Market (EFM). Prior to that, the film was due a lavish premiere at Amsterdam’s National Maritime Museum late January. Reiné has since returned to Hollywood but he and de Jong are now developing a number of projects together including a film about the Christianisation of northern Europe.

‘One of the strongest parts of the movie is Reiné’s direction of the actors’

The Admiral Director: Roel Reiné Script: Lars Boom, Alex van Galen Production: Farmhouse Film (NL), in co-production with Ciné Cri de Coeur (BE) Sales: Arclight Films

38

39

The not gone girl After IFFR 2015 Claudia Landsberger hands over control of EYE International to Marten Rabarts as she starts her own business BaseWorx For Film.

She reflects to Nick Cunningham on 20 years of promoting Dutch film.

Back in 1995 when Claudia Landsberger took over as head of Holland Film Promotion (now EYE International) her impact upon the Dutch film scene was both resounding and immediate.

Within a year the Dutch had a Foreign-language Oscar under their belt with Marleen Gorris’ Antonia’s Line, and another two years later they had won again with Mike van Diem’s Character. “When I started there was no money for an Oscar campaign,” explains Landsberger.

“So I went straight to the ministry of culture to get extra money for a professional publicist in Los Angeles. In those days most countries would just book a screening and that was it. But we ran a very professional campaign and we won the Oscar immediately.

And then we won it again.”

In subsequent years there followed more nominations, with Paula van der Oest’s Zus and Zo in 2003 and Ben Sombogaart’s Twin Sisters in 2004. Martin Koolhoven’s Winter in Wartime made the January shortlist in 2010 as did Paula van der Oest’s Accused in 2015. “Compared to the

big countries like France and Italy we have (relatively) more successes at the Oscars.”

Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, German actor Daniel Brühl and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander.

Another early innovation into which Landsberger put a lot of extra energy was the launch of European Film Promotion in 1997. The initiative grew out of a loose alliance of the smaller European countries, such as the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium and Portugal, that were willing to collaborate on the business of promotion. Together with Dieter Kosslick, who then headed up the European programme EFDO, the band of national film promotion bodies went with their films to the Toronto Film Festival, which was an altogether smaller event, but one which attracted many US and North American buyers. It was the perfect platform to promote the Europeans and their cinema.

Despite these large-scale successes her primary professional interest has been to link Dutch films of varying sizes and budgets with the festivals best equipped to return success. Landsberger cites the example of Robert Jan Westdijk’s Little Sister (1995) which was rejected by the larger festivals as it was “a small debut film with an unknown cast”, so she submitted it to Thessaloniki and Torino where it won the top prizes. “Then, all of a sudden, people understood that this film was a hot title. It won more prizes and was picked up for sales

by Fortissimo, who sold it to many international territories. Promotion is very much about making a profile of unique selling points for each film and matching it with the right event. Each film in itself needs that level of commitment.”

So the seed of a Europe-wide promo agency was planted, and after the Germans, French and Scandinavians joined the alliance in 1996, it was decided to institutionalise the set-up, which 18 years later has become a keystone of the European film infrastructure. Landsberger was one of the co-founders and acted as president/vice-president for 14 years. “With events like Shooting Stars and Producers On The Move we have nurtured an amazing amount of European talent over the years, some of have become big names in the industry.” These include UK acting talent such as as

‘We won the Oscar immediately… and then we won it again’

Over the years Landsberger estimates that she has developed a network of some 5000 international contacts interested in Dutch cinema. This network will hold her in good stead as she embarks on a new career nurturing film projects from their inception to their completion, and also in sourcing films for the international festivals with whom she will be working in the future. “I am still very much part of this business,” she stresses. “Now I think it’s time to promote myself.”

Claudia Landsberger, formerly of EYE International, now BaseWorx For Film

40

41

EYE in focus

Frieze frame South African artist William Kentridge is the subject of an ambitious exhibition to run April to late Summer 2015. EYE’s director of exhibitions Jaap Guldemond explains all to Nick Cunningham.

It is an odd fact that while EYE’s tent-pole exhibition of 2014, that forefronting the iconic objects within the films of David Cronenburg, attracted slightly fewer visitors than expected, the exhibitions focusing on the lesser known film luminaries of the Brothers Quay and Anthony McCall performed well over expectation.

EYE exhibition chief Jaap Guldemond puts this down to a number of factors, a natural curiosity among EYE devotees, excellent press notices, very strong word of mouth and, crucially, a highly imaginative and creative approach on the part of the museum’s curators.

Photo: Stella Olivier

Guldemond is confident that his upcoming William Kentridge exhibition will deliver to the same standard. Kentridge is a multitalented artist known for his work across many disciplines. He creates highly articulate, complex and politically shrewd animated films.

He is also a writer, sculptor, tapestrist and successful opera director, with productions of the The Magic Flute and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Monteverdi)

under his belt, and a Holland Festival production of Berg’s Lulu in the offing later in 2015.

“Kentridge is very interesting because within his visual art and opera direction he uses a lot of pre-cinema methods and tactics.

And the main part of his work within the visual arts are the films that he makes,” stresses Guldemond. “These are mostly multi-screen installations, using four or five or ten different screens to comment on issues such as the history and political situation in South Africa.”

‘He uses a lot of precinema methods and tactics’ The core element within the EYE exhibition will be a 45-metre frieze of screens depicting an elaborate danse macabre. “We will see a procession of people in shadow play, animation, all these different techniques incorporated into one single work,” explains Guldemond.

Housing this frieze is far from easy as the EYE exhibition space is anything but uniform. “We are using the space not as a white cube but as a black cube, and of course in our case it’s not a cube at all but a very difficult, multi-faceted, angled space which we are defining in three parts. So for the main part the

William Kentridge, photo taken during shoot of new work for several screens, to be presented at EYE in 2015

42

43

Kentridge installation will flow across the angles of the walls, turning two huge corners. It will look quite amazing I think.”

The exhibition will also include a display of preparatory drawings and prints, as well as two single screen works and Kentridge’s 2008 eight-screen installation based on Gogol’s The Nose.

At a time when interactivity seems to pervade all media, Guldemond maintains that the EYE setting itself provides ample scope for exhibit/ audience interconnectivity. “As a visitor you are interactive. If you encounter so many screens with no seating, you walk into the space and you decide which position you take, which image you watch, and how long you watch it for, so in a way with film installation there is always an active role for the visitor.

“It is the exact opposite of the normal cinema experience where you buy your seat and just sit there.

You know the film will start and end at a certain time. Here it is the opposite. In my role at EYE, I like to show the other face of cinema, which is not feature film, but how cinema is used in other ways that are not single-screen works. And I believe Kentridge is a very good example of that.”

Clermont Ferrand presentations

Funky shorts Five Dutch shorts head to the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival this year as the Netherlands Film Fund’s programmes supporting shorts continue to bear fruit. Melanie Goodfellow reports.

Academy Award-nominated A Single Life and avant-garde filmmaker Rosto’s latest creation Splintertime are among the Dutch works due to screen at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival at the end of January.

“It’s a really beautiful film, very charming and funny,” Dorien van de Pas, head of New Screen NL at the Netherlands Film Fund (NFF), says of animation short A Single Life, about a woman who is transported back in time when she plays an old vinyl record. It is a joint work by Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins and Marieke Blaauw, who met at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

The trio co-run a design studio specialising in illustration, animation character design and music, called simply Job, Joris & Marieke. “They come from a industrial background and there’s something very fresh and new about their work,” continues van de Pas, who as head of New Screen NL oversees many of the fund’s short film initiatives.

A Single Life was among four works supported by the NFF in 2014 under

its Ultrakort programme aimed at financing and promoting short two-minute films. The initiative is run in conjunction with Fund 21, a philanthropic body backing cultural, social and communitybased initiatives, and the Pathé cinema group in the Netherlands.

Under the scheme, selected works are screened ahead of mainstream pictures in Pathé cinemas.

Other NFF schemes for shorts include KORT!, a joint programme with broadcaster NTR, the Media Fund and CoBO, which awards €73,500 to 10 short films each year, nine of them live action and one animated. It is open to new and estabished filmmakers. The NFF is also set to launch a third funding stream for shorts in April, aimed at fostering new talent, setting aside €200,000 per year in 2015 and 2016 for works by new directors and producers. It will mete out roughly €30,000 per project.

A Single Life is one of two Dutchdirected works in ClermontFerrand’s international competition alongside talented artist and filmmaker Douwe Dijkstra’s Démontable. The latter cleverly explores the disconnect between our daily lives and the global news stream through the image of a man being besieged by mini fighter jets in his kitchen as he drinks his coffee.

The Netherlands is also represented in the section by Belgian Wim

Geudens and Thomas Baerten’s amusing live action short De Smet, about three brothers living side-by-side in identical houses, whose close-knit lives are upset when one of them falls for a new female neighbour. It was developed under the auspices of the Masterplan Filmtalent Limburg programme in southern Netherlands, aimed at supporting short productions by student filmmakers from the Netherlands and Belgium.

The Clermont Ferrand line-up also includes avant-garde artist and filmmaker Rosto’s latest film Splintertime, which completes a trilogy revolving around the virtual violent, rock band The Wreckers.

The film has made it into the national competition, aimed at French productions, because it was lead-produced by celebrated Paris-based animation house Autour de Minuit.

Rosto is a festival habitué. He screened the second film in the trilogy, Lonely Bones, at Clermont Ferrand last year and his 30-minute The Monster of Nix played in the International Competition in 2013.

Elsewhere in the festival, Guido Hendrikx’ experimental documentary Among US, in which three paedophiles talk about their forbidden desires, is playing in the lab competition. Hendrikx made the film while he was a student at the Netherlands Film Academy.

‘Oscar-nominated A Single Life is a really beautiful film, very charming and funny” says van de Pas’

Still: Job, Joris & Marieke’s A Single Life

44

45

Dutch industry news

Short Cuts Berlin Talents

2014 Strong Year for Dutch films

Still: The Summer of Sangaile

Two Dutch projects have been selected for Berlinale Talents, the annual summit and networking platform of the Berlin International Film Festival for emerging film creatives from all over the world.

Magdalena Szymków’s Reporter, selected for Directors Doc Station, is a found footage portrait of writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, an Eastern-bloc war correspondent who revolutionised world journalism. The film covers his journalistic assignments and is a visual essay on his creative process, struggles and accomplishments.

Szymków received a grant from Amsterdam Art Fund in coalition with Netherlands Film Academy, Binger Filmlab, The Eye Film Museum Amsterdam and International Documentary Film Festival IDFA. In Jack Faber’s AA, selected for Writers/Directors Script Station, a not-so-innocent prank spirals out of control for a group of Israeli high-school students during the last night of their heritage tour of Poland.

“Living in Europe the last three years I understood the broader perspective of this story and realise exactly how the film will recreate successfully the missing link between a painful past and an impenetrable political present, while projecting a possibility of hope for the future,” comments Faber.

Sundance/Berlin co-pro selection Marleen Slot of Viking Film was in raptures when her minority co-pro project The Summer of Sangaile, directed by Lithuanian Alanté Kavaïté, was selected for both Sundance and Berlin Panorama. “It was amazing.

Already Sundance made me jump in the air. We were so excited, and then we heard the news of the Berlinale selection. That is something to be really happy with and very proud of.”

In the film seventeen-year-old Sangaile is fascinated by stunt planes but is at the same time afraid of heights. But at a summer aeronautical show she meets Auste, a local girl who, unlike Sangaile, lives her life to the fullest with creativity and bravery. “When French co-producer Antoine Simkine sent me the script I immediately loved it, and I

46

also love the previous work of the director. So I thought ok,” Slot explains.

Slot successfully applied to the Netherlands Film Fund which, in turn, opened the door for Eurimages financing. “That made it a real co-production,” she says. “I really liked that and the fact that the film deals with tough subjects but in a lighthearted way. It is the type of film I like to be apart of.”

Dutch project The Hero produced by Millstreet Films and to be directed by Antoinette Beumer (Jackie) is selected for the 2015 Berlin Co-production Market. In the film, a woman is led to the truth about what happened to her father in WWII.

2014 was a strong year for Dutch films at the local box-office, equalling the 2013 figure of 21% market share and attracting an audience of 6.4 million viewers. It should be noted however that one title, Vipers’ Nest 2, released

by Independent Films, accounted for 20% of this audience, giving it ‘diamond’ status for passing the million viewer milepost. The film’s total admission in 2014 was 1,182,335 viewers, generating box-office returns in excess of €10 million. This made it the top film overall at the Dutch box-office, beating The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies and The Wolf of Wall Street into second and third place respectively.

Four Dutch films were accorded ‘platinum’ status for exceeding 400,000 viewers. These were Vipers’ Nest 2, Toscaanse Bruiloft, Soof and Pak Van Mijn Hart. Fourteen Dutch films received over 100.000 visitors (‘golden film’).

The long-listed Dutch Academy Award submission Accused (Lucia de B) by Paula van der Oest attracted 133,844 visitors, with a box-office return of just above €1 million.

IFFR Live IFFR Live is a series of film premieres and events held simultaneously in cinemas across Europe and on VOD platforms during the 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The Dutch films selected for the inaugural event are Erbarme Dich – Matthew Passion Stories by Ramón Gieling (see page 24), The Sky Above Us

by Marinus Groothof (see page 28) and Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s Atlantic.

In the week after the IFFR Live premiere events, a selection of the IFFR Live films will get a further release in cinemas and on multiple VOD platforms across Europe. IFFR Live is a consortium between Fortissimo Films, TrustNordisk, Doc & Film and the 44th IFFR Rotterdam.

EYE Collection Centre The new EYE Collection Centre is well on course for a Spring 2016 opening.

The Centre, located close to the EYE Building on the north bank of Amsterdam’s River IJ, will house 40,000 films (which corresponds to approximately 230,000 film cans), 70,000 film posters, approximately 700,000 still photos, a vast paper archive of film scores, a collection of pre-cinema apparatus and the biggest film library in The Netherlands.

The 6,000 square-metre space will consist of numerous depots of varying

temperatures and humidity in order to keep the artefacts in prime condition.

The film negatives will be frozen at minus 5 degrees, for example. “Finally we will have our whole collection in one building,” says EYE’s Director of Collection Frank Roumen.

The Centre will also offer research facilities for professionals, “from students to scientists to filmmakers”, according to Roumen. “And we really want to house a restoration expertise centre there. EYE already for years is well-known internationally for its

47

Eye Collection Centre

restoration and we will co-operate with the Institute of Sound and Vision, and also with the University of Amsterdam to host a Masters degree course in restoration and preservation.”

Film and television actress Abbey Hoes made her screen debut in 2009 as Maite in the critically acclaimed Maite Was Here. She went on to star in the films Furious, To Be King and Nina Satana, and had supporting roles in Lover or Loser, Tirza and the award-winning Finnemans. She was named one of the Most Promising Young Talents at the 2012 Dutch Film Festival. This year she won the Dutch Film Award 2014 for Best

Actress in a Feature Film for her starring role in the international co-production Nena, selected for Berlinale 2015.

Later in 2015, she will be featured in Nicole van Kilsdonk’s feel-good drama Ventoux, as well as Escape

by Ineke Houtman. Abbey will represent The Netherlands as European Shooting Star at Berlinale 2015.

Comments Nena director Saskia Diesing: “Abbey has a very rare talent when it comes to acting: whatever she does, or says, even the smallest gesture or word, is genuine! She’s able to mix different tones continuously and has a deep inner world, which is visible in almost every glance.

“It’s simply very difficult to keep your eyes off her.”

Photo: Marc de Groot

Abbey Hoes: Shooting Star