NLWave 26

Menno Otten’s latest feature documentary was inspired by a psychosis he observed in his brother, and the sense of calm the man derived from obsessively watching people from his window, finding solace in their seemingly serene gazes. In Still City, Amsterdam is revealed through the gestures of its residents, using 125 years of archival film. “As a city symphony, the film explores our longing for stillness amid the chaos of life,” says director Otten, “revealing what lies behind these moments of quiet and the shared humanity that connects us.”

After losing irreplaceable moments on a hard disk, filmmaker Robert-Jonathan Koeyers returns with his family to the locations they visited to fill in the gaps, all the time recording the process. The film is produced by Richard Valk of Valk Productions. “We are out to make an eclectic, kaleidoscopic film that positions itself as a documentary, an essay film, a fictitious reconstruction of memories, and with several animations to serve as the glue keeping it all together,” Valk tells BDE.

“Since the full-scale invasion, I have experienced what it’s like when a language becomes contaminated,” says Dutch director Aliona van der Horst of her new film, about a bi-lingual Ukrainian couple living in exile in Berlin, and the strain placed on their 45-year marriage. “Russian has become the language of the former coloniser of Ukraine: the language of Putin, the perpetrators, the murderers.”

Is there a more famous Dutch export than Vincent van Gogh? The Impressionist painter and his masterworks were ignored during his short, feverish life, and he died in total obscurity. Which is where he may have remained, had his visionary sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger not recognised his genius, and vowed to proclaim it to the world. BDE canvasses Dutch production company 100%’s Sandra Bolz about the new feature doc which tells Johanna’s hitherto untold story.

Indonesia-based Dutch actor Hans de Kraker has long been the go-to face of white colonial villainy in Indonesian films. But when he receives a suitcase of old family belongings from his sister, Hans uncovers a highly unnerving truth - his late father had committed terrible atrocities during his service in Indonesia. “In its own unique and highly visual way, Penjajah fits seamlessly into the current decolonisation debate by revealing different perspectives on a controversial chapter in European history,” Esther van Driesum of Dutch production company BIND tells BDE.

After their 2022 Berlinale Documentary Award-winning Myanmar Diaries, the Myanmar Film Collective returns with their hybrid work What Happened to My Country, What Happened to Me? With most members of the Collective now living in exile in Germany, Sweden and Thailand, the film is both a testimony of Myanmar’s continuing tragedy and an imaginative reflection on loss, displacement and the enduring search for home. “This is cinematic storytelling, patiently and carefully framed cinema,” producer Corinne van Egeraat (ZINDOC) and DOP/Editor Petr Lom tell BDE.

“In Your Shadow is vital because it makes visible something that exists in so many families and societies: the silence that grows around trauma,” Dutch producer Renko Douze (Een van de jongens) tells BDE of Thabi Mooi & Tom Fassaert’s work-in-progress In Your Shadow, presented at NLWave26. In the feature doc, after thirty years of silence, filmmaker Thabi takes her father on a journey to confront his past as a soldier in the South African liberation struggle.

“Paradise Morbid is a horror-hybrid documentary that focuses on what happens when you get lost in drug use,” director David-Jan Bronsgeest tells BDE of his NLWave feature doc presentation. The film centres on Frank van der Meer (63), once a king of Amsterdam’s Red Light district, “who has died many times, yet refuses to stay buried.” Bronsgeest further underlines his intentions: “With Paradise Morbid, I want to use the language of horror to explore reality.”

“We see this film as a love story set against the backdrop of an unequal and absurd world,” producer Ilja Roomans (Docmakers) tells BDE of director Suzanne Raes’s new feature doc project, presented this week in Utrecht. The film follows a couple, Paul and Daniel, working as cleaners in the Netherlands, who must return to Manila. The film describes “a world in which one country’s largest export may be its labour force, and in which the other country increasingly treats these people as second-class citizens,” Roomans adds.

“This film could have been my life,” says Sakir Khader of his feature debut, produced by mint film office, which follows three men as they fight Assad’s occupation of Syria, and then afterwards during the country’s uneasy peace. “Many war films focus on the moment of battle, placing the viewer at the heart of the fighting. Few films show the everyday reality of life on the front lines or the ruins that remain after liberation, as mine does.”