The Netherlands Film Festival, which celebrates its 40th edition this year, swarms all over the Netherlands, with a remarkably varied program. It would make you happy.
You will always see, just as two of the Netherlands’ oldest and most important film festivals are preparing for a grand anniversary – 40 years of the Netherlands Film Festival and soon another 50 years of the International Film Festival Rotterdam – the cinemas will be hit by a pandemic (go ahead, not only the movie theaters).
With an emergency slogan borrowed from Veronica, Netherlands Film Festival comes to you !, the annual Utrecht refuge for Dutch feature films, documentaries and series is now swarming all over the country. The premiere films run for a full week in nearly a hundred cinemas and movie theaters, in more than sixty cities. In this way an attempt is made to compensate the room capacity that has been lost to the 1.5 meter doctrine. That broadening of the festival locations seems such a good idea that you would want to keep it right away for the 41st edition, regardless of that virus.
Utrecht’s festival heart has certainly not been paralyzed. There are gala premieres in the Stadsschouwburg, there is a red carpet ready, which at most has less wear and tear to fear. There is a debate: about more color, the impact of covid on the film industry, working in front of very small or very large screens. And on the penultimate day of the festival, Friday 2 October, the Golden Calves distributed by the Dutch Academy will be sent out.
New, for city walkers: the festival app De Nederlandse Filmroute, which takes you past the places in Utrecht where ‘famous film scenes’ were shot, such as that part of the canal from the speedboat scene in Amsterdamned. Anyone who wants to see again how link the speedboat stunts were, and how protagonist Huub Stapel suffered a double hernia, can go straight to De Dick Maas Method.
The new documentary about the father of the Dutch action and horror genre is one of eight premiere titles that are brought to national attention. They are remarkably unlike: there are book adaptations, such as Come here that I kiss you and Outside is the party, based on the novels by Griet Op de Beeck and Arthur Japin. But there is also the Curaçao family drama Buladó and the La última primavera, a portrait of a Spanish family in a slum outside Madrid, moving between documentary and fiction. And the psychological thriller Marionette, which was filmed in Scotland and spoken in English, is also Dutch, if only because it is our Thekla Reuten who, as a psychotherapist, protects the world from a child who sows death and destruction through scratch drawings.
Also recommendable: the 4K restoration of Mike van Diem’s Character, the last Dutch feature film to win an Oscar. Or Freek de Jonge, who keeps track of the birds in The Bird Watcher on a remote island.
Is there still somber Dutch film news? Well, the two biggest productions that would appear in cinemas this autumn have been postponed: Jim Taihuttu’s colonial war drama The East and the WWII spectacle film The Battle of the Scheldt by Matthijs van Heijningen jr. The premieres are now scheduled for 2021. Too big and expensive films to release now that the halls may not be full yet.
That the case is by no means lost, director Johan Nijenhuis proves week after week with his Twente relationship drama De legstjes van Sint-Hildegard. Possibly the world’s only feature film that reverberates happily in the cinema before, during and (if that vaccine comes up) after the pandemic: almost seven hundred thousand visitors now. So it is still possible.