Jolein Laarman

Set in the remote winter landscape of Norway, Roos visits her mother there yearly, but this time it’s different: she brings bad news. However, old pain and numerous reproaches keep Roos from sharing anything with her mother. Aided by her half-brother and her old flame, the two women reconcile and Roos is able to make her next and inescapable step.

In this electrifying journey filmmaker Vincent Boy Kars will try to understand in fiction how he became the person he is now, and who he wants to be in the future. The film challenges the very fabric of identity, eagerly pondering the possibilities of personal transformation. Can one truly break free from the weight of their own story?

The parents of five sisters have been married for forty years; the daughters have gathered in the family beach house to make a video for them. The encounter is marked by many confrontations as well as cheerful moments. Reminiscent of the sweet children's poems that mother recited are countered by Elsschot's Marriage: 'He thought: I'll kill her and set light to the house...' It also turns out that father had once disappeared for eighteen months, a 'secret' that the daughters have different ideas about. Brittle, an intimate film version of a play written and performed by the same actresses, is about rivalry in a family, the right to silence, but also about the need for solidarity. At the Netherlands Film Festival in 1997 the Golden Calf for Best Actress was awarded to the five actresses together.

Is our life a story? And if so, can we re-write it? In Drama Girl, director Vincent Boy Kars gets a young woman to act out a number of key scenes from her recent past. Perhaps, Kars thinks, this could help her come to terms with certain events. In the meantime, he also gains something: a film that probes how fiction and documentary can learn from one another.

Polish Ewa works as an Au-pair in a small town in Holland. A sensitive girl, she finds it difficult to live up to her host-parents' clichéd expectations. When a rape takes place in town, Ewa believes to suspect the rapist. Having no one to share this knowledge with, it furthers her alienation from the people around her, resulting in her being send back home.

A woman diagnosed with terminal lung cancer gathers her three dearest friends together to make the most of the time she has left.

Stages is a film about loneliness, anxiety, struggle and love, which in an unconventional way shows the survival of two former lovers in their forties and their seventeen year-old son.

A lively young boy befriends and attempts to raise an abandoned baby jackdaw unbeknownst to his choleric and disapproving father.