Mijke de Jong

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.

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.

Joy is an emotionally damaged young woman of eighteen, who was given up at birth, to grow up in homes and with foster families. She lives on the fringes of society, getting by on benefits and earning a little extra by playing the accordion in the subway. In addition, she is a skilled shoplifter and has never been caught.

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

Actress and writer Nazmiye Oral discusses with her Turkish mother everything that was previously not discussed in the family. In stylized recordings, the women show extreme frankness. The viewer witnesses what the integration process looks like within this Turkish family, making it clear what the process of dialogue, misunderstanding and alienation yields within the intimacy of immigrant families. The understandable pain of this family about the modern life of their daughter gets an accessible face.

On the border of Turkey and Iran, 19-year-old twin sisters Zahra and Fatimah from Afghanistan lose their family. To survive in a hostile world of smugglers and drug dealers, they face choices and dilemmas that severely test their symbiotic relationship and conscience.

Dutch filmmakers gathered to make this compilation movie, consisting of 17 segments, as a reaction to the status quo in The Netherlands after the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh on november 2, 2004.

An intimate look into the life of a 13 year old girl in northern Amsterdam who 'looses' her Russian mother and older sister to the cruel world of prostitution. Little sister remains alone in a flat at the IJ-square. Through her unconditional love and her lack of inhibition she manages to keep her head up in the relentless world of porn, drugs, and neon ads.