Willem Baptist

“Let’s see if you gained any weight. 26,3 kilogram. Ahmet, you need to eat more. Double meals.” Like other boys their age, Baran, Ahmet and their classmates wrestle with the desire for recognition, with homesickness and with their target weights. Most of all though, they wrestle with, and against, one another. They are comrades and competitors, united by one and the same dream: Olympic gold! In their wrestling academy in the Turkish province of Amasya, which is well known for this traditional form of combat sport, they undergo strength and endurance training, they learn lifts and throws, they urge each other on and they console one another. Always responding to the boys’ needs, the trainers give the boys tough love, sometimes fatherly, sometimes strict and disciplinary. The film’s intimate documental camera bears close witness to the fine line between friendship and competition, victory and the lesson of how to lose.

A feature documentary about a self chosen family living in Rotterdam. At the head of the family is mother and dragqueen Ma'MaQueen, who has created a safe haven for her six ‘drag children,’ not all of whom can count on understanding from their biological family. Together they find support, security and a home in which fantasy becomes reality.

In Bird Strike, we see how man and animal must share the air space and the resulting consequences. In this visual story different characters struggle with their curious relationship with unpredictable flying troublemakers. Will man manage to get his own way, or will nature have the final say in this battle for the skies?

Through the ritual of saying sorry, a bold journey explores how apologies redefine history and what happens to us as witnesses to the act of atonement.

Fourteen-year-old Shabu is a good-natured, creative, and street-smart boy from the south of Rotterdam. When he wrecks his grandmother’s car on a joyride, his whole family is angry with him. He has a summer to make amends before his grandmother returns from a vacation in Suriname.

With a visual style that alternates between intimate verité moments, meditative reflection and suspenseful sequences, the film tells the story of Chief Ramon Gonzalez, detective Manuel Casas and officer Mayra Garza, as they navigate the complexities of their existence on the US/Mexican border.

There could hardly be a more telling contrast between the analog and digital eras than the beautifully blurry memories captured in a Polaroid picture and the thousands of pin-sharp photos on an iPhone. In this ambitious visual essay, Willem Baptist explores the visionary genius of Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Even today, all sorts of people are keeping his instant dream alive. Former Polaroid employee Stephen Herchen moved from the United States to Europe to work in a laboratory developing the 2.0 version of Polaroid. Christopher Bonanos, the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, tells us, "When I heard Polaroid would stop making film, it felt like a close friend had died." Artist Stefanie Schneider, who is working with the last of her stock of Polaroid film, is using the blurring that occurs with expired film as an additional aesthetic layer in her photographic work.

In a world where fantasy meets reality, Tengkwa leads a band of Dutch wrestlers and tries to train a new generation of superheroes. With slim chances of fame and glory, only the most die-hard of them will succeed.