Claude Vivier

Eminent Dutch writer Harry Mulisch reflects on the past and the future—the beginning and the end—and revisits his birthplace, his parents, the house of his earliest memories, and the home where he wrote his first story. A film about death, dachshunds, a girl in a closet, stars, and the remarkable body of work that stands like a monument in his Amsterdam study.

In 1928 in the northern part of the Netherlands, a man has an affair with the wife of one of his friends (who is in jail at the time). Because she abandons her children to move in with him, the police are sent to arrest her. This leads to a dramatic confrontation.

Following the successful documentary The Matthäus Mission of Reinbert de Leeuw, director Cherry Duyns is now showing the full implementation of the St Matthew Passion. It is a poignant performance in De Nieuwe Kerk conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. With soloists Joanne Lunn (soprano), Delphine Galou (alto), Christopher Watson (tenor), Tomáš Král (bass), Andreas Wolf (Christ), Benedikt Kristjánsson (evangelist), Holland Baroque, the Nederlands Kamerkoor en the Roder Boys Choir. Concertmaster Judith Steenbrink.

In 1944, a Jewish prisoner was commissioned by camp commander Gemmeker to make a film about life and work in Westerbork. Seven seconds from this film became the symbol of the deportations to the Nazi extermination camps: a girl with a white headscarf standing in the doorway of a goods wagon. Who was she? In 1994 Cherry Duyns followed journalist Aad Wagenaar in search of the girl's identity.