Above Us All

Dicky bears the full weight of the small, financially unstable family circus on her shoulders. She has an ambivalent relationship with her brother-in-law Willy, who is the widower of Dicky's deceased sister Jena. Dicky takes care of Willy's little son Timo, and treats him as if he is her own son. When Willy's parents suggest Timo should go to a boarding-school to get a normal education, Dicky is very much upset. She cannot understand why Willy doesn't support her and why he thinks of putting his own son away. Young Tunisian tent builder Tarek has just arrived to work in the circus. Because Willy drinks a lot and often gets aggressive, Dicky spends more and more time in Tarek's company. Slowly but surely already faltering relationships start disrupting the circus. Dicky realizes that she must make a drastic choice. This is not the choice between the two men in her life, but between her love for little Timo, her loyalty to her family and the circus, and her own personal freedom.

Feature film about the life of Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929). Aletta Jacobs knows from an early age that she wants to become a doctor. She asks Thorbecke to allow her to attend university and, after completing her studies, becomes the first female doctor in Amsterdam. Here, she focuses in particular on sexual problems in women and campaigns for universal suffrage. Director Nouchka van Brakel appears in the film as an interviewer who questions contemporaries about the life and work of Dr. Jacobs. The interviews give an impression of the flood of negative reactions that the feminist provoked. However, when Aletta looks back on her life at the end of the film, many photos and letters show how much she was ultimately appreciated.

The landscape in which we live has been around longer than we have. And it will still be there after our death. Not that the landscape always remains the same: every generation wipes out the traces of previous generations, and itself leaves new traces behind. This process has been followed for seven years with great detail, craftsmanship and without misplaced nostalgia on Super16 by Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. On the banks of the Netherrhine River, between the dike and the river itself, is a stretch of water meadow, Loowaard. In the derelict farmstead lives the last farmer who had cows here, there are remains of a brick factory that no longer has a function, and in the ground, remains have been found of an old Roman encampment. Until recently, the march of progress apparently had left this piece of land untouched. But now the meadows have to make way for the development of new nature.

During World War II, around 1944, people from Margraten, a small parish in Limburg, discovered that their fields had been expropriated by the American army. The forces used them to bury their fallen soldiers. Because the flood of corpses soon became unmanageable, young villagers were asked to help inter the war victims. Nobody could envisage that eventually twenty thousand crosses would be planted in the Limburg mud. '