Lipari

In 1990, the beheaded body of a young woman was found in a Rotterdam canal. The body remained unidentified until 2008, when new DNA techniques revealed that the victim was the American model Melissa Halstead. A joint investigation by the Rotterdam cold case unit and their colleagues in the United Kingdom led to John Sweeney. Sweeney is known to have a tumultuous relationship with Halstead – as evidenced by the many lurid drawings he made during their time together in Amsterdam.

Portrait of a traditional youth dance group from Grozny, Chechnya, on tour in Europe. Images of daily life in ruined Grozny combined with poetic visuals of performances. The art of survival.

What would happen with you if only you know the truth, and people won’t believe you? If the government decides to prosecute you and you have to plea for your own innocence without having the evidence? Peter Putker’s wife Durdana lost her life while sailing along the coast of Colombia. And although Peter states from the very beginning that they were attacked by pirates, the local authorities do not buy in his innocence. For them, he is the one who murdered his own wife. Problem is: only Peter himself was there and truly knows what happens. The Colombian authorities assign the case to the Dutch court. What happens when only you know the truth and any evidence supporting your innocence is lacking?

Two Dutch filmmakers travel to the Iranian city of Bam to chronicle the aftermath of a December 2006 earthquake that claimed 43,000 lives and left 60,000 homeless. Survivors reflect on the catastrophe in voice-over narration that's accompanied by images of a wrecked metropolis fighting to pull itself back together. The gripping documentary received its North American premiere at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

Portrait of the popular folk singer André Hazes. He was followed for several months by filmmaker John Appel. Love, hope, happiness, sadness, concerts, family, and fans play a major role in his life. Appel filmed Hazes during performances and business meetings, as well as at home with his family and during a vacation in Benidorm. The result is both hilarious and moving at times.

Russian Poet Boris Ryzhy was handsome, talented and famous. So why did he end his own life at the age of 26? A quest to find the answer takes the filmmaker to the notorious neighbourhood in the cold industrial city of Yekaterinenburg where Boris grew up...

The Gert & Hermien Story shows the rise and fall of one of the most popular singing duos in Dutch history: Gert & Hermien Timmerman. Their career has seen great heights and deep valleys. Their personal lives, which were marked by scandals, were always widely covered in the tabloids. Daughter Sandra, along with some other intimates and confidants of Gert and Hermien, is our guide in the unlikely story of her narcissistic, manipulative father and driven mother.

The mystery of the author of the 1937 cult novel Ali and Nino - a recently-rediscovered Romeo and Juliet of the Caucasus - is explored in Alias Kurban Saïd. Renowned Dutch documaker Jos de Putter travels from Azerbaijan to Austria to the U.S., chasing down who wrote the book under the pseudonym Kurban Saïd.

A family must come to grips with the suicide of their eldest son. What drove the outwardly relaxed and happy Arie to his deed? For two years we follow his younger brother Gijs, mother Denise and father Arjan while they try to turn despair into meaning.

One day, Dutch film maker van der Horst was given her inheritance: 6 square meters, one sixth of a small, wooden house in the Russian countryside where her mother grew up. It was as if life had handed her a card she felt forced to play. She began a journey into the past, back into the childhood of her Russian mother and her five sisters, all of whom struggled with fear, famine and war in Stalin’s Russia; experiences that left them scarred to their very soul. Aliona’s quest into the lives and fate of her family becomes a loving, poignant, and poetic film with Chekhovian characters. Accompanied by the magical animation of acclaimed Italian artist Simone Massi, unimaginable events in the Soviet past are given an immediate charge. Along with the stories of ordinary people living in the small farmhouse, the film maker tells the tale of Soviet terror, immense bravery and a fear that has never left those four walls.

As a film about fertility, Water Children is an ode to womanhood and the body Filmmaker Aliona van der Horst followed the trail of the unconventional Dutch-Japanese pianist and artist Tomoko Mukaiyama who made a huge work of art on the theme of womanhood and fertility. She created a cathedral-like space out of twelve thousand white silk dresses in which visitors, as in a ritual, roamed around and fell silent. And where people confessed intimate details about children who were or were not born, about sexuality and life-choices. This resulted in a majestic epic about motherhood, miscarriages and menopause. In a visual and poetic way, the film penetrates into what is probably still one of the greatest of taboos, menstruation, and, as a consequence, touches upon universal themes around life and death.

A political essay on the absurd dilemmas presented by asylum policies. In a classroom, migrants’ illusions are dashed against the rocks of European arrogance.

Piet is gone tells the story of Piet Beentjes, who went missing on the isle of Texel in 1987. For 30 years, Toos Beentjes has desperately tried to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of her homosexual brother. In vain. The police saw no reason to investigate the case: 'Eventually, he’ll wash up. And if not, the tourists will find him.' The film is not a quest for Piet Beentjes, but tells the story of what happened before and after the disappearance. About the Kafkaesque world Toos entered after her brother disappeared. A world of routine, lackadaisical interest and a lame police investigation.

Man is busy, busy, busy. Until we lie down flat on our backs for a while, in the dunes, in a farmyard, beside a fire engine, in the park or on the banks of a canal. Watching the bank of clouds drifting by or the planes forming persisting contrails in the sky, daydreams, outpourings and contemplations inevitably bubble up. With the sky as a mirror for prostrate man and with the lying man as a mirror for the viewer, this documentary draws a loving portrait of human beings briefly making contact with themselves.

The slogan “Meet the icons of modern art” needs to be scraped off the glass wall of the Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s modern art museum. Because precisely who the icons of modern art are is very much the question. Who gets to decide? And who loses out? In 2019, as director Sarah Vos started shooting her documentary, more than 90 percent of art at the Stedelijk was made by white men. That’s got to change, the museum’s director Rein Wolfs believes. But this is easier said than done—so much becomes clear when Vos follows Wolfs and his team as they strive for greater diversity in the collection, as well as among their staff.