A Stranger Came to Town

One morning in August 2012, renowned Syrian photographer Issa Touma saw young men lugging sandbags into his street. It turned out to be the start of the Syrian uprising in the city of Aleppo. Touma grabbed his camera and spent nine days holed up in his apartment, recording what was happening outside. The result? An unprecedented glimpse into a war that has been raging for three years now.

Ever since there’s only one male northern white rhino remaining on earth, armed bodyguards protect him, tourists are standing in line to make a selfie with him, journalists rush to Kenya to tell his story and scientists are determined to find ways to reproduce his species. What is so attractive about the threat of extinction? How does this reflect on us?

For filmmaker Nordin Lasfar, who grew up in the Netherlands as the child of Moroccan parents, author Paul Bowles opened the door to literature and stories from the land of his forebears. In the 1960s and 70s, Tangier was a base for Western artists and writers of the Beat Generation, among them Bowles.

VPRO icon Wim Brands died on April 4, 2016. He was known to the general public as a presenter of the VPRO Boeken program and also closer, with six collections of poetry to his name. This documentary about his life and work, built entirely from archive material, pays tribute to this television personality. A portrait in which attention is also paid to his complicated relationship with death. With a.o. Karl Ove Knausgård, David Sedaris, Ellen Deckwitz and Pieter Boskma. Brands' work merges with his rich inner life and that he chose death at the age of 56 casts a shadow over everything.

A floating female body. Positioned within an age-old theatrical device, the floating figure conjures the illusion of a hologram, achieved through the Pepper’s Ghost technique of reflection. Inspired by historical female mystics such as Teresa de Ávila and Christina the Astonishing, who were believed to possess the ability to fly or levitate, the work celebrates the transcendence of earthly boundaries. Beyond its technical and aesthetic layers, Almost There explores the fluidity between the tangible and the intangible, delving into the space between physical constraints, inner pressures, and mental elevation.

Who am I? What is real? How to live in the madness of the world? These are questions posed by six people who have had psychosis and speak openly about their experience. They have in common that they think deeply, and that at particular moments in their lives, they were under intense personal and social pressure.

In 2004, a urinal was voted the most influential work ever in modern art. Famed artist and provocateur Marcel Duchamp claimed to have created “Fountain”—or rather, he bought the mass-produced product and signed it—but according to some, it is the lesser-known, flamboyant Dadaist artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who should take credit for transforming this much-discussed porcelain “piss pot” into art.

Syrian photographer Issa Touma regularly travels from Europe to his city of birth, Aleppo. He visits family, friends and students who still live there, primarily viewing it as his task to record the art of survival during one of the biggest human dramas of our time.

Almost 50 years ago, on 6 May 1970, Feijenoord (now Feyenoord) won the European Cup in Milan. The cup was brought back to Rotterdam and the city exploded. A pavilion was built on the Coolsingel where football fans could have their photo taken with the cup. The makers of this documentary studied archives and conducted countless telephone interviews with ordinary Rotterdammers who witnessed this historic moment. How did it feel to win such a prestigious cup? And what are the stories from Milan, the Coolsingel, Stadhuisplein and the stadium in Rotterdam-Zuid?