Scary Man

How do you deal with the fact that someone close to heart has suddenly disappeared without a trace? Can you go on living whilst waiting for his return?

China introduced its draconian policy in 1979. In 1986, Hothothot was born. The illegality of his existence cost his father three times his annual salary and the end of a promising political career. The profound guilt Hothothot felt over what his life cost his family, along with unspoken resentment that simmered between them failed to abate. Four Journeys sees him return to China to reconcile with his loved ones, only to be surprised by their demands. It also grapples with the legacy of the law, and the impact both Maoism and the Cultural Revolution had on Chinese family life.

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.

From the filmmaker's perspective, we follow the process of a possible feature film about a photographer (Lea) tasked with capturing the energy transition in Amsterdam's harbor area. This brings up a flood of memories and associations. What do you do with what hasn't gone well in your life? How well can you know someone dear to you? Filmmaker and character turn out to coincide more and more during the process.

One night in the trenches during the Spanish Civil War, Joan Brossa heard a voice call his name. He didn't see anyone and walked towards where he thought the sound came from. A moment later, a shell hit the ground where he had just been standing. From that moment on, Brossa wanted to be a poet.

In a seemingly timeless polder in Brabant's Biesbosch in Southern Holland seasons pass by over unaltered prestine landscape. Change comes when the land is assigned to become a flood area. From the perspective of the tree we see machines and tractors move into the area.

After his retired father, Franco, nearly dies from a heart attack, Francesco decides to make a film about him. Francesco’s ruthless directing methods, as well as Franco's dubious acting efforts, generate both absurd and intimate dialogues which mostly occur between the takes. Edited as the “making of” for a film that was never finished, '13 attempts to shoot my father' follows the tragicomic journey of the director-son and his actor-father attempts at overcoming, with the help of a camera, their inability to communicate

People who create explore, and get to know themselves and others better. In this cinematographic essay, Rolf Orthel looks for the meaning of creating, with reality or the memory of it as a starting point and a train journey as a meandering ribbon through the film. We see the first musical steps of primary school children and youngsters at Jeugdtheaterschool Zuid-Oost. We see what talent does to you when a conservatory student practices for his graduation, when someone paints a remarkable self-portrait or when Konvooi creates a thrilling play. This is high-level creation which makes you wonder how on earth it is possible that you can suddenly be enchanted and moved. The conclusion of Orthel’s search? Creating things is the best.

A handwritten recipe book guides a filmmaker from her mother’s kitchen in Moldova to the high-tech greenhouses of Europe, uncovering industrial takeover of farming, memories and migration, all through the story of a single tomato.

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. '