Pieter van Huystee Film & TV

Emma Westermann's documentary shows the final six months in the life of Dutch animation grandmaster Gerrit van Dijk. Every night, he makes one drawing for his last animation films. A cinematic testament to one of the most distinguished Dutch film artists of our times.

The story is the search of the young Moszkowicz looking for his identity within his Jewish family, he wants to part with his inner demons and wants to break with the negative patterns in his life. In a country where 75 percent of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, the Moszkowicz family of lawyers stood out as a unique Jewish success story.

They still carry his house keys with them, Joaquin Sabina's old friends. It does not matter that the Madrid-based singer, who is adored throughout the Spanish-speaking community, changed the locks to his house years ago. After the brain haemorrhage that hit him in 2001, Sabina suddenly could not bear the dozens of friends anymore that invaded his house. This was a raw deal for them, as the interviews reveal that director Ramón Gieling had with them. As in Gieling's previous documentaries, he created a cinematographic form for the interviews, which he consistently applies. Friends and former lovers are introduced in a minutely reconstructed copy of the living room they were expelled from. In the real living room, they used to lead a loose life without thinking about the health risks.

Visitors to the temples of modern art in global cities will be familiar with the white cube gallery space. But when one arises in the middle of a Congolese palm oil plantation, the effect is deeply disorienting. Furthermore, it draws attention to the often overlooked ties between colonialism and the art world, for example, through the multinationals that now proudly sponsor these Western museums. This Congolese arts center is part of artist Renzo Martens’s unorthodox plan to jump-start the local economy. Former workers at the plantation make sculptures that are reproduced in chocolate, and then exhibited in New York. The plantation workers, most of whom earn a dollar or less a day, use the profits from this successful exhibition to buy back the land confiscated from them by Unilever.

Eighty-year-old doctor Co regularly holds office hours in a walk-in facility for homeless and uninsured people. In addition, he cycles across Amsterdam, looking for people he can give medical help. He descends into a shadow world of vacant garages and squatted office blocks, like the Vluchtgarage. Here, at ungodly hours, he helps rejected asylum seekers who are stuck and cannot go to regular doctors. What drives this aged ‘street doctor’ to be up and about at night to help these people?

Director Simonka de Jong follows sixteen-year-old Yvette from Nieuwegein in the last eighteen months of her eventful secondary school years. On the face of it, Yvette is a tough girl: she wears Lonsdale clothes, hangs around the schoolyard smoking and indifferent, and argues with her classmates, who are unable to place and simply will not accept her racism. Yvette clearly does not know what to do with herself and appears to have two faces. She can look like a hardcore Lonsdale girl, but with her hair loose and in the intimacy of the living room she is just a shy adolescent girl with her own dreams and desires.

Producer Oscar Holleman (Within Temptation an Krezip) instantly recognizes 21 year old Sharon Kovacs as a talented singer. Even comparing her voice to Amy Winehouse. The movie is a documentation of them recording during two very hectic years.

In July 1992, fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia, some patients of the Bosnian mental institution in Jakes leave for Hungary. Since 1996, these patients are housed on a ward of a refugee centre in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, where the rooms are clean but bare. The filmmakers talk to patients, who would rather go back home. They interview the psychiatrist in attendance, who wonders why there is no place in Bosnia for this small group. In Bosnia, they interview the psychiatrist of their former institution; old video footage shows the ravages of war. Plaintive singing on the soundtrack accompanies a trip across snow-clad Bosnia, where the filmmakers visit the patients' relatives. Their reactions are similar each time: they did not know that the patients were in Hungary now, but Bosnia has a lack of money, doctors and medicine. According to their relatives - and the director of a new institution in Jakes - they are better off in Hungary.

Documentary filmmaker Frans Bromet is known for his striking portraits of ordinary Dutch people. Now he is the subject himself, but has little desire to rake up matters from his own life.

Director David de Jongh represents the life Otto Frank in his documentary Otto Frank, the father of Anne. The film deals with various facets of Otto Frank’s life: his youth in Germany, including his military service during the First World War, his marriage to Edith Holländer and the birth of their daughters Margot and Anne, their flight to the Netherlands, the time in hiding and the deportation to Auschwitz, his life after the Second World War and his dedication to the diary and the ideals of his daughter Anne, and his second marriage to Fritzi Geiringer. The documentary features many photos and film images, as well as interviews, including new ones, with people who knew Otto Frank. His stepdaughter Eva Schloss is one of the interviewees. The film is produced by Pieter van Huystee Film.

The 24-year-old Monique, a Dutch woman of Hindustani origin, is at a turning point in her life. A recent college graduate, Monique has to make a decision: will she go along with her parents' wishes and leave the house a married woman, or pursue her dreams instead? She'd like to start off by discovering the world, making a career for herself, acting in Bollywood musicals and living on her own for a while. Her wishes and desires aren't all that different from Dutch girls; they clash with Hindustani traditions, in which women are expected to get married as soon as possible. Monique is trapped between two cultures she doesn't want to disappoint her parents, but she also can't bear to deny her own plans for the future.

They were called ‘the golden generation’, the young Yugoslavian soccer players who won the Junior World Soccer Championships in 1987 in Chile. They became world-famous and today play in Rome, Milan and Madrid. But the country they represented in Chile no longer exists. Director Vuk Janic talks with soccer heroes like Zvonimir Boban and Sinisa Mihajlovic and visits the neighbourhoods they grew up in. Via the soccer, he tells the story of the disintegration of his country. The supporter riots in 1990 during the match between Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb heralded the imminent war. Shortly after, the team fell apart. Seven years later, as national players of Croatia and little Yugoslavia, they compete in two charged qualification matches for the 2000 European Championships. Soccer is not war, but the war is never far away. The first match in Belgrade has to be cancelled due to NATO bombings, and the two national hymns are drowned in deafening whistles from the audience.

Under the toughest of living conditions, four poets have had to employ their imaginations in order to survive. Marjoleine Boonstra choose to focus on the sensory perception during their captivity. Personal stories about physical contact, sound, taste and smell gives intriguing view about the emotional years being in prison. At the age of eighteen, Nizametdin Achmetov went to jail a virgin, and twenty years later he emerged, still a virgin. The Cuban Maria Elena Cruz Varela was all by herself in a prison environment where anybody could betray her, while the Russian Irina Ratoesjinkaja found that her fellow prisoners could be indispensable allies. But during the first days after her release, her eyes could not stand the vivid colours of freedom.

The pig is unclean to some, tasty or sweet to others. The pig Dorus grows up in the backyard of free-range butcher Gerard Zwetsloot. They walk around the village together and are local celebrities. After two years, Dorus is ready for slaughter and Gerard is faced with a difficult choice: the pig or the meat. A story about a pig and a butcher that shows how ambiguous our relationship with animals can be.

Juliano Mer-Khamis' documentary on his mother, Arna, an activist against the Israeli occupation who founded an alternative education system for Palestinian children.

Documentary of the lives of Dutch gangsters

In the 1940s, Alima decides to flee from an arranged marriage to work as a nanny for a Dutch family. Through all her new impressions and thoughts, she looks critically at colonial society and her own position.

God, or fate, has brought Becky Moses to Europe via Libya from her native country Nigeria, on the run for an arranged marriage with an elderly man. Never would she have thought she would end up in Riace, a mountain village in Calabria (southern Italy) that has become world famous by its open-door policy for immigrants by the flamboyant mayor Domenico Lucano. Through the eyes of Becky and her fellow villagers, we witness how the shrunken Italian community lives together with the new, mostly African, inhabitants.