Dutch Film Festival 2024 Overview: The Dutch Investigating Themselves In The Movies

The world is undergoing monumental changes in these decades. This can sometimes be unsettling and applies to practically every country. From Mongolia to Canada and from Chile to the Netherlands. Digital technology, media and artificial intelligence, quantum, the enormous increase in knowledge about almost everything and at the same time the international balance of power is shifting on all fronts. It creates a new world whose scope is incalculable. No wonder that many people are turning an investigative gaze on their own culture and filmmakers are no exception. A yardstick for this are the films that were shown at the Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) last autumn. Below are a number of short characterizations of films that were shown at the 2024 Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) and for the most part competed for the festival's main prizes: the Golden Calves. 

Hardcore Never Dies by director Jim Taihuttu is set in the specifically Dutch Gabber subculture of the nineties. The film tells the story of two brothers, the eldest Danny, a rascal and rebel who has been thrown out of the house, the younger Michael driven by the dream of becoming a classical pianist. The latter is not easy from the Rotterdam working class environment he comes from. Just after he has passed his admission to the conservatory, his brother turns up and drags the aspiring pianist into the world of drug trafficking and the wild musical underground. Taihuttu's film was one of the standouts this year in Dutch film. 

This is Not a Christmas Film by Michael Middelkoop (see picture above) is a skillfully made comedy that makes fun of everything, including political correctness, the genre of the Christmas film and above all the ideological fashions and delusions of the day. The film is structured around a family whose characters are introduced one by one, giving the makers the opportunity to analyse all the preoccupations of the different generations of the family as a kind of miniature of Dutch society at the moment. 

De Terugreis (The Way Back) by Jelle de Jonge is a tragicomic road movie about an older couple who are going on a trip for the first time in years. They want to visit an old friend in the south of Europe once more. The journey takes them right across a continent that has become completely different from what they remember. Along the way, the man played by Dutch comedian actor Martin van Waardenberg discovers that his cheerful, nonchalant wife, beautifully played by Leny Breederveld, occasionally loses her way mentally in the world around her. Not only the outside world but also the inside world is changing for her. The fact that all elements camera, script, acting, direction fit together smoothly, together with the story, made the film win the highest prize of the festival, the Golden Calf for best film. 

The opening film Witte Flits / White Flash (Laura Hermanides, 2024) was immediately a film in which the inward-looking view reaches a dramatic climax. The film shows a Dutch family that is torn apart by an eldest son with an explicit death wish. The film follows the difficult and painful search of the parents and the son for help in psychiatric institutions and care providers. The mother is played subdued by the well-known Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk, the capricious son in contrast is played expressively by actor Sanne de Hartogh. You could also read the film as a ritual with which the Dutch, helped and embedded by institutions and procedures, have learned to exorcise their problems. First as an action group, then in word and writing, one or more lawsuits, politics, the media and then a film. Sometimes the order is different, or links are missing, but that is the general pattern. 

  

The fictional Paradijs (Bobbie Koek) tells the story of a young Dutch boy who becomes a father at the age of seventeen. His lover leaves the baby behind and disappears. He goes in search of her on a scooter and travels hundreds of kilometers with the baby in a baby carrier on his chest. The baby we fear for during the dangerous journey survives and is well cared for. And the seventeen-year-old father does not find the mother of his child, but when he returns home he and the child do find some kind of closure. 

  

There is the feature film Torch Song (Jeroen Houben) in which a peaceful, prosperous Amsterdam house is disturbed by the arrival of the American half-sister of one of the residents. The film shows how the strange, the unknown, can shake up our lives and therefore, in addition to pain, can also cause unexpected events. Seen from a distance, the film also reminds of Pasolini's Teorema from 1968. It made an impression with its narrative form, rhythm and music. Torch Song rightly won the Dutch film critics' prize for it.