Vlissingen 2025: Recommendations

So if you're near the Netherlands and fancy some cinema along with a trip to the beach, here are several recommendations. Click on the sides of the picture to get the next one!

Also, check out the festival's website for the full programme.

The festival opens this year with Amélie Bonnin's romantic musical comedy Leave One Day, which was also the opening film in Cannes this year. A reworking of Bonnin's award-winning short of the same name, it tells the story of a successful Parisian chef who returns to her village of birth and meets some fun characters from her past, making her reassess her choices.

Monique van de Ven has been one of the Netherlands' most famous actresses for over 50 years, starring in films as diverse as Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight, Dick Maas' Amsterdamned and Brian Trenchard-Smith's Stunt Rock (seen above).

She is a guest of honor at the festival and will be receiving the Film by the Sea's Career Achievement Award 2025, and Claire Pijman's fiction/documentary hybrid A Woman Like Monique will be shown. Monique will also hold a career talk, so if you're a fan, show up!

The festival's extensive documentary section (17 films this year) focuses on the main theme "Hope", with films like Green Musketeer (seen above) by Babette Vermunt and Melchert Meijer zu Schlochtern, which shows the work of Dutch inventor Pieter Hoff, who finds ways to plant trees all over the world by using ingenious irrigation methods.

Or the film Patatje Oorlog van Pamela Sturhoofd en Jessica van Tijn, in which Dutch snackbar owners Franky van Hintum and Coen van Oosten travel to the Polish/Ukrainian border to make French fries for the Ukrainian refugees there, for free ('Patatje Oorlog' literally means "French fries of war" but is also what we call French fries with mayonnaise, peanut sauce and chopped onions...).

The legendary Japanese animation factory Studio Ghibli is 40 years old this year, and the festival celebrates this by showing five of their films: Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away , The Boy and the Heron and Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies.

Also shown will be two documentaries: Miyazaki: Spirit of Nature which highlights Miyazaki's work on Princess Mononoke, and Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron which shows Miyazaki working on his latest film, and the impact the passing of his old comrade Takahata had on him.

As always, the festival shows a lot of recent French cinema (23 titles this time) and this year there is a special focus on actress Laure Calamy. One of her films shown is Franck Dubosc's comedy thriller How To Make a Killing, about a couple who come upon a fatal car crash in the woods and find a bag with two million Euros there.

Vlissingen has a church which, during the festival, sometimes doubles as a venue for silent films with live music. This year F. W. Murnau's award-winning classic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans from 1927 will be shown. In the film, a farmer falls in love with a city woman who tries to convince the man to drown his wife.

Book adaptations are a staple at Film by the Sea, and the festival even has a competition about them. This year, eight films participate and you can see the full line-up here.

Shown above is Sophie Deraspe's Bergers, about two people who give up their careers to herd a large flock of sheep in the French Alps, discovering the beauty of the region but also the backbreaking amount of daily labor involved.

The festival closes with Peter Cattaneo's comical drama The Penguin Lessons, in which a teacher in Argentina (played by Steve Coogan) saves a penguin. Unexpectedly, the animal becomes a symbol of hope for all who encounter it, in a time of extreme political upheaval.