JUNE 4 FRI 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
CHARACTER
NETHERLANDS 1997
DIRECTOR: MIKE VAN DIEM Adapted from Ferdinand Bordewijk’s classic novel, CHARACTER channels the social and political unrest of the Netherlands between the wars into a dark Dickensian drama of love, ambition and patricidal obsession. Opening on a moment of sudden, violent confrontation in a shadowy warehouse, the film unfolds as authorities interrogate Jacob Katadreuffe for the murder of Amsterdam’s most notorious bailiff, Dreverhaven “the scourge of the poor.” Flashing back, the bloodied young man recounts the days when his mother, Joba was Dreverhaven’s maid and briefly his mistress, and how, after a night of passion, he was born. Joba and Jacob eke out a living at the onset of the Depression free from Dreverhaven’s iron rule. Gradually, however, noirish fatalism takes hold when a bad business deal places an unwitting Jacob in Draverhaven’s debt and into a nail-biting clash of wills between the estranged father and son. As Jacob struggles for a release from poverty by studying law, labor riots breakout all over the city and the rain swept streets of Amsterdam come to form an impossible maze owned and patrolled by Draverhaven himself. Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.—Paul Malcolm. (120 mins.)

JUNE 5 SAT 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
MAX HAVELAAR
NETHERLANDS 1976
DIRECTOR: FONS RADEMAKERS Based on a classic 19th-century novel by Multatuli (the pseudonym of one Eduard Douwes Dekker) and executed on a grandiose scale, Fondemakers’ MAX HAVELAAR is a lavish, sprawling saga that relentlessly critiques the colonial situation in the Dutch East Indies. Peter Faber stars as the eponymous hero, an idealistic bureaucrat promoted to a supervisory position on Java. Young, vigorous and uncompromising, Havelaar is determined to reform the corrupt local administration. But his high-minded plans are swiftly met with resistance—at first subtle, then dangerously explicit—from his colonial superiors as well as the island’s native leaders, all of whom profit from the exploitative system. Shot on location in Indonesia after extensive research, MAX HAVELAAR belongs among the most Herculean auteur efforts of the ’70s, alongside Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO and Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW. And like these other epics set in far-flung exotic milieu, Rademakers’ film is both a towering aesthetic accomplishment and a devastating indictment of Western imperial ambition and, in the word of critic Peter Cowie, “the most imposing fiction film ever produced in the Netherlands.”—Jesse Zigelstein. (167 mins.)

JUNE 6 SUN 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE SPANISH EARTH
NETHERLANDS 1937
DIRECTOR: JORIS IVENS Backed by a group of concerned American artists and writers (including Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker), globetrotting documentarian Joris Ivens and cameraman John Ferno plunged into the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War to witness the anti-fascist struggle. For the politically progressive Ivens, the job of the documentary filmmaker was to inform audiences but also to “mobilize them to become active.” With commentary written by Ernest Hemingway and narrated by Orson Welles, THE SPANISH EARTH is a stirring portrait of a people’s struggle for democracy and a wrenching account of a human tragedy as it unfolds. Though the tone seems ever hopeful of a Republican victory (Ivens captured the fervor at the official founding of the People’s Army), the film never flinches from the horrors of war. Similar to the mounting rhythms of Ivens’ avant-garde study, RAIN (1929), in which a few drops become a torrential downpour, the film’s full force builds slowly.—Paul Malcolm. (52 mins.)

JUNE 9 WED 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
LITTLE RASCAL
NETHERLANDS 1939
DIRECTOR: DOUGLAS SIRK Shortly after escaping German Occupation, Douglas Sirk joined the Dutch film industry and was asked by the City Film Company to make its first feature. LITTLE RASCAL, adapted from a book and popular play by M.J. Brusse, tells the story of a little street urchin in Rotterdam in the 1930s. Thanks to the efforts of a local priest, the boy ends up against his will in a boys’ school in the country. He manages to escape, but after committing a petty crime, ends up back at the priest’s place again, shows his good heart and returns remorsefully to the boys’ home. LITTE RASACAL was nominated for the Golden Palm at the first Cannes Film Festval, which never took place because of the outbreak of World War II. Restored by the Nederland Filmmuseum in 1999, this was Sirk’s last European film before escaping to a distinguished career in Hollywood. (90 mins.)

JUNE 10 THU 7 PM GUILD THEATRE
THE HUMAN DUTCH
NETHERLANDS 1963
DIRECTOR: BERT HAANSTRA Part city symphony, part ethnographic essay, this award-winning documentary aims to reveal what is unique about a country with “no great talkers, singers, or dancers,” where “even the monuments are small and cozy.” A simultaneously intimate and critical narration serves as our guide through a torrent of candid images of the Dutch people at play and in love, haggling over cattle, or vigorously scrubbing their front stoops. A focus on the body and gesture lends the film a delightful zoomorphic edge; in fact, Haanstra went on to make a feature about chimpanzees. Creatures of grace on ice and in water, the prudish Dutch prove to be as comically awkward as Jerry Lewis when they maneuver to change clothes on the beach while keeping their decency intact.—Theresa Schwartzman. (85 mins.)

JUNE 11 FRI 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
A QUESTION OF SILENCE
NETHERLANDS 1983
DIRECTOR: MARLEEN GORRIS The first film from the director of ANTONIA’S LINE was a feminist cause célèbre at the time of its release and the question the film poses—can murder be a sane response to patriarchal oppression—still provokes heated debate, or at the very least incites reflection on how drastically the terms of feminist thought have shifted. A chic female psychiatrist’s world is turned upside down when she is asked to determine the sanity of three women who have committed the brutal and apparently senseless murder of a male clerk in a dress shop. The women—a housewife, a waitress, and a secretary—were strangers to each other until the moment of the crime and they refuse to give a motive for their act. Their stories come together through flashbacks, little fragments of a puzzle that gradually and incompletely reveals a picture of silenced female voices and smothered female potential that eventually erupt as a terrible, and terribly sane rage.—Theresa Schwartzman. (92 mins.)

JUNE 12 SAT 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE NORTHERNERS
NETHERLANDS 1992
DIRECTOR: ALEX VAN WARMERDAM Van Warmerdam made his film debut with ABEL (1986), a claustrophobic black comedy about voyeurism and familial dysfunction. These themes are further elaborated in THE NORTHERNERS, but van Warmerdam here broadens his canvas to observe the eccentric inhabitants of an unfinished subdivision in the Dutch hinterlands circa 1960. The film’s off-kilter ensemble centers around a sexually-frustrated butcher and his fanatically religious wife; their mischievous son, obsessed with Congolese liberation (he likes to put on blackface and call himself “Lumumba”) and beguiled by a water sprite living in the forest; a gun-toting prig, tormented by his own sterility and sudden onset of blindness; and van Warmerdam himself, as a delinquent mailman prone to peeking into the letters in his satchel. Observing each character—like specimens under glass—in his or her own absurd predicament, van Warmerdam wisely withholds judgment on his quirky creations. Deadpan dark humor and gentle social satire—spiced with an occasional pinch of magical realism—are the hallmarks of THE NORTHERNERS.—Jesse Zigelstein. (107 mins.)

JUNE 13 SUN 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE SILENT RAID
NETHERLANDS 1962
DIRECTOR: PAUL ROTHA A study of the resistance movement operating througout Europe during the Second World War. In a documentary style, the film recounts the facts that led up to a risky raid carried out on December 8, 1944 on the prison in Leeuwarden. Members of the Dutch resistance movement successfully attacked the prison and freed a group of fellow countrymen who had been arrested by the Germans. A major commercial success in Holland, the film’s glorious black and white cinematography has been restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. (81 mins.)

JUNE 16 WED 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
ONE PEOPLE
NETHERLANDS/SURINAM 1976
DIRECTOR: PIM DE LA PARRA, JR. The first film produced in Surinam in the year after it gained independence from Holland, ONE PEOPLE tells a hopeful national allegory through the character of Roy, a young Creole student in the Netherlands who is called back to Surinam to attend his dying mother. Initially reluctant to leave his Dutch girlfriend and his urban lifestyle, Roy gradually discovers that his homeland holds more complexity and secrets than he ever imagined, especially when he falls in love with Rubia, a Surinamese Hindustani girl. As Roy and Rubia fall deeper into each other’s worlds, their outraged parents conspire to separate the racially mixed pair by sending Roy back to Holland. The Romeo and Juliet story points to a split between the older generation of colonial Dutch Guyanese whose racial taboos echo those of their colonizer, while the younger Surinamese understand that their country’s strength lies within the difference of its peoples. Dazzling lens flares, Roy’s sexy flared jeans, and a beguiling polyglot soundtrack give this film the righteous feel of an album cover from the era of free love.—Theresa Schwartzman. (90 mins.)

JUNE 17 THU 7 PM GUILD THEATRE
SPITTING IMAGE
NETHERLANDS 1963
DIRECTOR: FONS RADEMAKERS Transformation under duress is at the nexus of this psychological and philosophical wartime drama by Fons Rademakers. The setting is Holland under German occupation and young Ducker, a faint-hearted cigar trader, is surviving the war and an unhappy marriage the best he can. Then one dark night, a mysterious secret agent who looks remarkably like Ducker except for his black hair, parachutes into the young man's back yard. The secret agent, Dorbeck, enlists Ducker's help in his missions against the Germans, and before much time has elapsed, Ducker has joined the resistance fighters and is actively engaged in the anti-German, underground war effort. He becomes daring, confident, and imaginative—all the qualities missing in his earlier life. But then the war ends and brings an ironic twist to Ducker's career as a brave patriot. Produced by Alfred Heineken, then the head of the famed Dutch brewery, the film was screened at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, withdrawn from circulation in the late 1960s, and finally re-released in 2003 after restoration by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. (120 mins.)

JUNE 18 FRI 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE VANISHING
NETHERLANDS 1988
DIRECTOR: GEORGE SLUIZER A sober psychological thriller that plays like a Dutchman’s take on Hitchcock via icy Gallic master Claude Chabrol, THE VANISHING pivots on the unsolved abduction of a young woman from a highway rest stop in France. Three years later, her boyfriend (Gene Bervoets) is still obsessed with her disappearance and tries desperately to make contact with her abductor. The film takes the unconventional tack of disclosing the perpetrator (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) to the audience almost immediately; Sluizer even supplies extended flashbacks that reveal this mild-mannered sociopath—a bourgeois French academic and family man—as he dispassionately works through the preparations for his crime. Since the scrambled chronology effectively vitiates the whodunit aspect, Sluizer instead foregrounds the mysteries of motive (why?) and the victim’s ultimate fate (what happened to her?)—precisely the questions that drive (and torment) the film’s nominal “hero,” whose desire for closure—for answers—leads inexorably to the plot’s final wicked twist. Largely devoid of onscreen violence, melodramatic effects or typical thriller tropes, the film builds suspense through subtle technical means—temporal jumps, narrative gaps, shifting points-of-view—to become that rare and chilling creature—the thinking person’s scary movie.—Jesse Zigelstein. (110 mins.)

JUNE 19 SAT 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE 4TH MAN
NETHERLANDS 1983
DIRECTOR: PAUL VERHOEVEN Verhoeven’s last Dutch language film before he went to Hollywood to direct such films as BASIC INSTINCT, SHOWGIRLS and STARSHIP TROOPERS serves the kitsch so straight its hard to know whether he’s serious or putting us on. Based on the novel by pioneering gay author Gerard Reve, THE 4TH MAN is an erotic-thriller that deliciously tweaks the genre’s psychological pretensions. A controversial writer on the skids, Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) wakes with trembling hands, entertains fantasies of murdering his live-in lover and pays his liquor bills by lecturing to suburban literary clubs. The writer’s mental breakdown is a license to cook up a giddy host of biblical allusions and surrealist imagery, an over-the-top dreamscape from which emerges a tangled sexuality when Christine (Reneé Soutendijk), a wealthy platinum blonde with a alarming string of deceased husbands, seduces Reve who, in turn, sets out to seduce her rock-a-billy lover Herman (Thom Hoffman). With everyone playing both predator and prey, Reve teeters between madness and revelation until finally he succumbs, but is it to a sinister plot or his own mounting paranoia? —Paul Malcolm. (102 mins.)

JUNE 20 SUN 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
METAL AND MELANCHOLY
NETHERLANDS 1993
DIRECTOR: HEDDY HONIGMANN A Peruvian taxi driver tells the story of the great, lost love of his life and then asks Honigmann if she would like to hear the first song they danced to. He slips in the cassette and the camera records without interruption as the man sings along. The startling simplicity of such moments is what makes Honigmann (O AMOR NATURAL) a documentarian like no other. In METAL Y MELANCOLIA, she turns her camera on gypsy cab drivers in Peru during a period of severe economic crisis when it seems anyone with a car—a medical publicist, a film actor, a professor of aviation—has taken on a second job as a taxista. The film proceeds as a series of rides, so each driver appears only briefly, but Honigmann’s clear-eyed attention to detail and remarkable ability to earn her subjects’ trust provide us a strong sense of how life must feel in another’s shoes.—Theresa Schwartzman. (80 mins.)

JUNE 24 THU 7 PM GUILD THEATRE
BRASS UNBOUND
NETHERLANDS 1993
DIRECTOR: JOHAN VAN DER KEUKEN One of the most revealing moments in Johan van der Keuken’s exuberant documentary, BRASS UNBOUND, comes when a British missionary in Ghana recalls an attempt to organize a brass band decades earlier. “I wanted them to learn our notes,” he says but native audiences were unmoved by British marches and anthems. When the musicians used their trumpets, tubas and euphoniums to play local high life tunes, however, audiences leapt to their feet and a new music was born. From Ghana to Surinam to Nepal to Indonesia, van der Keuken pursues the colonial pathways of brass instruments to explore the powerful legacies of such cross-cultural encounters the world over. An innovative filmmaker with a keen facility for illuminating the finer points of global interconnectedness, van der Keuken proves equally adept at personalizing complex currents of influence and resistance. His subjects in each region are working musicians who provide the living soundtrack for communal events such as weddings, funerals and religious festivities.—Paul Malcolm. (90 mins.)