Jolein Laarman

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The parents of five sisters have been married for forty years; the daughters have gathered in the family beach house to make a video for them. The encounter is marked by many confrontations as well as cheerful moments. Reminiscent of the sweet children's poems that mother recited are countered by Elsschot's Marriage: 'He thought: I'll kill her and set light to the house...' It also turns out that father had once disappeared for eighteen months, a 'secret' that the daughters have different ideas about. Brittle, an intimate film version of a play written and performed by the same actresses, is about rivalry in a family, the right to silence, but also about the need for solidarity. At the Netherlands Film Festival in 1997 the Golden Calf for Best Actress was awarded to the five actresses together.

Set in the remote winter landscape of Norway, Roos visits her mother there yearly, but this time it’s different: she brings bad news. However, old pain and numerous reproaches keep Roos from sharing anything with her mother. Aided by her half-brother and her old flame, the two women reconcile and Roos is able to make her next and inescapable step.

A lively young boy befriends and attempts to raise an abandoned baby jackdaw unbeknownst to his choleric and disapproving father.

When Louise (70) and Max (72) meet, it is love at first sight: they abandon their sleepy lives and travel to the South of France, where they become the terrors of the 'Route du Soleil'. They rip off naïve tourists with their act as a sad old couple: a second youth that goes further than their wildest dreams. Based on a true story.

An intimate look into the life of a 13 year old girl in northern Amsterdam who 'looses' her Russian mother and older sister to the cruel world of prostitution. Little sister remains alone in a flat at the IJ-square. Through her unconditional love and her lack of inhibition she manages to keep her head up in the relentless world of porn, drugs, and neon ads.

Sam and Do (short for Dominique) have been together for five years. They enjoy life and are very happy. But then Do gives birth to their son Max. Their whole life is suddenly upside down. Can their love survive after the arrival of their baby?

In a juvenile delinquent center two girls find comfort in love for each other. Once one of them gets released, they don't know how to deal with this and both seek for a solution, with tragic consequences - A contemporary love story based on the motives of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Is our life a story? And if so, can we re-write it? In Drama Girl, director Vincent Boy Kars gets a young woman to act out a number of key scenes from her recent past. Perhaps, Kars thinks, this could help her come to terms with certain events. In the meantime, he also gains something: a film that probes how fiction and documentary can learn from one another.

Esin and Serkan are trying to live their own new happy married life, but soon they encounter the strong traditions and rules that apply in Serkans family. They don't dare to go against this, until this almost becomes fatal to their love. Esin makes a choice.

Stages is a film about loneliness, anxiety, struggle and love, which in an unconventional way shows the survival of two former lovers in their forties and their seventeen year-old son.

A truck carrying a Dutch military convoy on a peacekeeping mission breaks down somewhere in the desert. As a group of soldiers waits for a repair team to arrive, they encounter a local boy who refuses to leave.

A woman diagnosed with terminal lung cancer gathers her three dearest friends together to make the most of the time she has left.

A destructive aggression is festering inside the 19-year-old Gijs. He must learn to contain it as his life is steadily getting out of control.

On the border of Turkey and Iran, 19-year-old twin sisters Zahra and Fatimah from Afghanistan lose their family. To survive in a hostile world of smugglers and drug dealers, they face choices and dilemmas that severely test their symbiotic relationship and conscience.

Polish Ewa works as an Au-pair in a small town in Holland. A sensitive girl, she finds it difficult to live up to her host-parents' clichéd expectations. When a rape takes place in town, Ewa believes to suspect the rapist. Having no one to share this knowledge with, it furthers her alienation from the people around her, resulting in her being send back home.

Olaf, an engineering student, lives with his father Vincent. Once a renowned architect, now suffering from early Alzheimer’s disease. Olaf is struggling, because he wants to keep seeing Vincent as the man who knows everything. In the run-up to the birthday party Olaf organises for his dad, their surroundings grow darker; a concrete wall casts a shadow over their house from the garden and Vincent’s condition is deteriorating. Olaf will have to realise that living together in the present is more valuable than persistently clinging on to what used to be.

In this electrifying journey filmmaker Vincent Boy Kars will try to understand in fiction how he became the person he is now, and who he wants to be in the future. The film challenges the very fabric of identity, eagerly pondering the possibilities of personal transformation. Can one truly break free from the weight of their own story?