Directing
Young journalist has an interview with a succesfull gay playwright who likes to write frankly about sex. At first the interviewee responds cynical and distant, but after a while the tone of the conversation changes. This is because the playwright notices the journalist more than admires him.
Anna starts and ends in euphoria: brother and sister Stijn and Brecht have both put the ghosts of the past behind them and she has finally said 'yes' to the tall waiter who has been courting her for so long. In their tragic past, the mysterious Anna plays a key role. When some time later Anna suddenly reappears, she again turns the siblings' life topsy-turvy.
The year is 1969. Father Louis (27) lives in a monastery and his priesthood is a vocation for him. However when his friend and colleague priest Daniël starts having a relationship with a woman, Louis also starts to question his celibate life. Why is he not allowed to have intimate relations with another human being? A series of events make Louis rebel against the Catholic Church and in 1973 he leaves the monastery. Chance brings him into contact with Daikha, a woman who teaches him about love. In 1999 his short affair with Daikha is almost forgotten. Louis has turned away from the church and now lives with his childhood love Liliane. Then he gets news that will change Louis' life drastically for the third time.
Due to excessive rainfall, the Land van Maas en Waal is threatened with flooding. Whereas all villagers have been evacuated, stoic old Jacoba refuses to vacate her little house on the dyke. Filled with a longing for death, she sits and waits for the dykes to give way. She kills time by listening to the radio alerts, by reading the Bible and by praying to God to hurry up. Until she is disturbed by the arrival of her 12-year-old granddaughter Fleur, who foils her plan. Gradually, the film unravels the reason for the old woman's peculiar behaviour, at the bottom of which lie indigestable past events. Despite attempts to get rid of Fleur, the unyielding girl is determined not to abandon her grandma. The confrontation with her grandchild forces the elderly lady to reconsider her intention.
What happens if you take the law into your own hands, start correcting the legal system on your own initiative? Hans Croiset, André van den Heuvel, Bram van der Vlugt and Kitty Courbois in their roles of aged resistance heroes do not think this is such a bad idea; in fact, it is what they already did during World War II. Back then, they formed a sworn resistance gang. The occasion for their renewed fighting spirit is the brutal robbery and murder of Marjan, one of the members of their former group. Past and present start blending. In a controlled tempo, alert to detail and acting, a story unravels that focuses on Hans Croiset in the role of Simon, a retired teacher of Dutch. He makes contact with the underworld, meeting the Slavic Goran, who starts feeling sympathy for the old man. Eventually, fate lies in Simon's hands.
At the invitation of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Dutch conductor Jules Coulée returns to the Netherlands to conduct a one-off performance of Third Symphony by Gustav Mahler. Coulée is unpleasantly surprised when he sees that the Concertgebouw is under construction and that the renovations continue during rehearsals. In addition, the acoustics of the hall are terribly bad and the balcony too close, so that the post horn solo in the third movement cannot possibly come from afar, as the score prescribes. For Coulée, the entire implementation stands or falls with this detail.
Rianne and Freek have three adopted children. They have a stable and happy family until the eldest son, Gilles (17), doubts his parents' love and sets off in search of his roots in Belgium. The family atmosphere is disrupted. Freek manages to calm the conflicts by talking, but swallows a lot of feelings. This affects his health. Rianne doesn't know whether she can keep the family together on her own.
I don't know who I am - that's what it is', the seventeen-year-old curly redhead Jordi grumbles to his tough girlfriend. Under mother's wing, Jordi spends all his time on the Internet. His only adventure is a ride on the back of his girlfriend's motorbike. One day, a coincidental but shocking discovery on the Net forces him to start searching for his identity, away from his familiar environment. It takes him to a confrontation with his biological father who was supposed dead, but appears to live in Ireland and does not immediately press his lost son in his arms. Kilkenny Cross is a coming-of-age drama, in which the Dutch urban water landscape contrasts with the green hills of Ireland and the impassiveness of modern means of communication with the longing for human intimacy. A chat session between mother and son leads to an emotional climax. In a cameo role, female novelist Manon Uphoff explains what true love means.
