Maasja Ooms

"It’s not easy to find a foster family for you," an orphanage supervisor explains to nine-year-old Alicia. "After all, you are a very special girl." Alicia is crying. "I’m not special. I’m just a girl." This disturbing scene sets the tone for this film about Alicia, who was taken away from her teenage mother by the Child Welfare Bureau when she was 12 months old. She’s been living in an orphanage since the age of five, and they have never managed to find a foster family for her. In Alicia, we watch as she becomes a teenager, still craving safety and love. Over the course of three years, filmmaker Maasja Ooms follows her daily life up close. Alicia's yearning and powerlessness are palpable in these observations, which painfully reveal the effects of having no prospects.

The parents are at their wits’ end, so a temporary supervision order is the last hope for a group of teenagers in Punks. Now, on a remote farm in France, they’re going to have to get their lives back on track, with the help of a counselor. If they want any chance of a happy life, they need to engage in some frank and painful conversations. Mitchel has to find a way to get along with his father, but maybe too much has already happened since his mother died. Jahlano is already at the next stage: he’s no longer allowed to live with his mother, and needs to get over the disappointment. Mike, meanwhile, is struggling with his image as a boy who’s “got a screw loose.” Filmed in constant close-up by director Maasja Ooms, the teenagers try to tame their demons with music and therapy, but problems from the past keep resurfacing. In this intimate and sincere portrait, these troubled kids show us their most vulnerable sides.

Russian Poet Boris Ryzhy was handsome, talented and famous. So why did he end his own life at the age of 26? A quest to find the answer takes the filmmaker to the notorious neighbourhood in the cold industrial city of Yekaterinenburg where Boris grew up...

No description available.

One day, Dutch film maker van der Horst was given her inheritance: 6 square meters, one sixth of a small, wooden house in the Russian countryside where her mother grew up. It was as if life had handed her a card she felt forced to play. She began a journey into the past, back into the childhood of her Russian mother and her five sisters, all of whom struggled with fear, famine and war in Stalin’s Russia; experiences that left them scarred to their very soul. Aliona’s quest into the lives and fate of her family becomes a loving, poignant, and poetic film with Chekhovian characters. Accompanied by the magical animation of acclaimed Italian artist Simone Massi, unimaginable events in the Soviet past are given an immediate charge. Along with the stories of ordinary people living in the small farmhouse, the film maker tells the tale of Soviet terror, immense bravery and a fear that has never left those four walls.

One in ten people hear voices. In this film, we meet five people living with this phenomenon. One person hears a single voice, another hears 19. One voice wants to protect, another wants to kill.

Let’s embark upon a journey to discover two collective housing projects. One in Kharkiv, Ukraine, from the early days of the Soviet era in 1930; the other, in the suburbs of Rotterdam, in the 1950s. Their connection? Lotte Stam-Beese, the first woman to train as an architect at the Bauhaus, who took part in both ventures. Two political and social spaces for two different architectural utopias. The film unfolds stories and expands them with well-informed, militant explanations, as we go back and forth, sometimes imperceptibly, from one city to another, from past to present, in a delicate weaving operation. As a game of transfer and echoes, of viewpoints opening up a counter-History, in reverse, as suggested by the superimpositions the film is peppered with. A journey through the bends of places, History, words, punctuated by the apparitions of an interpreter who translates as much as she comments, in a whispering voice, as a ghostly narrator.

Two Dutch filmmakers travel to the Iranian city of Bam to chronicle the aftermath of a December 2006 earthquake that claimed 43,000 lives and left 60,000 homeless. Survivors reflect on the catastrophe in voice-over narration that's accompanied by images of a wrecked metropolis fighting to pull itself back together. The gripping documentary received its North American premiere at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

TV adaptation of Brigitte Kaandorp's theatre tour 'CD Opname', in wich the Dutch comedian Brigitte Kaandorp sings a selection from her songs, accompanied by 9 musicians.

Teenager Kristopher feels relieved about his coming-out, which as yet seems to bring him more advantages than disadvantages.

As a film about fertility, Water Children is an ode to womanhood and the body Filmmaker Aliona van der Horst followed the trail of the unconventional Dutch-Japanese pianist and artist Tomoko Mukaiyama who made a huge work of art on the theme of womanhood and fertility. She created a cathedral-like space out of twelve thousand white silk dresses in which visitors, as in a ritual, roamed around and fell silent. And where people confessed intimate details about children who were or were not born, about sexuality and life-choices. This resulted in a majestic epic about motherhood, miscarriages and menopause. In a visual and poetic way, the film penetrates into what is probably still one of the greatest of taboos, menstruation, and, as a consequence, touches upon universal themes around life and death.

A painfully frank portrait of 22-year-old Jason as he undergoes trauma therapy. This is the third and final part of Maasja Ooms’ trilogy about the failing Dutch youth welfare services. As in the two previous documentaries Alicia and Rotjochies (Punks), the film is a critical observation from a very personal point of view.

The documentary closely portrays three patients who are being treated with Electro Convulsion Therapy (ECT) for their depression or psychosis.

As much about the people who work in Russia's renowned museum as it is about the glorious art works housed in this St. Petersburg institution. We meet with several "Hermitage-niks"—including Olga Bogdanova, the head of museum maintenance, icon curator Alexandra Kostsova, museum attendant Valentina Barbashova, and art handler Vadim Kuptsov, among others—each of whom explains their own very personal reasons for considering the palace of Catherine the Great their "home."

15 attempts to make a film, to misunderstand an artist or to look at the world without preconceptions.

Director Simonka de Jong follows sixteen-year-old Yvette from Nieuwegein in the last eighteen months of her eventful secondary school years. On the face of it, Yvette is a tough girl: she wears Lonsdale clothes, hangs around the schoolyard smoking and indifferent, and argues with her classmates, who are unable to place and simply will not accept her racism. Yvette clearly does not know what to do with herself and appears to have two faces. She can look like a hardcore Lonsdale girl, but with her hair loose and in the intimacy of the living room she is just a shy adolescent girl with her own dreams and desires.

Poetic film about the funfair, which concentrates on human conditions: The enchantment of children. The ease of the youth, full of expectations. Fleeting smiles. Devotion to the moment. Felicity... but also melancholy and vulnerability. The funfair as metaphor of life itself.

Documentary about the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the former Soviet Union. Hanna Michailenko, an Ukrainian schoolteacher from Odessa was locked up in a psychiatric ward from 1980 until 1988 for refusing to work for the Soviet Secret Service, the KGB.