
Okki Poortvliet
Directing
Biography
Okki Poortvliet (1999) is a documentary filmmaker, audiovisual artist, and illustrator. She grew up in a small village in the north of the Netherlands, where she shot her graduation film IJswee (Longing for Ice) in 2021 at Minerva Art Academy. Since then, she has created six films, each marked by an anthropological lens, experimental approach, and human touch. Okki is fascinated by people and their worlds—whether it's Manus, who sharpens ice skates (IJswee), Jippe, who dreams of outshining Kim Jong-un (World's Greatest Missile Builder), Ricardo, who nailed his regional flag to a windmill (The Flaghoisters), or Robert, who cycles through the forest each morning at 5:30 (Over the Cattle Grid). In addition to her film work, Okki creates installations, posters, and drawings. She studied philosophy at the University of Groningen. From 2025-2028 she will attend the Master of Film program at the Netherlands Film Academy.
Known For

Fabian builds his house on an old cart that he will pull himself, with the plan to walk to Serbia. But then it turns out that building the cart in itself is quite a journey. Will the cart ever leave it's place?
Fabian's little Cart

Based on a comic by legendary Dutch artist Typex, Milkman is the story of a lonely, old-fashioned milkman fighting a quixotic battle against modern times, whilst feeling stuck in the same old routine of delivering the milk every day. One day, he discovers a mysterious bottle in his cart. A bottle that turns out not only to have life-changing consequences for the milkman himself, but for the entire village.
Milkman

When is the moment you think: I'm going to hoist my regional flag? Who are these flaghoisters? And what does it mean to identify with your region? These are questions that filmmaker Okki Poortvliet, theatermaker Hans van der Werf and designer Vera Vos asked. So, they went through the whole of Drenthe, a region in the North of The Netherlands where all three of them grew up, to collect as many stories as possible from hoisters of the flag of Drenthe. The Flaghoisters is a film about the confrontation between the countryside and, as people from Drenthe call it, “the city dwellers”. A story about a disappearing language, the safety of your village, greeting each other, being proud, and just acting "normal".
The Flaghoisters

Milah van Zuilen, visual artist and forest ecologist in training, uses the square to deal with the habit of people to construct nature. Square Fieldwork is filmed in the Bohemian forest in the Czech Republic and the concrete structure of Barendrecht, The Netherlands.
Square Fieldwork

It’s October 10 2020 and Kim Jong-un presents the largest mobile rocket on Earth. Jippe Liefbroer, Interaction Design student, sees the rocket and thinks: it can be bigger. For his graduation project he built 'Kimmi's worst nightmare', a 31 meter long rocket. That is 1 meter longer than Kim Jung-un's.
Worlds largest rocket builder

IJswee is a documentary film about an ice club, a village and the warm winters. In the film we follow Oringers, the inhabitants of Odoorn, through the winter. The Oringers all experience IJswee in their own way. You will also see the Icecounter (Rafael van der Ziel), who builds ice sculptures and drinks frozen milk. You see the Drenthe countryside changing with the weather. You see animations, archive material and you hear the mysterious sounds of IJswee in the music of Wietse de Haan. And there are two trumpet players, who welcome winter with their music and say goodbye to it.
IJswee

In Over the Cattle Grid you follow to Robert, Rinke and Ytzen, who spend every day in the woods between the villages of Odoorn and Exloo. Ytzen and Rinke because they live in the middle of the woods, Robert because he cycles through the woods every day to get to work. Behind the grid time seems to pass in a different way. Or as Ytzen says "there is no time, there is just being". They also see things they have never seen before, such as trees that lose their leaves in September and plants that want to start growing in the middle of winter. You will also see Wietse de Haan and Evert Prummel, they build instruments from dead trees. All the music you hear in the film was played on these tree instruments and recorded in the forest. Okki herself also occasionally passes by. She has been coming to this piece of forest all her life, which is a kilometer from the house where she grew up. Not only has she known the forest, but also Robert, Ytzen and Rinke for most of her life.