A young man from the city decides to travel into the Dutch countryside. There, he notices strange mound-like shapes in the fields covered by white plastic tarps. The local farmers casually explain that the mounds contain silage or hay, but the man becomes suspicious. When he secretly peeks underneath, he discovers something bizarre instead: stacks of consumer goods like sugar, canned soup, and sliced bread.
Tag: NETHERLANDS
Abel has never left home (literally). After failing with doctors and psychiatrists, Abel’s father Victor brings home Christine, a friend, in an attempt to teach Abel basic social skills. But Victor’s wife Duif accuses him of having an affair, and in the ensuing row Abel is thrown out into the street. But help is at hand when he runs into kind-hearted stripper Zus – whose show Victor is obsessed with…
In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents’ villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother’s depression, and her mother’s suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. “Is my life real, or is it theater?” This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.
In an open field, a butterfly flies from flower to flower. The charming image is interrupted by cut-out photos of apartment blocks and flats that jump into view to the rhythm of a pile driver. The butterfly is increasingly hemmed in by the buildings, until there’s no more space left, and it is finally mounted and framed on a wall. The last of its kind died in 1975.
Sientje is a little girl whose mother won’t let her watch TV. She’s angry. Extremely angry: what does a little girl do when she’s so angry? Sientje takes out her aggression on everything, even her most precious stuffed animal.
Film professor Michael falls in love with one of his students and is confronted with his pupil’s father, with whom he had an affair over 15 years ago. This unexpected meeting abruptly overturns the lives of all the characters. When the tutor decides to undertake a planned trip to London, not with the son but with the father, he is once again forced to choose; this time between his wife and his friend.
Four recalcitrant teenagers come into conflict with their clumsy parents. The battle escalates when the mother tries to seduce her daughter’s tennis teacher and the children turn the villa into a heavily armed fortress. A classic theme, the battle between parents and children, gets completely out of hand in this black comedy in an idiosyncratic and brutal way, in which the authority of the parents is completely undermined.
Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They’re all rather tight, or so they claim.