“Ciske de Rat” belongs to dickensean model “little man’s hard life” and tells a deceptively simple story about a boy in modern Netherlands. Persecution, loneliness, adults’ hostility, fear, mixture of obstinacy and tenderness, and even an imprisonment. Excellent camera movement and delicate portraying of Ciske’s fragile soul put this film out of merely historical context and ensure the place in the Great Cinema History for it.
Tag: NETHERLANDS
Tragic love story about the photographer and explorer Felice Beato who travelled back to Japan in 1895 to seek his former wife O-Kiku. On the way he describes in a nostalgic letter to his brother how much he yearns for his lost love O-Kiku and how impotent he feels in an ancient Japan subject to rapid change.
The film tells the story of Freek Groenevelt and Simone Marijnissen whose lives are taken over by Joachim Stiller. He’s a bizarre character who influences Freek and Simone’s lives in different ways.
Alex van Warmerdam’s award-winning second feature is set in a remote small Dutch village in the early 1960s. The village is actually just one street of a new town that was never completed, and the behavior of its inhabitants is invariably determined by their unsolved sexual problems, leading to a number of comic situations depicted in a tradition of absurdist black humor.
In January 1945, during the 2nd world-war, the Dutch resistance kills a collaborator in the street where the 12 year old Anton Steenwijk lives. The man was shot in front of his neighbors house, but is moved by them to the house of the family Steenwijk. Because of this, his father, mother and brother are killed by the Germans, and their house is set to fire. During his life, Anton meets several people that tell him more about what really happened on the night of the assault.