A former sailor who has served prison sentences for alcohol smuggling fights to keep his family afloat. He is offered pay for a last tour of cargo between Reykjavik and Rotterdam. He agrees, in the hope to get out of debt, but unexpected events occur.
A thrilling love story between the young boxer Vincent and the German Eva, who soon has to marry with the middle-aged Dirk to save her family. While the war starts in the Netherlands their impossible love inflames. May 14, 1940, the day that the centre of Rotterdam is bombed and the young lovers lose sight of each other.
On Christmas Eve, Francesca sets out for Rotterdam in order to find her little sister, who has run off with her musician boyfriend. On the way, she picks up Gerlinde, a heartbroken older woman at the end of her rope.
Highly intelligent hacker Lillian joins a cybersecurity company in order to gain access to the bank where her father used to work. She discovers nothing is what it seems and it turns out she isn’t the only one pretending to be someone else. But where do we draw the line between activism and terrorism?
At 41 years old, the Quebecois conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has established himself as one of the most gifted maestros of his generation, with numerous prestigious posts with some of the world’s greatest orchestras already under his belt, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra (music director), London Philharmonic Orchestra (principal guest conductor), and the Orchestre métropolitain de Montréal. One week before Nézet-Séguin's official nomination as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra in 2008, filmmaker Christiaan van Schermbeek met the maestro for the first time. The once-in-a-lifetime event inspired Schermbeek to begin this documentary project, giving us a fascinating glimpse into the life of a truly extraordinary individual.
Long blue hours characterise summer nights in the sleepy Norwegian port town of Ålesund. Asta is a young journalist working for the local newspaper, where she is expected to report on local sports, historic preservation, and cruise ships. It is only when she stumbles across the strange story of a refugee’s forced deportation, that she finds new meaning in her work and life.
Documentary about loneliness in the elderly.
Jakob Yzermans is an American salesman looking for his roots in Rotterdam. He thinks his father (Hendrik Yzermans) has left Holland with the money he took from his collegues. Jakob is trying to get the money together to repay the money. While doing so he encounters more and more problems.
Rotterdam 2040 is a film about the city’s future, departing from the principle of Gyz La Rivière that you can’t look ahead without considering your past (something that hasn’t always been Rotterdam’s strongest feature). At high speed, La Rivière reconstructs the history of Rotterdam from the time before the bombings until now, and expands the developments to the year 2040 (100 years after the bombing and the 700th anniversary of the city). La Rivière made a specific choice to expose his personal vision, which is sometimes radical or a little absurd. So no experts and no talking heads, but an assault of old and new imagery, held together by La Rivière as the narrator of the film. Although Rotterdam 2040 deals with architecture and urban renewal, it is actually a film about people. The subjective experience of the city by its (future) occupants mainly determines the parade of architectural blunders and suggestions for the future. All tongue-in-cheek of course.
Humorous, melancholy documentary about copywriter, photo model and poet Frans Vogel (1935-2016). A handsome kid who became involved in the art world of the 1950s. Thanks to his absurd humor and provocative behavior, Vogel became a familiar face on the Rotterdam art scene.
A journalist in Rotterdam has to show the city to an important foreign relation. He shows her the Rotterdam port.
Short film version of the app – loosely based on tarot – the maker developed as a graduation project. Barbie dolls and Lego versions of Bert and Ernie play the lead roles. Instagram filters give them all sorts of layers, emotions, and identities. The game enables players to discover their life’s goal.
An out of work engineer is hired as the private chauffeur of a rich playboy, and has to drive to Vlissingen to pick up the latter's fiancée. On the way back from Vlissingen, the car breaks down and the engineer and the fiancée travel to Rotterdam to get some spare parts -- a trip full of amorous entanglements and mistaken identities.
A girl who's living abroad, alone for the first time, misses her cat.
Next to the Bijenkorf on the Coolsingel stands one of Rotterdam’s most famous sculptures, an untitled structure created by Russian modernist artist Naum Gabo, that has been simply called Het Ding (The Thing). This documentary about the restoration of Naum Gabo’s nameless sculpture from 1957 combines awe-inspiring shots of this artwork with audio fragments from Gabo’s fiery Russian manifests.
Rotterdam city poet Dean Bowen paints a harsh and bleak picture of how we, the Dutch, ignore the sins of our colonial past.
Shots of pre-war Rotterdam, both the city and the port.