Overview: Father and son, Senior and Junior, try coming to terms with their war trauma by flatly denying reality in Flat Earth by Monique Verhoeckx. The character of Senior, played by Joris Smit, was inspired by the filmmaker’s grandfather who was a POW in one of the Japanese internment camps during WWII, where he was forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. He died from the effects a few years later. In this personal film, young veteran Senior lives on in a surreal monitoring space. On his monitors, he observes his now elderly Indonesian son Junior, and looks back in in time. When images from the war involuntarily return to him, Senior finds himself in contemporary Thailand while he re-experiences the war. Strong, contradictory emotions arise in him in relation to his son. Gradually, a hidden history is revealed.
Overview: 2 November 2004, shortly before nine in the morning. In The Hague, the report comes in that in Amsterdam Theo van Gogh has been murdered. All warning bells start ringing. With the country in flames, sometimes literally, politicians and officials in The Hague have to neutralise all sorts of known and unknown stings, and just when Van Gogh’s cremation seems to herald a period of relative peace, a second explosion follows: the attack on the Hofstad Network in the Laakkwartier in The Hague. A reconstruction of nine days of political high tension and flying dust, a decade after the assassination of the trendsetting filmmaker and TV presenter.
Overview: The lives of Anna, Paul and their little son Thomas seem perfect from the outside. Paul has a well-paid job, Anna has a home studio where she works with porcelain and Thomas is an angelic child. However, when Thomas bites one of his friends at school, the cracks of a context that is anything but perfect begin to surface.
