Dutch Treats Hits Nerve During Crowded New York Film Season

December in New York……one of the city's most popular seasons, as people from around the US and around the world descend on the metropolis to experience the first snows of winter and absorb the lively, intoxicating atmosphere of the Holiday Season.

Amid the frenzied shopping sprees, the delights of store window displays, the romantic twinkling of lights, the film season is at its peak with prestige offerings from Hollywood and the independent studios. With the first announcements of the annual film awards, the obsessive guess work surrounding possible Oscar nominations and the roll out of several highly anticipated end-of-the-year smashes, who could have guessed that a program of new films from the Netherlands would have been one of the highlights of the early Winter season?

This year's fourth annual edition of Dutch Treats ran at the Quad Cinema, one of New York's most prestigious arthouse cinemas, from December 1 to 7. The event was a surprising box office performer, topping box office records for its week and becoming an unlikely hit on the specialized film circuit. While not as well known as contemporary French, German, Scandinavian or Spanish films, the Dutch have done surprisingly well in the US of late, having snagged the Best Foreign Language Oscar twice in the past 6 years (first for Antonia's Line by Marleen Gorris in 1994 and in 1998 for Mike Van Diem's period drama Character).

This year's contender for the Oscar also mined the past and was also based on a famous Dutch novel. Little Crumb, directed by Maria Peters, is the charming story of a street urchin in 1920s Rotterdam who searches for a sense of security and family that makes the story quite contemporary indeed. Following its successful screenings in New York, several leading US distributors, including powerhouse studio Miramax Films, were circling the film. Will Oscar lightning strike again for this unsentimental and resonant children's film?

One thing that was made clear by the ten films featured in the Dutch Treats program was the diversity and talent of films being made in Holland. Leak, a dynamic drama based on an actual police corruption scandal, is a highly stylish and emotionally affecting drama set in the shady milieu of drugs and dirty cops. The film, which was the best attended of the event, was reminiscent of an arthouse Dirty Harry flick, with requisite action, gunfights and car chases, all set in the uncharacteristic settings in and around modern Amsterdam.

Siberia, directed by Robert Jan Westdijk, is set in and around the idyllic canals of old Amsterdam, a magical kingdom where tourists feel completely at ease and safe from the harsher realities of the places where they have come from. But that sense of security is riotously ruptured as we follow the wild adventures of two local con artists who seduce and then rob unsuspecting female tourists, lulled by the beauty, marijuana "coffeeshops" and hedonistic sexuality of the "San Francisco of Europe". The film has a wildly inventive look and kinetic energy fueled by the driving techno score of Dutch bank Junkie XL.

A different kind of social problem is explored in the highly intelligent and effecting Les Diseurs de Verite, directed by Karim Traida. Based on the true story of a crusading Algerian journalist who is forced to leave his troubled country and attempts to find political asylum in the Netherlands. The film, which is uncompromising in its critique of the nameless, faceless, impassive bureaucracy that must decide the man's fate, has drawn a lot of heat, according to Traida, himself an Algerian refugee. The film is alarming in its critique of the supposed liberal open-mindedness of Dutch culture, while it explores the growing sense of xenophobia that is present in even the most progressive of European nations.

Social critique of a less serious manner is the subject of Eddy Terstall's brilliantly funny new comedy, Rent a Friend. Terstall, known as the Woody Allen of Holland, works with a stock company of friends and former lovers in all of his films. The themes are always the same….a diverse group of 30-somethings who long for true friendships and relationships in an increasingly commercialized and dehumanized society. In this comedy of manners, a man dumped by his successful girlfriend for not being ambitious enough, comes up with an ingenious idea to hire out instant friends for all occasions. His agency, Rent A Friend, becomes an instant success but his sudden fame leads him to even greater loneliness and self-denial. As in Allen's films, the message is that it is the simplest of things that bring the most pleasure…a fact that is often lost on the driven neurotics who look for love and fulfillment in all the wrong places.

The sense that nothing is more political than the personal relationships between human beings is one of the touchstones of Total Loss, an edgy, noir psychodrama expertly directed by first time director Dana Nechushtan. The film begins with a fiery car crash in an underground tunnel and then traces the last 24 hours of its three victims, whose friendships are laced with invective and sexual longing. The feverishly imaginative cinematography and moody use of silence and sound creates an atmosphere of excitement and macabre humor as the sexual tension heats up between an arrogant doctor, a down-on-his-luck con man and a mysterious immigrant. The tricky screenplay pirouettes in times, revealing conflicting stories and closely held secrets that inevitably lead to an explosion of emotions and sexual release, represented by the car crash. The crash in all its gory glory is the film's coda and brackets the opening and closing sequences in a cyclical purgatory of unending and unresolved passion.

Two documentaries presented as part of the program also captured the imagination of the public and the press. Crazy, directed by acclaimed Heddy Honigman (The Underground Orchestra, O Amor Natural) is a powerful and poignant look at war and remembrance as it captures the stories of veterans of UN peace keeping missions in Rwanda, Lebanon, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia. With lingering close-ups on the expressive faces of former soldiers recalling the difficult and often gruesome experiences of their service, the film reaches deep into the recesses of unsettling memories, focusing on the individual horror of mass destruction.

Poignant in a very different way are the lyrical and haunting images from Diva Dolorosa, directed by Peter Delpeut, a tribute to the Italian divas who were the first international superstars of the silent screen. Delpeut edits fragments of vintage tinted prints to convey the ideals of fatalistic romanticism as embodied by these beautiful sirens, whose sexually liberated attitudes were punished by a fate of loss, guilt and self-torment. Their delirious suffering is almost religious in its intensity, accentuated by the moving score by Dutch composer Loek Dikker. The film conveys the transitory nature of time passing and the implied importance of preserving these fascinating relics from the early history of film art.

None of the films presented in the program has yet found American distribution, thereby making their premieres in a New York theater a special event. If any of these films come back as part of a traditional theatrical run remains to be seen. But for the audiences who flocked to the Quad Cinema to become introduced to a new wave of Dutch film talent, the sense of excitement and discovery was palpable. Now it is up to a few visionary US distributors to take on the challenge of bringing these films to a wider public…..an audience set to discover a treasure trove of Dutch treats.

Sandy Mandelberger