Gerlach van Beinum is one of the last old-school crop farmers near Amsterdam. Surrounded by the advancing exponents of modernity—distribution centers, highways, multinationals—he moves through the seasons at his own pace. We follow him for several years in his fields on the outskirts of...
Russian Poet Boris Ryzhy was handsome, talented and famous. So why did he end his own life at the age of 26? A quest to find the answer takes the filmmaker to the notorious neighbourhood in the cold industrial city of Yekaterinenburg where Boris grew up...
One day, Dutch film maker van der Horst was given her inheritance: 6 square meters, one sixth of a small, wooden house in the Russian countryside where her mother grew up. It was as if life had handed her a card she felt forced to play. She began a journey into the past, back into the childhood of...
As much about the people who work in Russia's renowned museum as it is about the glorious art works housed in this St. Petersburg institution. We meet with several "Hermitage-niks"—including Olga Bogdanova, the head of museum maintenance, icon curator Alexandra Kostsova, museum attendant...
Two Dutch filmmakers travel to the Iranian city of Bam to chronicle the aftermath of a December 2006 earthquake that claimed 43,000 lives and left 60,000 homeless. Survivors reflect on the catastrophe in voice-over narration that's accompanied by images of a wrecked metropolis fighting to pull...
The incredible life story of a Soviet soldier of Tatar descent who was captured by the Nazis during WWII. Today, his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father, trying to understand what made him the man she knew as a child, through his diaries, as well as various personal and public...
Four people,in their struggle to improve the world during Occupy Amsterdam. The downfall of the encampment is part of their search for ways to bring about change. But why don't we want to hear their message?
As a film about fertility, Water Children is an ode to womanhood and the body Filmmaker Aliona van der Horst followed the trail of the unconventional Dutch-Japanese pianist and artist Tomoko Mukaiyama who made a huge work of art on the theme of womanhood and fertility. She created a cathedral-like...
Documentary about the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the former Soviet Union. Hanna Michailenko, an Ukrainian schoolteacher from Odessa was locked up in a psychiatric ward from 1980 until 1988 for refusing to work for the Soviet Secret Service, the KGB.
The incredible friendship between Semyon Gluzman, a psychiatrist and former dissident, and General Volodymyr Prystayko, the deputy director of the Ukrainian Security Service, who was in charge of keeping Gluzman's files in the KGB archives.
Film about falling in love across a political, cultural and geographic divide. It tells of Simon, a Dutch communist student in Moscow, who meets and marries the Russian Zoya in the spring of 1968. Simon returns to the Netherlands, expecting his wife to follow shortly afterwards when her exit visa...
