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Dutch films selected for Venice 2021

The 78th edition of the Venice International Film Festival has announced its selections. Six films and co-productions from the Netherlands are selected for different programmes and parallel sections. The Festival takes place 1 – 11 September, 2021.

Three Minutes – A Lengthening*, written and directed by Bianca Stigter, will celebrate its world premiere in Giornate degli Autori and is presented as a Special Event. The film is produced by Family Affair Films (NL) and co-produced by Lammas Park (UK). International sales are handled by Autlook Filmsales. Three Minutes – A Lengthening presents a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland and tries to postpone its ending. The film is an essay about history and memory. As long as we are watching, history is not over yet. The three minutes of footage, mostly in color, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The existing three minutes are examined to unravel the stories hidden in the celluloid. Different voices enhance the images: Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz and Maurice Chandler, who appears in the film as a young boy. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film essay.

Short documentary Sad Film* is world premiering in Venice in the Main Program - Out of Competition. The film is directed by “Vasili” (pseudonym) and produced by ZIN Documentaire for the Myanmar Film Collective. International sales are handled by SND Films. Sad Film is an autobiographical short documentary about fear and resistance, and the impossibility of creating art since the military coup in Myanmar.

Selected for the Venice VR Expanded competition is Angels of Amsterdam*, a 6 DOF virtual reality experience by Anna Abrahams and Avinash Changa and produced by WeMakeVR & Stichting Rongwrong. Angels of Amsterdam is based on the true stories of four 17th century women and is set in a truthful recreation of a 17th century café in Amsterdam, where you share key episodes in the lives of Maritgen Jans, Juliana, Elsje Christiaens and Pussy Sweet: four fierce angels who were not getting their fair share of the Golden Age’s gold and took their destiny in their own hands.

Three minority Dutch co-productions are also part of the Venice selection: Anatomy of Time, Don't get Too Comfortable and Detours.

Anatomy of Time*, by Thai director Jakrawal Nilthamrong, is selected for Orizzonti Competition. It is co-produced by Netherlands-based Sluizer Film Productions and follows an army general’s wife as she reflects upon a life of loss, disappointment and betrayal.

Don’t Get Too Comfortable, directed by Shaima Al-Tamimi and a Yemeni/Dutch/US co-production, is selected for Orizzonti Corti. The short doc was realized with the support of the Dutch Prince Claus Fund. Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a heartfelt introspective letter to the director's deceased grandfather. The letter questions the continuous pattern of movement amongst Yemenis in diaspora. The film fuses archival photographs, sourced footage, parallax animation, abstract videos to create an audio visual body of work that calls attention to the collective feeling of statelessness and sense of being felt by Yemeni (or non-Yemeni) migrants.

Russian/Dutch co-production Detours by Ekaterina Selenkina, minority co-produced by Dutch Mountain Film, will world premiere in Venice Critics Week. A sprawling meditation on the choreography of bodies in Moscow’s urban landscape, Detours depicts a new way of dealing illicit drugs via the dark web, the layering of physical and virtual realities, as well as a reflection on the poetics and politics of space.

*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.

Source: SEE NL