Film veteran Mike van Diem and thirties Morgan Knibbe are the big winners of the Kalvergala. Van Diem went home with three Golden Calves for his black comedy on Friday in the Utrecht city theater with three Golden Calves For the girlsincluding best film. Knibbe received four, including best control, for his The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The Gala concluded the 45th Dutch Film Festival, which did this year without a six -tonne subsidy from the city of Utrecht. The festival managed to organize a sober, worthy edition. And like every year, public film makers felt heavily undervalued.
This year, 26 calves were awarded for short films, digital productions, television drama and feature films. 778 colleagues from the Dutch Film Academy vote for the calves, a professional jury judges for a few smaller categories. Presenter Stijn de Vries threatened winners with a whip at speeches for more than a minute and a half, which kept the pace in it.
Mike van Diem was rewarded for Best Film and Scenario and saw Thekla Reuten win the gender-neutral acting chalf as worrying, pinned mother Anouk Wier daughter needs an art heart. Van Diem said earlier that an actress dropped out when he demanded a “Meryl Streep-worthy Performance” and another because she “preferred to stay beautiful”. “I am curious if they will still regret it,” Van Diem said in an interview NRC. Now probably.
Left: ‘For the girls’ by Mike van Diem won three Golden Calves. Right: ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ from Morgan Knibbe received four Golden Calves.
As very Dutch as Van Diems are bickering couples, so internationally is Morgan Knibbes feature film The Garden of Earthly Delightswho did research for years into sex tourism in the Philippines. Knibbe won a Golden Calf for his documentary ten years ago Those Who Feel the Fire Burningin which he released à la Terrence Malick on the refugee crisis with a fladder camera. This too is a kind of mosaic film, albeit fictional: a Dutch sex tourist descends into a hallicunant hell of drugs and child prostitution from Hieronymus Bosch. The film won calves for best direction, assembly, camera work and sound design.
A mention deserves the dry trieste Three -day fish Van Peter Hoogendoorn, about a 65-year-old father and his 45-year-old son who does not find each other in a black and white, dingy Rotterdam. In addition to best costume, Neidi Dos Santos Livramento won a calf for best supporting role. Another clash of father and son, survival drama Alphagot a golden calf for best music, while production design went to another ‘Vatersuche’, the Limburg regional comedy Fabula. Hair and makeup-a new golden calf-went to The idyll.
Won at TV drama Whimper Van Will Koopman, actress Eva Crutzen was best director with Soil. Was the best documentary Nesjomme Chosen, a unique archive documentary about the flared Jewish world of the Dutch Interbellum.
Tribal struggle
The Golden Calf of the public went to Surprise Hit Loverboys: emotions fromthat attracted 380,000 visitors.
Of course there was also the tribal struggle between makers of public films and art films, now a trusted ritual. The public film always feels undervalued in Utrecht. For example, producer Klaas de Jong pulled his epic ten years ago Michiel de Ruyter Back from the NFF because despite 700,000 visitors it did not get nominations for Golden Calves. De Jong then called the NFF a “elitist canalies” and argued a calf for which the film audience could vote. That ‘public chalf’ came, after which a plea followed to stop giving colleagues to vote according to the Oscar model but to let juries decide, like in the past. At the time, this often resulted in complaints about favoritism or the cowardies saving cabbage and goat.
The annual storm in a glass of bubbles now came in the form of a not fully accurate calculation of director producer Johan Nijenhuis, known for his ‘in love with’-Romoms. Last year he blamed the Film Fund in a populist Manifesto-the Shovel Cabinet, that 80 percent of the film subsidies go to Arthouse and only 20 percent to public films. The Filmfonds recovered that with a ‘fact check’.
This year, Nijenhuis made the question ‘What does a calf cost’ again on social media. The five titles recited for a Golden Calf received 1.3 to 1.7 million euros from the Film Fund, says Nijenhuis. Given the visitors, the taxpayer paid 48 euros for a cinema ticket (Alpha) to even 433 euros (The Garden of Earthly Delights). Nijenhuis successfully criticizes the hang-up at foreign film festivals; Film money could be better “used to bring Dutch language and culture to the public in all its multi -colorness in their own country”.
Producer Klaas de Jong, usually in Hyperdrive, accused the ‘art boys’ of millions of fraud and threatened with a ‘heavily substantiated’ plea for the House of Representatives to halve the budget of the Film Fund – ‘the people not notice it’ – and to put that money in public films. Nijenhuis took a good time that his film company Nijenhuis & Co also spent 4.3 million euros in tax money in the form of so -called ‘cash rebats’; Public films can also rarely stand on their own two feet. But that subsidy pot forgotten advocates of the public film invariably in their sums. Own subsidy first.
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