The Dutch Film Festival kicks off this year with a screening of the new film Downtown, by director Michiel van Erp from Eindhoven. Van Erp previously caused a sensation with documentaries about disaster flight MH17, photographer Erwin Olaf and the film Een Schitterend Gebrek.
The 46th edition of the Dutch Film Festival starts on September 25 and will feature a wide range of films from Dutch soil. Downtown, the new film by the famous Eindhoven resident Michiel van Erp, opens the festival. The film is about three friends who immerse themselves wholeheartedly in the Amsterdam nightlife of the eighties.
There they discover the city’s gay scene, with the AIDS pandemic in the background that was spreading rapidly at that time. After years without contact, the friends meet again. This time not in smoky cafes or nightclubs, but in the oppressive silence of a new pandemic: the corona era.
‘Extremely proud’
Van Erp previously caused a sensation with several high-profile documentaries. For example, he captured ‘dull’ Netherlands in Amusement Park Netherlands. In it he shows in detail how Dutch people go to all kinds of lengths to entertain themselves. The result was mainly many laughable scenes.
“I am extremely proud that we have this film with such an important subject as the opening film,” said festival director Marjolijn Bronkhuijzen in a statement. “The film about love, loyalty, powerlessness and an intense friendship in which Van Erp convincingly shows two impactful periods, touches and invites conversation.”
Documentaries
Other documentaries also show Van Erp’s nose for special stories. In I Am A Woman Now he followed the ‘first generation of transsexuals’, who were the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery by gynecologist Georges Burou in Casablanca in the 1950s. Many of the ladies in the documentary are now over eighty and look back on their lives.
But Van Erp also did not avoid serious topics. In 2015, for example, he made the documentary MH17: The Sorrow of the Netherlands, about the mourning that arose after the downing of disaster flight MH17 by pro-Russian separatists.
Millions of people in front of the TV
The documentary attracted a lot of attention at the time: more than 1.1 million people were glued to the TV live at the first screening on NPO 1.
In 2018, Van Erp decided to venture into a real feature film for the first time. He briefly let go of his love for documentaries to make his feature debut with Geen in de Stad. That film was also immediately picked up as the opening film of the festival that year.
