Rik van Uffelen

Well-known novelist and literary monument, 55-year-old Jan Meerman's successful life is thrown upside down when his 85-year-old mother, Josée Verbeke, unexpectedly has a severe stroke. Jan no longer recognizes his once lively mother as her verbal witticisms have been replaced by pitiful cries and gibberish. In these difficult times Jan faces the upcoming deadline of his new novel. The confrontation he has to engage with the decline of his mother makes him question his priorities.

'Name of the Fathers' tells the story of Thomas, a 16 year old boy, trying to find his own path within the community of Jehovah's Witnesses he's raised in. Thomas finds himself in the middle of his disfellowshipped brother, and his younger brother who is just about to get baptized. Will he take side with his elder brother, or will he set the right example for his younger brother? Whatever his choice might be, the decision will have a great impact on the relations within his family.

Tuur, a shoemaker who fled his wedding anniversary, stays at his sister Josée, a familie outcast, and her friend Odette with whom she runs a cabaret. His wife Emma finds herself forced to look after her sick sister-in-law Gerda while runnig the shop.

For all his life Frank Goudvis has tried not to follow in the footsteps of his father. When his father is mysteriously murdered, Frank loses his alibi for his cherished passivity and decides to travel to the crime scene.

The film is adapted from a play by Cyrille Offermans Lichtenberg, scenes at the dawn of a new era". Although the protagonist shares some features with the experimental physicist and writer George Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), who wrote the famous Sudelbücher and numerous letters, the film does not pretend any historical accuracy with respect to the real Lichtenberg, but focuses on Offermans' hybrid [partial fictitious] personage. The result is not an interplay between fact and fiction, but a sort of view of Lichtenberg, mouthing some 19th- and 20th- century authors he couldn't have known, strictly speaking, but whose alleged fantastic formulations seem to follow from his own writings in a natural way.

According to an ancient Indian tale a giant monster embryo residing in a crystal vase is predetermined to fertilize a blue-eyed woman. She will give birth to something evil to unleash horror and destruction upon human kind. Ugly septuplet brothers reproduced within the framework of mysterious genetic experiments terrorize a young innocent girl who seems to be chosen for the sinister predestination.