Tom Nestelaar

A Danish family visits a Dutch family they met on a holiday. What was supposed to be an idyllic weekend slowly starts unraveling as the Danes try to stay polite in the face of unpleasantness.

In this documentary we follow 21-year-old Cynthia Stomphorst and her retarted mother for a year. At first sight, Cynthia is a perfectly normal, calm MBO student from Vlaardingen. In practice, she sleeps during the day and is absorbed in games and music at night. Cynthia is no ordinary girl of twenty from Vlaardingen. She is the only one of the Stomphorst family who is normally gifted, and has lived in twelve different places since her infancy: foster families, host families, weekend and crisis families and children's homes. When she is sixteen, she can go to a Assisted Living project. But after a conflict with a roommate, she is forced to move in with her gifted mother. Here she celebrates her 21st birthday. Twenty years ago, Cynthia was the main character in an episode of the TV show Zembla.

Michael Dudok de Wit was asked by the famous Japanese animation studio Ghibli, to create his first feature length animated film. This would be Ghibli's first international co-production ever. Maarten Schmidt and Thomas Doebele followed Dudok de Wit and his team during the complex creative process for over two years. He is a perfectionist that is used to making his own hand drawn animated films by himself. For this new and timely production, he was assisted by a team of 20 to 30 artists from all over Europe.