Erik Disselhoff

We think we know what ethnic profiling is, but what does it feel like? Dutch citizens report on at times bizarre and disconcerting experiences with police checks, where their skin colour routinely makes them suspicious. For years, the police has been aiming to proactively execute security checks in order to arrest more riff-raff. But practise shows that Dutch people with a migration background are regularly stopped without any suspicion of criminal offences. Poignantly, the teacher, the soldier, the lawyer, the rapper, the fellow police officer and other coloured Dutchmen talk about helplessness, frustration, humiliation, alienation, anger and what it feels like to be a suspect from the start. Wry, but insightful indictment of ethnic profiling.

Life Is Wonderful is a feel-good movie about love and longing. Best friends Mees and Boelie are spending a beautiful spring day in Amsterdam's Vondelpark. It seems like just a normal day, until they meet the young and attractive Panda. While the heat rises in the park, it's nowhere to be found between the long-married couple Etta and Ernst-Jan. Ernst-Jan suspects Etta of cheating and has his own ideas of how to catch her in the act. We also meet Rosa and Kees, old lovers whose paths cross after decades of not seeing each other. On this spring day in Amsterdam, their love starts blooming again.

Everyone has to deal with loss at some point in life. And however large or small that loss may be, it always hurts. The three young children in this somewhat stylized film can attest to this, and they do, candidly and in detail. Their experiences are all different, as are their ways of dealing with them: whether it's losing a favorite stuffed animal, an important fencing tournament or an older sister. Fillmaker Arianne Hinz handles all of these losses with the seriousness they deserve. The children place the event in context, against the background of the places where the loss is felt most keenly: a tent made from blankets and towels, the gym where the fencing matches are held and the stables where the deceased sister’s favorite horse is kept. The children roam around in a dreamlike lost and found, looking for something that can illlustrate the sense of loss, that can fill the void or replace what is no more. But this is an impossible task: “A little piece of your heart is missing.”