Riekje Ziengs

Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV architects, always has 100 projects going at once. Documentary filmmaker Jan Louter followed him for two years to make "Under Tomorrow's Sky", a candid and open-hearted look at the highs and lows of the architecture profession.

The very personal inner process of mourning is shown in the way stragglers clean the house of their deceased parents. That house is the most personal domain, loaded with touchable memories of an accomplished human life. A documentary about dismantling and grieving.

The Long River Slides is a musical ode to sadness. 'De Kift' frontman Ferry Heijne sets sail and meets people willing to share their stories with him. The poetic brass band punk provides comfort along the waterfront.

The “Kindertelefoon” (Child Helpline) in the Netherlands provides a listening ear. One girl talks about being home alone virtually all week; another’s sad because her parents are getting divorced. A boy in an asylum seekers’ center is worried about the future, while another boy doesn’t want to be gay and hopes these feelings will pass. Every day, the Kindertelefoon takes calls like these from children who want someone to talk to. But children also call to talk about their pets, to practice their audition for The Voice Kids or to make pranks. The recordings of these phone conversations are accompanied by images that quite literally give color to the conversations, and that beautifully reflect their tone—sometimes hilarious or naughty, but more often sad or heartrending.

We follow neurosurgeons Clemens Dirven and Arnoud Vincent of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam in this documentary during the treatment of three patients with a brain tumor.

Shishmaref is a community of about 600 people, located on an island just off the west coast of Alaska. The effects of global warming threaten the very existence of these people- so much that the entire population needs to be relocated off the island within 10 years. They have become the first tangible victims of the worldwide climate changes. The project exists of several components; exhibition, book, film, website, and educational program. In the documentary Jan Louter depicts the impending end of the traditional lifestyle on the island of Shishmaref trough the lives of three Inupiat families. Despite the alarming situation, the film has not become a political manifesto. The Last Days of Shishmaref is a moving film about identity, transience, mortality, and the clash between different eras and cultures.

At the beginning of the documentary, fine artist Jan Montyn is lying in bed, stripped to the waist. The blades of a fan are spinning; war footage is projected across. In 1944, Montyn enrolled in the German navy and ended up on the eastern front. He shows drawings he made in the trenches with charcoal and toothpaste. Back in Holland, he was hospitalised with 'shell shock'. Nevertheless, later on he would fight the communists in Korea and work as a relief worker in Vietnam and Cambodia. The film crew follows him back to Vietnam, a country where he first arrived in the early seventies: 'Sometimes, I try to convert the horror to paradise.' And now he is sailing on a river, surrounded by dancing young women. But we also see him at work and breathe down his neck when he is etching and engraving. He looks back on his life without a guilty conscience or shame. 'Many wars, many women, many etches', could be his epitaph, the voice-over says.