Melle van Essen

Romy’s mother has to work a lot. That’s why Romy goes to her grandmother every day after school. Grandma Stine is very busy working in her hairdressing salon, and is very strict. But everything changes when Romy discovers a totally different side to her grandmother.

A sturdy flight attendant has to deliver a child in mid-air and gets involved in a confusing mother/lover relationship with a boy who's living under the streets of Bucharest.

When successful banker Thomas attends his father’s funeral, he meets his left-wing activist brother Arne again after many years. He makes an effort to get close to Arne and invites him to a prestigious conference on sustainable banking, but Arne uses the conference to make a political statement that has fatal consequences. Thomas finds himself fighting for his own career and for Arne’s life, but especially to regain his brother’s respect.

From a historic genocide trial to the overthrow of a president, the sweeping story of mounting resistance played out in Guatemala’s recent history is told through the actions and perspectives of the majority indigenous Mayan population, who now stand poised to reimagine their society.

'Disappearance' takes place in the remote winter landscape of Norway. Roos visits her mother there yearly, but this time it's different: she brings bad news. However, old pain and numerous reproaches keep Roos from sharing anything with her mother. Aided by her half brother and her old flame, the two women reconcile and Roos is able to make her next and inescapable step.

Sieger, um garoto tímido de 15 anos, está treinando para o campeonato nacional de revezamento, onde conhece o intrigante e imprevisível Marc. Eles desenvolvem uma amizade que parece ser nada fora do comum, mas Sieger secretamente cultiva sentimentos mais fortes por Marc. Ele inicia uma luta solitária consigo mesmo, quando descobre que Marc também é apaixonado por ele.

A light grey room. A slender woman of 50 and a 12 year old boy. Joined together like the links of a chain. Changing positions at a constant rate. One flowing movement. Never losing touch with each other. A game played by a mother and her child. A kind of tango. Sound of feet. Breathing. Faint smiles. Until suddenly the woman's hands let go of each other.

Made in collaboration with photographer Roger Ballen, THE ASYLUM is a surrealistic haven where the lust for power and the desire to love are penetratingly portrayed.

A story of destinies joined by Guatemala's past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation's turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present.

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.

On the idyllic island of Lipari near Sicily a few traditional swordfish hunters are still active. The days are over where these fishermen were self-evidently succeeded by their sons. On board Nino’s ship, the reigning peace is not what it appears to be. The twelve-man crew that mans the small boat is in complete concentration. They peer at the water surface, looking for their prey. While the diesel engine stamps monotonously, the hours pass and we wait patiently. Then an excited noise erupts from the crow’s nest: a swordfish couple has been spotted! Lipari pays homage to an almost extinct profession.

In the heart of the Eurasian continent, the ancient center of the world where the Silk Road connected China to Europe, the circus is a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon. This film focuses on two circus artists, whose lifelong friendship under the dictatorship in Uzbekistan is affected by the differing political choices they make under the dictatorshop in Uzbekistan.

War and violence leave behind the dead, the wounded, the maimed, the victim and the witness. In ECHOES OF WAR, children left behind in Afghanistan, Colombia, Sierra Leone and New York take us into their lives and share their memories, nightmares and dreams. A Colombian boy takes us down the road where his hand disappeared. In New York, two girls tell us about their father, who worked on too high a floor of the World Trade Centre. We meet a girl in Afghanistan who struggles to remember her father of whom even the pictures were burned. In Sierra Leone a family on their way to a well is attacked, leaving a girl behind who has no idea what the rebels were fighting for. A boy in the Colombian jungle dreams of becoming a doctor. A girl in a besieged city is determined to become president of her country and outlaw all weapons. The children reveal these stories by listening to the tale of a little elephant who tries to find the courage to live with the death of his father.

Viewed from the world of Roger Ballen. Ballen is renowned for his confronting and bleak black and white portraits of marginalised South Africans. Melle van Essen follows in Ballen’s footsteps by creating 'Living' photographs with fixed frames and strong black and white contrasts with great emphasis on composition.

A portrait of Naples and its inhabitants, in the words of the Neapolitans themselves. Two women gossip about a woman who committed suicide; a man sells tickets for a local tombola; a woman concerns herself about her elderly neighbour. By moving from person to person, the documentary gradually portrays this enigmatic city at the foot of the Vesuvius. James Baldwin once returned a writing assignment about Naples, because he utterly failed to grasp the city. A Neapolitan says: `Naples is a kaleidoscope of thousands of different souls. Their total defines the Soul of Naples.' The leitmotif is Caravaggio's painting Seven Works of Mercy (1607), made for an aristocratic charity that still exists. The documentary mirrors Caravaggio's clair-obscure in its patterns of poverty and wealth. Age-old alleys with subdued light contrast with the glittering chic of a genteel club. Slow aerial shots and poetic texts in voice-over interweave the separate stories.

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.

Director Scheffer registered a performance of the Tea Opera by Chinese composer Tan Dun (who won an Oscar in 2001 with his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Scheffer interlaces the images with interviews with Dun, stage director Pierre Audi and librettist Xu Ying, about the opera and the role tea and oriental philosophy play in this work. Using monochrome, sometimes abstract images (in yellow, blue, red and green), close-ups of plants and flowers and images of the Chinese nature and people (sometimes accelerated or decelerated, sometimes in black-and-white), he mirrors the stylised opera performance and Dun's reflective music.

Carefully composed portrait of prominent modern composer Elliott Carter (1908-1912). Scheffer depicts both the person and the development in his music and the musical tradition it grew out of, as well as the time in which the American Carter grew up. The result: historical images of the city of New York, old film footage, cinematographic finds to illustrate the music and statements by conspicuous fellow-composers and musicians, including Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim.

The film tells the tale of Iala, whose authority over his two sons, Raul and Bedan, is shaken. Raul has left to study in a seminary in the big city, where unknown to anyone, he has joined the liberation movement. Meanwhile, younger son, Bedan is rebelling against every possible tradition, even eyeing his father's young bride-to-be.