Author Peter Verstraten

After a modest attempt to create a national film industry in bilingual Belgium had run aground in the 1950s, Belgian cinema was split into two separate small cinemas – a Flemish and a Walloon (French-speaking) ...

Given his interest in paradoxes, the French philosopher Alain Badiou dubbed cinema a ‘mass art’, although not every film can be categorised in this way. On the one hand, many movies are above all commercial far...

The oddest thing about Western (2017), the third feature film by the German director Valeska Grisebach after Mein Stern (Be My Star, 2001) and Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006), is its title. Borrowing neither an origi...

Because of the almost insurmountable linguistic barrier between Flemish in Flanders and French in Wallonia, the history of twentieth-century Belgian cinema is best seen as a ‘split screen’ between two language ...

Between 1999 and 2008, the Dutch director Martin Koolhoven made eight feature films, none like any of the others. In 2005 he shot the multicultural rom-com Het schnitzelparadijs (Kitchen Paradise), about a Moro...

Over the course of his long career, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has been at the centre of many a success and many a controversy. His second feature film, Turks fruit (Turkish Delight, 1973), is still the ...

Practically all published items on Borgman (2013), no matter how tiny, mentioned the fact that this was the first Dutch film to enter the Cannes main competition since 1975, the year Jos Stelling’s debut featur...