Despite a strong performance at home and abroad, the Dutch film industry faces uncertain times. By Geoffrey Macnab
It has been a topsy-turvy year in the Dutch cinema sector. Earlier this month, when the industry announced its 2011 statistics, the conclusions were very upbeat indeed: Dutch audiences turned to domestic product in increasing millions in 2011. Audience market share rose from 15.88% in 2010 to 22.38% in 2011. The total audience for Dutch films was over 6.8 million, a 52.16% hike on the 2010 figure of 4,475,760.
With local films capturing 21.88% of the box-office, a Dutch movie (Will Koopman’s Gooische Vrouwen) topping the charts with a startling 1.9 million admissions (relegating Harry Potter to second place) and overall receipts of around €240 million, it was a bumper year. Kids’ movies, including New Kids: Nitro and New Kids: Turbo, continued to attract huge numbers of cinemagoers. The first Dutch 3D movie, Nova Zembla, posted close to 625,000 admissions.
“These figures, coupled with the increasing number of Dutch films selected at international festivals, is a great incentive for Dutch film professionals to further expand and exploit the potential of Dutch film in the coming years”, says Netherlands Film Fund director Doreen Boonekamp.
There were obvious logistical reasons for the upsurge. Exhibitors in the Netherlands, traditionally an underscreened market, have been increasing the number of screens. Digitalisation is also well underway: one reason why 3D films feature so prominently in the ‘Top 20’ for 2011. Nonetheless, this does nothing to lessen the achievements of Dutch filmmakers in attracting local cinemagoers in such huge numbers.
Internationally, Dutch films are also grabbing attention. Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars won a Special Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and films such as The Brownian Movement, Code Blue, Shock Head Soul and Among Us screened in official selection at festivals from Berlin to Cannes and Locarno to Venice. “You could say Dutch films are growing up,” declares Claudia Landsberger, head of EYE International. “Dutch cinema has become a saleable product within and outside of the Netherlands. Slowly, we are getting there. Perseverance is key.”
On the face of it, the Dutch industry appears to be thriving. However, there was no disguising the unease within the sector in the face of the proposed cuts in public film funding. Last May, during the Cannes Festival, leading Dutch filmmakers wrote an open letter to State Secretary Halbe Zjilstra, making their discomfort very apparent. “A true industry has come into being,” they pointed out, but warned that cutbacks in subsidy could lead to “a reversion to the darkness of the 1980s and 1990s, when the market for Dutch films fluctuated between 0.8% and 3%.”
The concern is that Dutch production may be entering a period of slow decline. 2012 is likely to be another strong year as films financed in 2010 and 2011, before the cuts were announced, hit cinemas. 2013 is when the downturn may begin. “We don’t know what deals we can strike with the government or between ourselves to counter the budget cuts,” says A-Film’s Managing Director Wilco Wolfers, also president of the Dutch Film Distributors’ Association (NVF).
The first (2.2%) cuts to the budget of state body The Netherlands Film Fund will be made this year (increasing to 25% in 2013). This is why the industry is lobbying the Dutch government so hard for measures to support local producers. Ideas include a soft-money scheme for the Netherlands to attract inward investment; new piracy laws; a levy system on distribution and exhibition to generate funds for production and a ‘cashflow’ fund for gap financing during production. Local producers worry they’re not attractive coproduction partners. At present, the Dutch can’t offer international filmmakers the tax breaks they get in Belgium or Luxembourg. Nor do the Dutch have regional film funds to match those found in Germany or Sweden. Nonetheless, they continue to coproduce and remain members of Eurimages where, at the December board meeting, two Dutch-led projects received funding: Alex Van Warmerdam’s Camiel Borgman (a Rotterdam CineMart entry last year) and Peter Kuijpers’ Heaven On Earth.
Dutch films are present in Rotterdam this year, if not in the quantities you might expect. (There are none in the Tiger Competition.) The Rotterdam-set teenage drama Lena (the second film from Belgian director Christophe Van Rompaey) screens in Bright Future and Fow Pyng Hu’s third feature Nick is a world premiere in Spectrum. Meanwhile, Simon Pummell’s Shock Head Soul, a “hybrid film” about 19th-century German judge/madman and Freudian subject Daniel Paul Schreber combining documentary, fiction and animation, screens in Spectrum. Rotterdam is also hosting Pummell’s media installation The Sputnik Effect which sets out to draw visitors into the schizophrenic mind of Schreber.
“Rotterdam could be very important for Dutch films if they were selected for the Tiger Competition,” Landsberger suggests. “If Rotterdam selected two Dutch films in the Tiger Competition, it would show it is embracing Dutch cinema. But this year we have none.”
“We would have liked more, but we are starting to notice that production is getting a bit less in the Netherlands,” festival director Rutger Wolfson notes. Nonetheless, there are several Dutch projects in the CineMart, from Peter Hoogendoorn’s debut feature Between Ten And Twelve (inspired by events on the day the writer-director learned his sister had died in a car accident) to Urszula Antoniak’s project about female adolescence and sexuality, Nude Area (produced by Frans Van Gestel’s new outfit Topkapi).
Whatever problems may lurk ahead, it is clear that the Dutch are starting 2012 from a strong position. “The mood is very positive,” Wolfers declares. “By the same token, everybody looks at the future saying ‘What is going to happen? We now have this professional industry. Will it be cut in half?’” The upside, Wolfers adds, is that the public now “see Dutch film as professional, interesting, entertaining.” The appetite for Dutch movies is clearly there and the real challenge for local filmmakers is how best to satisfy it.