Stop Acting Now

Stages is a film about loneliness, anxiety, struggle and love, which in an unconventional way shows the survival of two former lovers in their forties and their seventeen year-old son.

Actress and writer Nazmiye Oral discusses with her Turkish mother everything that was previously not discussed in the family. In stylized recordings, the women show extreme frankness. The viewer witnesses what the integration process looks like within this Turkish family, making it clear what the process of dialogue, misunderstanding and alienation yields within the intimacy of immigrant families. The understandable pain of this family about the modern life of their daughter gets an accessible face.

An intimate look into the life of a 13 year old girl in northern Amsterdam who 'looses' her Russian mother and older sister to the cruel world of prostitution. Little sister remains alone in a flat at the IJ-square. Through her unconditional love and her lack of inhibition she manages to keep her head up in the relentless world of porn, drugs, and neon ads.

In 1990s Amsterdam, Loe and Bob are in a relationship, but wanting different things. Loe is a singer who likes to party and who is also engaged in migrant support. Bob is a lawyer focused on his career. As the film progresses, the tensions in the relationship become exposed.

18-year-old Layla, a Dutch girl with Moroccan roots, joins a group of radical Muslims. She encounters a world that nurtures her ideas initally, but finally confronts her with an impossible choice.

Dutch filmmakers gathered to make this compilation movie, consisting of 17 segments, as a reaction to the status quo in The Netherlands after the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh on november 2, 2004.

The film’s genesis lies in the voluntary work De Jong did at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, where she met the Afghan twins Nahid and Malihe. Touched by their story, ambitions and talent, De Jong decided to collaborate with them.

The parents of five sisters have been married for forty years; the daughters have gathered in the family beach house to make a video for them. The encounter is marked by many confrontations as well as cheerful moments. Reminiscent of the sweet children's poems that mother recited are countered by Elsschot's Marriage: 'He thought: I'll kill her and set light to the house...' It also turns out that father had once disappeared for eighteen months, a 'secret' that the daughters have different ideas about. Brittle, an intimate film version of a play written and performed by the same actresses, is about rivalry in a family, the right to silence, but also about the need for solidarity. At the Netherlands Film Festival in 1997 the Golden Calf for Best Actress was awarded to the five actresses together.

Uitgesloten is set in 1983. Jonathan is 18 and, just like his best friend Coen, he has grown up in the Jehovah's Witnesses. In this world with its strict rules, Jonathan and Coen however have their own ideas. Both have girlfriends, Marjan and Annemiek, who live in a very different world: the girls study at art school and mix with squatters. The boys do not tell their girlfriends about their background and they anxiously keep Marjan and Annemiek hidden from their own community. The friends lead a double life: they ring doorbells to distribute the Ontwaakt! and play in a band for the Jehovah's Witnesses, while they also visit ska concerts and squatters' bars and become increasingly caught up in the worldly life of Marjan and Annemiek.