Frank van Mechelen
Witse returns to his hometown to find his niece's murderer. It doesn't take long before Witse gets in trouble with local police authorities. While conducting his investigation, old family issues are starting to surface.
Largely fictionalized, partly fictitious chapters from the life of the Belgian royal family during and around the reign of king Albert II. Besides his duties, including signing a more federal regime for the Belgian state, focus is on his marital troubles, illegal offspring and unruly sons. Albert's elder brother and predecessor Boudewijn I and his widow Fabiola also play a largely fictionalized part.
The story of the laborer family Debruycker during the turbulent strike by Vieille Montagne in 1971.
In August 1996, bus drivers Marcel Van Loock and Wim Moreels are apprehended by the Moroccan Customs for drug trafficking. Inside their bus, hidden behind a false compartment, they have discovered 700 pounds of hashish. Although the owner of the bus company is arrested as well and makes a full confession clearly indicating that both drivers were unaware of the hidden drugs, the Moroccan judge sentences both men to 5 years in the Moroccan prison of Tangiers. Nothing could have prepared the two men for life inside a Moroccan prison. Without food, clothes or medical care, they must learn how to take care of themselves to survive their stay in prison. Corrupt guards, corrupt lawyers and judges, a consul who doesn't care and frequent beatings are only part of the terrible prison. Meanwhile their families at home are left without any information, any help or any hope - finding out that their own government doesn't care for Belgian people in prisons abroad.
Tom Vansant is an emergency physician from Brussels who is desperately searching for his daughter who ran away from home and is now missing for eighteen months. He meets a girl of whom he thinks that she knows what happened to his daughter but the girl doesn't want to talk about her past. In his search to find out why she doesn't talk about it he ends up in a small village in the Ardennes where no one wants to help him discover what really happened.
Witse is a Dutch language crime drama produced by Belgian broadcaster VRT and broadcast on their één channel. It is also shown on BVN. First broadcast in 2004, as of 2010 the programme comprises eight series with a ninth and final series planned for 2012. It stars Hubert Damen as the eponymous Witse, a driven inspector in the Belgian federal police based in Halle. It is one of the most popular Flemish television programmes with some 1.6 million viewers. There are also Witse books. The first three were based on the last two episodes of each season, but since 2010 every six months a brand new story is published, written and invented by established Belgian writers, as Bob Van Laerhoven and Bart Van Lierde. The music for Witse is composed by Steve Willaert.
