Tag Archives: Belgium

Soldier of Orange (Dutch: Soldaat van Oranje) is a 1977 Dutch film directed by Paul Verhoeven and produced by Rob Houwer, starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé. The film is set during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, and shows how individual students have different roles in the war. The story is based on the book Soldaat van Oranje by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, who lived the story himself.
The film received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980. The film is considered to be one of the two best Dutch films made in the 20th century.
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Don Juan seduced Elvira then, sated, abandoned to fall upon new adventures…
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Hélène Régnier walks out on her drug-addicted husband Charles after he brutally attacks their infant son. She stays in a run-down hotel whilst her son convalesces in hospital and she files for divorce. Charles’s wealthy bourgeois father is adamant that Hélène will lose custody of her child and, to that end, he engages a former business associate of Charles, Paul Thomas, to discredit her. When Paul fails to uncover any incriminating evidence against Hélène he concocts a scheme that will destroy her reputation. Things do not go quite as planned…
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A la fin d’un week-end, Louis Riquier, père divorcé refuse de rendre ses enfants à leur mère. Armé, barricadé dans sa maison, il tient tête à un escadron de gendarmerie. Les médias s’emparent de l’affaire, la tension monte et la situation s’envenime. Riquier menace de tuer ses enfants…
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Rosalba, a young tourist guide, suffers from a strange ailment: the very least melody sets off in her gesticulation and she beings to dance, as suddenly as uncontrollably. Despite her ruses to hide her eccentricity, this uncontrollable body might well seduce her surprising co-worker, Alain.
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A beautiful female vampire lures men to their doom.
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The story of a small and conservative West-Flemish village opposing the construction of a bridge over the Scheldt.
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A Moroccan fisherman sets off on an epic journey towards Europe on his wind surfboard. But the pursuit of dreams does not come without sacrifice.
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In Paris, the thirty-two years old travesty Stéphanie a.k.a. Pierre is a streetwalker that lives with the Egyptian gay hustler Djamel and the Russian gay Mikhail that works in a restaurant. When the hospital where her mother Liliane is terminal calls her, she travels with her two lovers to the countryside to look after her dying mother. While at home, she recalls her childhood and how she met Djamel and Mikhail.
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Israel 1956. Rachel, a Jew, rather unexpectedly meets an old friend at the kibbutz where she is working as a teacher. It brings back memories of her experiences in The Netherlands during the war, memories of betrayal. September 1944. Rachel is in trouble when her hiding place is bombed by allied troops. She gets in contact with a man from the resistance and joins a group of Jews who are to be smuggled across the Biesbosch by boat to the freed South Netherlands. Germans from a patrol boat murder them all however. Only Rachel is able to escape. She is rescued by a resistance group under the leadership of Gerben Kuipers. When Kuipers’ son is captured after trying to smuggle weapons, he asks Rachel to seduce SS-hauptsturmführer Ludwig Müntze. Soon she will find out the attack in the Biesbosch wasn’t a coincidence.
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Mathias is a Belgian linguist, living with French theatre producer Anne. After a quarrel about moral questions, they take a train to attend a congress. While Mathias sleeps, Anne disappears. The train stops in the middle of the country and Mathias gets off the train with an older man, Hernhutter, and a young one, Val. The train moves off without them being able to catch it up. They will find a village, but cannot get any help because they do not understand a word of what the inhabitants say…
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The line between fantasy and reality is once more blurred in this Belgian/French drama about a professor of literature who develops an obsession with a beautiful woman he meets (or imagines meeting) in the woods. He has an affair with this woman, but before he can run off with her, his daughter, who is an object of his incestuous desire (as several daydream sequences make clear), kills the stranger. Perhaps, though, his daughter only kills his daydreams when she gets married.
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Thomas and Alfred were born around the same time; a fire in the nursery had nurses scrambling to save the newborns. Because he felt that he deserved Alfred’s good fortune at being born into a wealthy family, Thomas conceives the idea that he and Alfred were switched at birth, and he can’t help seeing that his unhappiness should be Alfred’s, from the loss of his sister to his inability to have a relationship with the woman Evelyne. So, as his life is ending, he formulates a plan of revenge against his bitter enemy, his lifetime adversary, the man who stole his existence.
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Thomas is a young agoraphobic man; he’s afraid of coming to any kind of contact with other people, so he lives totally isolated in his apartment. The story takes place in the near future where everything can be done through computers, so Thomas hasn’t left his apartment for eight straight years. However, although his life seems complete, he misses human contact, so his psychoanalyst consults him to meet a woman through some on-line service. Is it possible for Thomas to fall in love with a woman? And if so, is he going to get out of his apartment for that woman?
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An older film critic’s life is interrupted by an unexpected visitor.
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