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AWARDS Netherlands

Joy for Best Dutch film win

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The annual showcase of local films, the Netherlands Film Festival, came to an end on Friday with the traditional awards ceremony for the Golden Calves, the Dutch national film awards.

Big winner of the night was Mijke de Jong’s Berlinale title Joy [+see also:
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, which was crowned Best Film and also won Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress honours for Coosje Smid.

The arthouse drama, about a teenage girl in search of her birth mother, sold only a few hundred tickets and received decent but not ecstatic reviews when it was released in local cinemas in April. Distributor A-Film has said it is thinking of re-releasing the film in cinemas in the wake of its three Golden Calves.

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The other two titles nominated in the Best Film Category were Lang & gelukkig [+see also:
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(“Happily Ever After”), a fairy tale spoof based on a popular play, and Stricken (A Woman Goes to the Doctor). The latter sold over a million tickets when it was released, while the former will hit Dutch screens October 14.

Neither film went home empty-handed: Lang en gelukkig, directed by Pieter Kramer, won the Special Jury Prize, the Audience Award and the Golden Calf for Best Production Design (which replicated the fairy tale settings in cardboard, much like in the play), while Stricken, about the two-timing husband of a terminally ill woman, went home with the Best Actor Golden Calf for Barry Atsma.

Best Actress went to Carice van Houten for her role as a woman suffering from post-partum depression in The Happy Housewife [+see also:
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and marked her fourth win in the category. Jeroen Willems won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Majesteit [+see also:
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, a biopic about Queen Beatrix in which he played her husband, the late Prince Claus.

Dutch Cannes title R U There [+see also:
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won two Calves: Best Sound and Best Cinematography, while the current Dutch Oscar submission Tirza [+see also:
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went home with statues for Best Editing and Best Director (Rudolf van den Berg).

Two further films won only one honour, despite multiple nominations: C’est déjà l’été [+see also:
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won the Best Score Golden Calf, while the Dutch Critics’ Prize went to Hanro Smitsman’s Dusk [+see also:
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.

The festival sold around 154,000 tickets this year, while the festival’s website, which also offered an Online Film Festival, welcomed about 3m visitors.

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