10/05/2005

On 21 May, the first day of shooting will commence for the long-awaited screen adaptation of the Maarten 't Hart novel Het woeden der gehele wereld' (The raging of the entire world). The successful novel was originally published in 1993 in Dutch and was subsequently translated into, amongst others, German (with over half a million copies sold), French, Italian and the Scandinavian languages. It has been in development as a feature film for over eight years.

Het woeden der gehele wereld' is a Bildungsroman about Alexander Goudveyl, a poor boy with a gift for music who grows up in Maassluis, a small harbour town on the Nieuwe Waterweg, the river that connects Rotterdam with the North Sea. The book and the film open during WWII and will end around 1960, with an unresolved murder of which Alexander was a witness as a leitmotiv woven through the story of Alexander's education Het woeden... deals with Alexander's protestant religion, his passion for piano music and his encounters with love in all of its strange forms. Newcomer Maarten Heijmans will play Alexander.

For the 32 most important roles of this epic drama, the director, Guido Pieters and producer Rob Houwer have seen more than 600 actors before settling on the aforementioned Heijmans, Cees Geel (who won 'best actor' for Simon at the recent Tribeca Film Festival) and Frank Lammers. The cast is completed by Bart de Vries, Hugo Haenen, Peter Drost, Ottolien Boeschoten, Joost Prinsen, René van 't Hof, Bob Radstaak and Marcel Faber.

Filming will begin in Prague in two weeks before moving to Maassluis. The director can count on Remko Schnorr for the cinematography and has signed Bas van Otterloo to compose the film's score. Van Otterloo's father Rogier wrote the score for several of producer Houwer's pictures including the Paul Verhoeven pictures Turkish delight and The soldier of Orange.

Independent producer Rob Houwer carries the main financial burden of this production, though he will be aided by both the Dutch Film Fund and the CoBO fund of Dutch State Television. The distribution rights for the Benelux have been sold to Universal pictures, which will distribute through UIP (NL). The film is scheduled for a release on 9 March 2006.