This article was originally published on the EIDR website in May of 2025.
EIDR and the Netherlands
This article was originally published on the EIDR website in September of 2025.
Each September, EIDR spends a surprising amount of time in the Netherlands: first attending the annual IBC convention in Amsterdam; then attending the annual DOI face-to-face meetings in The Hague.[1] This year, while walking along the canals, enjoying the architecture,[2] and dodging the bicycles[3] I began to wonder about Dutch[4] cinema. I naturally assumed that it was mostly populated by tall, blond people wearing wooden shoes when they weren’t ice skating on the Zuiderzee, but it turns out I was completely wrong.[5]
As with most national cinemas, early Dutch filmmaking focused on actualities, like Zwemplaats voor Jongelingen te Amsterdam (“Swimming Place for Youths in Amsterdam,” 1896), a look at the Netherland’s first indoor swimming pool. The first Dutch scripted fiction film was the comedy 1896 short Gestoorde hengelaar directed by M. H. Laddé and J. W. Merkelbach. In the early 1900s, Filmfabriek Hollandia (founded by Maurits H. Binger) was a leading producer of feature films, documentary shorts, and educational films. Their documentaries often focused on subjects from Dutch life: harbor activities, fishing, bridge construction, etc. Much of early Dutch cinema is now lost.[6] For example, less than half of the Netherlands’ first feature film, Maurits Binger’s and Louis H. Chrispijn’s 52-minute De levende ladder (1913), still survives.
The Netherlands moved relatively quickly into the Sound Era – by 1930 more than half of Dutch cinemas had sound projectors, reaching 90% just a few years later. However, production of sound films in Dutch lagged behind, as the domestic market is relatively small and there was little export market for Dutch-language films. The first Dutch feature film with synchronized dialogue was Willem van Oranje (1934), the only feature shot at the Philips Studios (‘Philiwood’) in Eindhoven. Cinetone Studios in Duivendrecht was more successful and produced around 20 sound films between 1934–1940. De Jantjes (1934) was a financial success and seemed to indicate that there was a market for Dutch language cinema, but by 1936, most Dutch studios sat vacant for significant periods of time. The industry rebounded with films such as Pygmalion (1937), Vadertje Langbeen (1938), Morgen gaat het beter!(1939) and Ergens in Nederland (1940), but then came to a halt in 1940 with the invasion of the Netherlands in World War II. Only one Dutch language film, Drie weken huisknecht (1944), was produced during the war (all others were in German). Dutch cinema didn’t begin to recover until the late 1950s with the release of films like Fanfare (1958) and Dorp aan de rivier (1958), the latter being the first Dutch film to earn an Academy Award nomination. Since then, Dutch-language films have earned a total of 16 Oscar nominations and a further 10 wins in 5 different categories – the most recent in 2025 for Live Action Short Film: Ik ben geen robot (2023).
If you consider the Netherlands wider contribution to cinema by including Netherlands-born or -raised filmmakers, then there are a further 15 Academy Award nominations and 4 wins, including for Audrey Hepburn (who grew up in the Netherlands) with 4 nominations and 2 wins. Other notable Dutch filmmakers include directors Paul Verhoeven[7] and Jan de Bont[8]and actors Rutger Hauer[9] and Famke Janssen[10].
From the early days, documentary realism has been a strong thread in Dutch film, starting with actualities and continuing on through documentaries and scripted fiction. Many Dutch works are as much about observing everyday life, landscapes, social structures, etc. as they are about “plot.” Scripted fiction often marries this sense of realism with a strong sense of place: the landscape, the water, and the towns, often showing the tensions between city and countryside. There is also a tension between making films in Dutch for the local market (which means lower budgets) or as international co-productions in other languages (which opens up more commercial opportunities). This choices shapes style, casting, production scale, and the stories that can be told. Although Dutch cinema rarely rivals Hollywood in volume or budget, Dutch films have reached wide international audiences, including Blue Movie (1971), Turks Fruit (1973), Soldaat van Oranje (1977), De aanslag (1986), and Zwartboek (2006).
If you’d like to dive deeper into Dutch cinema, we recommend you start with our list of 50 Notable Dutch Films. Each has an entry in the EIDR Content ID registry, most with links to third-party data sources for more information and links for streaming.
[1] Our earlier Netherlands-inspired article was “Fun Facts About the Netherlands,” which introduced a list of gin-related movies (the Netherlands being the home of that quintessential British beverage).
[2] Including the occasional windmill.
[3] Sadly, September is the wrong time for tulips.
[4] Dutch translates from early German as roughly “of the people” and refers to the language, culture, and people, while the Netherlands translates as “low countries” and refers to the territory (with about a third of the Netherlands being below sea level). Meanwhile, Holland is a western region of the Netherlands (so all of Holland is in the Netherlands, but not all of the Netherlands is Holland).
[5] To no one’s surprise.
[6] Somewhere between 75%-90% of motion pictures produced before 1929 are now lost, due to a combination of nitrate film stock (which variously decays or combusts if not cared for properly) and a lack of interest (once a film ended its theatrical run, it was not seen to have sufficient cultural value to justify its preservation).
[7] Academy Award nominated Turks Fruit (1973), Flesh + Blood (1985), RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Starship Troopers (1997).
[8] Speed (1994) and Twister (1996) – also the cinematographer for Cujo (1983), Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992).
[9] Turks Fruit (1973), Blade Runner (1982), Ladyhawke (1985), Flesh + Blood (1985), and Batman Begins(2005).
[10] GoldenEye (1995), X-Men (2000), X2: X-Men United (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Taken (2008), Taken 2 (2012), The Wolverine(2013), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and Taken 3 (2014).
