Centraal (2019)

'Central' is not equally strong across the board, but it certainly has a number of positive outliers that instill confidence in young filmmakers. The opening film 'You can keep what you think' has attracted most attention as a kind of morality sketch between a young believer with a desire to have children (Judith Noyons) and an anti-religious transvestite (Maarten Heijmans). A beautiful, simple atmospheric portrait of an underground drag scene and the approach of two opposites who have more in common than they think. I like 'Afua' even better, because it has such a wonderfully simple premise: a girl is kicked off the school bus if her mother has not paid for a trip to the Efteling. At the station, the minor hooks up with an adolescent ice cream seller and is taken along in the Rotterdam nightlife. Where sex, alcohol, drugs and men are a dormant threat. 'Bitch' has a cool synthesizer soundtrack, but it's actually just another Flodder misery around people on the margins. 'Khata' about boy prostitution came in hard, also because the love affair between a Dutch-Moroccan boy and a white architect is so beautiful and at the same time so cruel. The more absurdist stories such as 'Beenlampman' and 'Karman' feel somewhat like a break in style with the social-realistic stories that form the main part. But I'm definitely signing up for a new series of stories around another Dutch station.

Translated from Dutch · View original