Henny Vrienten

Waldemar Nods, a young man from Suriname, meets the older Dutch woman Rika van der Lans and they fall in love. In pre-WWII Netherlands they could not be more different. The one black, the other white, 17 years between them and on top of that Rika already has four children with another man. They love each other, but then Rika appears to be pregnant.

1969. Nine-year old Caro lives on a pig farm in a small town with her four other siblings and another on the way. She is curious and determined to understand the mysteries of the world around her. But her devout catholic father can't explain the new world and her mother is too busy for philosophy so she converses to God. One day at school she is horrified to learn that man will soon set foot on the moon. In her eyes it's not possible that God would allow anyone to get so close to Heaven. Her clowning father agrees and, unable to cope with modern-day progress, hits the bottle. Caro is preparing for her first holy communion to become 'a bride of God' but before that she seals a pact with her father to overcome her fear of swimming in exchange, he will not touch a drop of alcohol.

Disappointed with humanity, God wants to revoke his contract with humanity and wants to take back the stone tablets containing the ten commandments. To this end an angel is sent out to affect the personal lives of three humans so an appropriate child may be conceived.

While escaping from Nazis during the WWII, a Jewish man dug suitcases full of things dear to his heart in the ground two. The war deprived him of his family, and afterwards he endlessly turns over the soil of Antwerp to find the suitcases, which makes him look obsessed. He keeps checking old maps and keeps digging, trying to find, in fact, those he lost. His daughter Chaya is a beautiful modern girl looking for a part-time job. She finds a place as a nanny in the strictly observant Chassidic family with many children, although her secular manners clearly fly in the face of many commandments. One of the reasons she is accepted is that mother of the family is absolutely overburdened by the household, so she stays despite the resistance of the father, normally - an indisputable authority in the family. She develops a special bond with the youngest of the boys, four-year old Simcha, so far incapable of speaking.

A mysterious foreign woman who is staying temporarily in a house there. Who she is and what her secret is are both slowly revealed in the reconstruction of a story about passion, revenge and war. Paul Ruven's homage to the films of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman.

Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation when they stop at a busy service station. Saskia is abducted in broad daylight and three years pass with no answers or closure surrounding her disappearance. Rex has nearly given up all hope when he suddenly begins receiving letters from her abductor.

A woman and her daughter lives in Oostdijk, a village near Amsterdam. One night when the mother is on her way home, she is killed in a car accident in the street they live in.