Haunting Reedland draws on age-old Netherlands trade, at Dutch Film Festival April 25

A reed cutter tries to solve a murder in Academy Award submission for Best Foreign Language Film; plus documentaries and soccer as fest enters second installment

Dutch Film Festival 2026 continues at various venues April 23 to 26

OF ALL THE FILMS playing at the second installment of the Dutch Film Festival this week, none has more buzz than director Sven Bresser’s atmospherically chilling Reedland—the Dutch submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

And movies don’t get much more traditionally Dutch: the story centres on a reed cutter (that’s rietsnijder in Dutch), a professional who harvests wetland reeds using scythes, cutting and bundling them for old-style thatched roofing. It’s a fascinating specialization—and one that’s, of course, disappearing with modernization.

In the eerie crime drama, we meet the central character Johan (real-life reed cutter Gerrit Knobbe) at work, standing amid endless golden, endlessly rustling reeds in a shot that’s as striking sonically as it is visually.

Johan’s quiet life is interrupted when he finds the body of a dead girl amid the wetlands. Motivated by fears for the safety of his own granddaughter, he sets out on a quest to find out who amid his small community might have killed her.

Emerging director Bresser builds the entire story into a haunting, dreamlike journey—full of stunning wide shots of the surreal landscape. It’s unsettling and well worth catching on the big screen, where Reedland screens April 25 at 7 pm at SFU Woodward’s downtown.

Earlier in the day at the same venue (12:30 pm), the fest offers up Child of Their Time, a documentary that reflects back on the 1970s, when many Dutch families adopted children from Indonesia. It’s directed by a sibling of one of those adoptees—and he has built up a resentment toward his adoptive father for taking him to Europe. The film pairs with the similarly themed “Object Reconnaissance” short—about activist Merah Muda, who fled to the Netherlands during political crisis in Indonesia, and her granddaughter, who searches today for a missing family heirloom that might unlock secrets of the past.

Finally, and fittingly, not only for a nation obsessed with football but for a Vancouver edging towards the FIFA World Cup, the festival closes April 26 at Container Brewing Company with the soccer-themed All Stars, a sports comedy-drama directed by Jean van de Velde.

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Janet Smith

Janet Smith is founding partner and editorial director of Stir. She is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s dance, screen, design, theatre, music, opera, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

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Haunting Reedland draws on age-old Netherlands trade, at Dutch Film Festival April 25

A reedcutter tries to solve a murder in Academy Award submission for Best Foreign Language Film; plus documentaries and soccer as fest enters second installment

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