OOGST: New Dutch Shorts

Jörgen van Dongen, Steven Willems 

Returning to the remote house of her childhood to help her mother Caatje move out, Emma is confronted with a long-buried past. A confrontation erupts over motherhood, loss, and the legacy of silence. Emma’s partner, Melle, tries to mediate but becomes entangled between two generations of women, each holding fast to their own truth. Tensions build toward a surreal climax where memory, trauma, and visions of the future blur into one. BROKSTUKKEN is an intimate family drama that captures the universal struggle between holding on and letting go.

Chagalle Pennink 

In this wild story, eleven-year-old, curious, and slightly rustic Kaat visits the Stavros family for the first time. This is a flamboyant and imposing family where everyone, including the dog, suffers from a terrible wasp allergy. Kaat is very impressed by the opulent house, the romantic parents Theodore and Dr. Stavros, and, above all, her sparkling friend Giselle, with whom she would gladly trade lives. But the family also has a very dark side. They are all too eager to use Kaat as an experimental subject for their research to keep wasps at bay. Kaat searches for her balance between appreciation and self-acceptance, while the parents put more and more pressure on her. As a result, she slowly loses sight of her boundaries and becomes increasingly swallowed up in their world. How far will she go to win the recognition of the sparkling Stavros family?

Lara Milou Pollen

Ly visits the doctor because she’s unsure if she’s normal or not. The Doctor does various tests during which Ly is taken on a journey through the concepts of normality and weirdness and is forced to confront where she herself belongs on that scale. 
Remedy is a surrealistic mixed media animation about neurodiversity and normality. 

Raúl Struik 

Slopmachine is a 2D and partially clay animated short film that plays with the concept of the attention economy, in which attention is seen as a scarce and valuable material that can be turned into profit.

A fictional tech company that goes by the name of Slop Inc. tries to maintain the attention of their users for as long as possible by presenting them an endless stream of content on their social media platform called ‘Slopmedia’. When an unsuspecting user loses access to the platform, Slop Inc. tries to win back his attention in an absurd way, eventually revealing the true intentions of the company.

Renee Maria Hendrika Riebeek

Third Time’s the Charm is a short film about my grandfather, who died after being struck by lightning not once, but three times. Told in a dry, pseudo-scientific tone and constructed entirely from archival material, the film presents this unlikely story with forensic precision.