4 Movies Directed by Mijke de Jong

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Merel is a young girl with a lot of talent. She excels at school, is good on the springboard and is careful too. Her severely handicapped brother Kasper gets a lot of attention. Merel also has talent for singing. It is no surprise that she is asked for the school musical. But maybe Merel is a bit too convinced of herself. When people perform solos, she likes to sing along loudly. This doesn't fall on good ground though. People start ignoring her and she is getting bullied. All of the sudden Merel's life isn't that easy anymore, it will be hard to keep herself together.

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Dutch teenagers Jonathan and his best mate Coen were raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, a strict Bible-focused minority community which monopolizes nearly all of the members' lives, imposing missionary work in pairs, knocking at every door trying to sell the magazines and the message which believers consider the whole and only Divine truth. Both boys can however play modern music, rehearsing for the religious Sunday service band, and secretly see girlfriends who aren't "in the truth" (converted). Jonathan's Marjan, a rebellious squatter and graphic artist, drags the well-behaved boy along in heathenish gang-mischief such as shop vandalism and can't believe he accepted all his life to do meekly as his parents and (church) elders tell him in God's name instead of making his own choices. When Jonathan's father expects him to join the boss's boat-building firm as apprentice at minimal wage, bagging on the art academy he dreams of as 'barbaric filth', some teenage rebellion sets in; when Coen dumps his 'external' girl but also confesses about both of them, Jonathan proposes to Marjan. However the 'community' takes a more then dim view on 'traitors', without any right of defense the elders fire his father from the rotating hierarchy and judge the well-meaning boy's "irredeemable moral depravity" gravely...

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STAGES is a film about Roos and Martin, who are divorced but haven't become detached yet. When their 17-year old son Isaac withdraws ever deeper into silent isolation, they try to find a solution. Their attempts to find a solution for Isaac fail due to their frustrations from the past and their inability to listen to one another.

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Joy is an emotionally damaged young woman of eighteen, who was given up at birth, to grow up in homes and with foster families. She lives on the fringes of society, getting by on benefits and earning a little extra by playing the accordion in the subway. In addition, she is a skilled shoplifter and has never been caught. The film follows her closely during her dogged search for her unknown biological mother. Joy has a rather distant quality and the only times we see her animated is during her obsessive attempts to discover the identity and address of her mother. She clings to her conviction that she was the product of a loving relationship and that is why her mother called her Joy. This belief is all she has to hang onto in life. Her other activities revolve around her friend, Denise (16), who has got pregnant on purpose and is living in the home from which Joy was expelled because of bad behaviour, and her boyfriend Momo (21), a second-generation immigrant who was born and bred in Holland. Joy's search for her biological mother, have led her to an old address; on the basis of a vague physical resemblance, she assumes that the woman she finds there is her mother. She starts to follow the woman on her way to work and during shopping trips, and watches the house where she lives with her teenage daughter. Joy becomes more cheerful and more alert, and begins to develop an eye for the world around her - giving us a glimpse of the young woman she could have become if she had had a bit more luck. Then she hears someone call the woman by her name - a different name from that of her biological mother. She is profoundly shocked: her world seems to collapse around her.