18/10/2013 - Dutch directors Boudewijn Koole and Martin Koolhoven have received production support from the Netherlands Film Fund.

The Oversteek (“Cross Over”) project has awarded two Dutch features production support worth €750,000 each in its latest round of funding: Martin Koolhoven’s (photo) “western thriller” Brimstone and Boudewijn Koole’s Beyond Sleep, an adaptation of the novel by revered Dutch author W.F. Hermans.

The Oversteek project yearly awards two auteur films “of cultural value” that have the potential to cross over to mainstream Dutch audiences as well as international viewers and is an initiative of the Netherlands Film Fund, Netherlands Public Broadcasting and the CoBO Fund.

Brimstone is a five-way co-production that involves Dutch producer Els Vandevorst’s production company N279 as well as Prime Time (Belgium); The Film Farm (Canada); Illusion Film (Sweden) and F&ME from the U.K.

The film is set at the end of the 19th century and focuses on a young woman and her family, whose “lives change drastically when a diabolical preacher comes to town”. Koolhoven is most famous for his previous film, Winter in Wartime [+see also:
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The new film is also backed by Dutch broadcaster AVRO and will be distributed in the Benelux by A-Film.

Beyond Sleep will be written and directed by Koole, who made Kauwboy, which won the EFA Discovery Prize last year.  The adaptation will be produced by Hanneke Niens and Hans de Wolf of KeyFilm, in co-production with Neofilm from Norway and German outfit Schiwago Film. Dutch broadcaster VPRO is also on board, while Wild Bunch will distribute the film locally.

The film is described as a “survival quest by a young geologist searching for a stone from Heaven”. The novel, one of Hermans’s most celebrated works, was first published in 1966.