05/10/2026 - Muriel d’Ansembourg's film has picked up six awards, while the IDFA prizewinner My Word Against Mine won in the documentary category

Director Muriel d’Ansembourg with two of the awards for Truly Naked (© Marcel Krijgsman/NFF)

The Golden Calves awards ceremony, occurring as part of the EY Golden Calves Gala, marked the conclusion of the 46th Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) on 2 October. These 26 awards are also widely considered the nation’s most prestigious audiovisual prizes given its ties to the Dutch Academy for Film (DAFF).

Muriel d’Ansembourg’s Berlinale Perspectives entry Truly Naked picked up the Golden Calves for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Production Design. Meanwhile, Maasja Ooms’s My Word Against Mine collected the Golden Calf for Best Documentary Feature Film. Ooms’s intriguing documentary, which previously won both the Award for Best Dutch Film and the Audience Favourites Award at IDFA in 2025, tracks conversations between a psychiatrist and people who hear voices in their head, all for different reasons.

Young Dutch actor Daan Buringa made waves as the leading actor in Joe Speedboot, a film adaptation of a famous book about a man with a progressive muscle and nerve disorder who becomes an arm-wrestling champion. Buringa, who was the first wheelchair user to graduate from the Amsterdam Theatre School, took home the Golden Calf for Best Leading Role in the film. The acting prizes for the Golden Calves became a gender-neutral award in 2021 and are given only to one performer, regardless of gender.

Acclaimed shorts filmmaker Nienke Deutz, together with Digna van der Put, collected the Golden Calf for Best Short Film with their co-directed animated work This Is Your Captain Speaking. Mike van Diem’s Our Girls, which collected three trophies last year (Best Feature Film, Best Screenplay and Best Leading Role), collected the Audience Award for Best Feature (Fiction) Film in this year’s competition.

In the series (also known as TV Drama) category, BASTA took home the Golden Calves for Best Drama Series, Best Leading Role and Best Director. The show dramatises the life of famous footballer Marco van Basten in his early career. Halina Reijn, known for her films Bodies Bodies Bodies and Babygirl – the latter of which she co-produced with her Dutch outfit Man Up – was granted the honorary Golden Calf for Film Culture.

For the feature-length fiction and documentary categories, the nominees and winners are voted on and selected via the academy system in a collaboration between the DAFF and the NFF. Independent juries determine the nominees and winners of the other categories. Similar to the US Academy Awards, the Golden Calves for Best Feature Film (Fiction and Documentary) and Best Series, as well as the Audience Awards, go to the producer(s) of the work.

Here is the full list of award winners:

Feature-length film awards

Best Feature Film (Fiction)
Truly Naked – Muriel d'Ansembourg (Netherlands/Belgium/France)

Best Documentary Feature Film
My Word Against Mine – Maasja Ooms (Netherlands)

Best Director
Muriel d'Ansembourg – Truly Naked

Best Screenplay
Muriel d'Ansembourg – Truly Naked

Best Leading Role
Daan Buringa – Joe Speedboot (Netherlands)

Best Supporting Role
Thor Braun – Downtown (Netherlands)

Best Sound Design 
Evelien van der Molen – Sugar (Netherlands)

Best Music
Spinvis – Toutes Directions (Netherlands)

Best Cinematography
Myrthe Mosterman – Truly Naked

Best Editing
Emiel Nuninga – Truly Naked

Best Production Design 
Fleur Ankoné – Truly Naked

Best Costume Design  
Mattijs van Bergen, John van Vlerken – Downtown

Best Hair & Make-up Design 
Katja Alexis (posthumous award) – The Wolf, the Fox & the Leopard (Netherlands/Luxembourg/Ireland/Croatia/Taiwan/USA)

Audience Award – Feature Film  
Our Girls – Mike van Diem (Netherlands/Austria/Belgium)

Audience Award – Documentary  Film
Mama’ku – Van Jakarta tot de Molukken – Sven Peetoom (Netherlands)

Short-film awards

Best Short Film
This is Your Captain Speaking – Nienke Deutz, Digna van der Put (Netherlands/Belgium)

Best Documentary
How to Catch a Butterfly – Kiriko Mechanicus (Netherlands)

Best Leading Role
Juul Vrijdag – A Shot at Art (Netherlands)

Series/TV drama awards

Best Drama Series 
BASTA (Netherlands)

Best Leading Role
Chris Peters – BASTA

Best Supporting Role
Sabri Saddik – Mocros (Netherlands)

Best Director
Remy van Heugten – BASTA

Best Screenplay
Luuk van Bemmelen and Martijn Hillenius – Hein 2 (Netherlands)

Other awards

Best Digital Culture (formerly known as Best Interactive)
Graves’ End – Finn Stevenhagen (Netherlands)

Film Culture Award 
Halina Reijn