It is late summer in 1944, and when the hiding place of beautiful Jewish singer Rachel Steinn is accidentally bombed by warplanes, she decides to join a group of Jewish refugees to make an escape into liberated Allied territory. The boat they are escaping on is intercepted by a German patrol and all the refugees are savagely murdered with only Rachel managing to escape. She joins the resistance and manages to chat up the high German SD officer Müntze. The resistance attempts to free a group of captured fighters with her aid. This fails miserably and woman is designated the culprit by both the resistance movement and the Germans. The liberation does not bring her freedom; not even when she succeeds to unmask the real traitor. “To have a character who’s in danger during the war, but in even worse danger once the war ends always felt like a beautiful idea,” says director Paul Verhoeven.
About the film
Details
- Running time
- 2 hr. 25 min.
- Country, year
- Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, 2006
- Genre
- Drama
- Language
- Dutch
- Subtitles
- Lithuanian, English
- Age rating
- N/A
Credits
- Director
- Paul Verhoeven
- Screenplay
- Gerard Soeteman, Paul Verhoeven OperatoriusKarl Walter Lindenlaub
- Music
- Anne Dudley
- Cast
- Carice van Houten, Halina Reijn, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman
- More information
- www.imdb.com
Festivals and awards
- won Young Cinema Award for Best International Film and was nominated for Golden Lion
- Best Film not in the English Language
- nominated for Best Foreign Independent Film
Director
Paul Verhoeven
Director, scriptwriter and producer Paul Verhoeven was born in 1938 in Amsterdam and graduated from the University of Leiden with a degree in Math and Physics. He entered the Royal Netherlands Navy, where he began his film career by making documentaries for the Navy and later for TV. His film Turkish Delight (1973) was nominated for Oscar and won a Golden Calf for Best Dutch Film of the Century in 1999. Since mid-1980s Verhoeven was working in the Hollywood where he directed films including RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers etc. Black Book is his first film directed in the Netherlands after a 20-year break.
