In Morgan Knibbe’s €1.5m project The Garden of Earthly Delights, 12-year-old drug addict Kenji fights for attention, respect and freedom in the drug-infused slums of Manila.
Meanwhile, he struggles with his sexuality and crosses paths with Dutch sex tourist Michael, who is being torn apart by his dark desires.

Knibbe blazed like a comet onto the Dutch production scene in 2014 with his audacious doc debut Those Who Feel the Fire Burning. Following this, his The Atomic Soldiers won the Golden Calf (Dutch Academy Award) for Best Short Documentary in 2018 and the Dutch Director’s Guild Grand Prize in 2019.

“The Garden of Earthly Delights will become an explosively colourful, eclectic and grim fairytale in which grotesque images of hellish horror are set against moments of surreal beauty,” Knibbe comments. “The images will have a layered meaning. In the first place, the cinematic form will serve the emotional journey of the main characters, which will become intensely tangible and sensory, mixing gritty social realism with magical escapades.

Co-written with Roelof Jan Minneboo, the Filipino and English-language film is produced by BALDR Film and has €72,500 in place, courtesy of the Netherlands Film Fund (€22,500) and Creative Europe (€50,000).

Director: Morgan Knibbe Script: Morgan Knibbe, Roelof Jan Minneboo Production: BALDR Film Co-production: Cinematografica (PH)

David Verbeek’s The Wolf, the Fox & the Leopard is a dystopian story about Isa (23) who has been found living amongst wolves. She is brought back to a medical centre only to be kidnapped by an idealistic couple in order to help them build a new, purer world.

Produced by Lemming Film, the 100-minute €2,700,000 project has €127,500 in place from the Netherlands Film Fund (€102,500) and Creative Europe (€25,000). The screenplay is also written by Verbeek.

“In order to start any attempt to describe the core of this film, we must look at the animal kingdom and ask ourselves what it is exactly that separates us from them,” says the director. “What we do all day with our oversized part of the brain called the frontal lobe is run simulations, structure the past and project possible future outcomes or even entirely alternative variations on things we have perceived before. What I mean to say here is: we’re storytellers.”

“I see the art of cinema as a spiritual exercise,” he continues. “Something that cuts beneath rational narration. And perhaps, at its core, to begin with, the effort to prevent the destruction of the world is similar to this; a spiritual exercise more than anything else.”

Right now, Verbeek is in post-production on his feature film Dead & Beautiful, also produced by Lemming Film.