While the Dutch film industry can be dated back to the tail end of the 19th century, for its first 80 years it was, without exception, a boy’s club. It wasn’t until 1977 that the Netherlands saw its first feature film directed by a woman. Nouchka van Brakel’s The Debut inaugurated a new kind of local cinema, one forged between the wakes of a new wave of filmmaking and second-wave feminism. Prioritizing female subjectivity in a career that would span four decades, van Brakel had emerged from the Dutch Film Academy in the early 1970s to begin work as a second unit director for the likes of Paul Verhoeven. Provocative tales of sexual awakening and personal emancipation, the three beautifully restored films in our series are little-known outside of the Netherlands.

Controversially subverting the dynamics of Nabokov’s Lolita, The Debut grants total agency to its protagonist—remarkably embodied by screen newcomer Marina de Graaf—in a tale of taboo romance between a teenager and a much older man. For her second feature A Woman Like Eve (1979), van Brakel reunited with actor Monique van de Ven, with whom she’d worked while serving as assistant director on Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight (1973). A lyrical story of sexual liberation, this deeply empathetic portrait of social unshackling follows a wife and mother as she leaves her family for her female lover on a bohemian commune. A lavish period drama, The Cool Lakes of Death (1982) is van Brakel’s grandest production, marrying the aesthetics of Merchant Ivory to the punishing psychological spirals of Lars von Trier. With a fearless lead performance from Renée Soutendijk, this adaptation of the celebrated novel by Frederik van Eeden charts a middle-class woman’s abandonment of religious and patriarchal conservatism in the pursuit of passion, a path leading inexorably into despair and tragedy. Both A Woman Like Eve and The Cool Lakes of Death served as the Netherlands’ Academy Award entries for their respective years, attesting to van Brakel’s national prominence as a singular, groundbreaking auteur.

Arielle Scherr