Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium & Luxembourg) Historical & Cultural Movies

The power struggles and wars between the Frisian Redbad and his sworn enemy Pepin of Herstal, Lord of the Franks.

A tale centered on the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302 where the Flemish rank and file won a major victory over the glorious French knights.

A sparkling film and surprising look into the middle ages by means of the story of Mariken, whose beauty is used by the devilish comedian Moenen to put people up against each other.

Elckerlyc is a man without scruples living in Medieval times. He lives a life of crime and hardly knows the difference between right and wrong. He is a purebred Misanthrope. Until one day he falls in love with a poor lonely girl who lives under a bridge. When she seems to like Elckerlyc as well his life seems to take a turn. However, his happiness is short lived, because the next morning, the girl is strangled by the local village idiot (the Fool). This drives Elckerlyc to madness and he avenges his loss on everyone he comes across. First he marries a Burgundian Duchess to become Duke, then he buys a magician who gives him a magic instrument which holds the power of life and death.

In medieval Germany, poor and witty Till Eulenspiegel fools and cheats citizens, churchmen, and landlords. Although in most cases he uses his wit for personal well-being, he often helps the poor and weak. Eventually, he gains an influential but also dangerous position as royal fool at the court of the emperor.

Popular joker, wheeler-dealer and heckler Till Eulenspiegel cleverly exposes the stupid greed of Lübeck burgomaster Klaas Wüllenwever, who vows to revenge the humiliation in order to restore his shaken authority in city council, as he plans to demand a plenipotentiary mandate to wage war on the main Hansa city's Baltic rivals, including the Danish realm and Dutch republic. As a trap, Klaas orders Till's patrician first ex Kathrin incarcerated, while his soldiers fail to hunt down elusive disguise-master Till. Kathrin sends to Till her cocky but resourceful kid daughter Marie, who escapes from the nunnery orphanage to commandeer Till as 'her helper' to free mother. After a daring plan to get Copernicus's master key invention, they return to Lübeck, where it's truth time, changing Till's and other lives forever.

This movie focuses on a dozen of the five hundred characters depicted in Bruegel's painting. The theme of Christ's suffering is set against religious persecution in Flanders in 1564.

While she fights a heroic battle against the Spanish besieger with her female army, Kenau, driven by hate and sorrow of the execution of her youngest daughter, is threatened to also lose her eldest daughter.

Viggo Mortensen plays the Spanish soldier-turned-mercenary Captain Alatriste, a heroic figure from the country's 17th century imperial wars.

Loyal Spanish soldier Alatriste employs his sword skills for a military group fighting Inquisition abuses. Amidst power struggles of the fading Spanish Empire, he faces conflicts, betrayals, romance, and secrets.

When the young republic of The Netherlands is attacked by England, France, and Germany, and the country is on the brink of civil war, only one man can lead the country's strongest weapon, the Dutch fleet: Michiel de Ruyter.

Late 16th century, persecuted protestantism and general dissatisfaction with the Catholic Habsburg rule in the Netherlands lead to large-scale plundering and vandalizing of churches, only harshening the Spanish Inquisition, sparkling the Eighty Years War. Flanders, 1568: Italian minstrel Campanelli tells he followed a Dutchman, the robber of a golden chalice, but failed to prevent him being taken -after banging a country-girl- by the men of a rigid farmer Netelneck, who has him tied-up inside a huge shit-container. After Campanelli frees him, the gold stays inside, and the Dutchman is killed, but the minstrel turns to offer the paying audience a happier version. Seven years later, he scares the Dutchman's posthumous son into bringing him food and convinces the kid he can fly, like his dad, who is on a grand ship, but fails to drag the gold out and is blinded and chased by Netelneck. Fourteen years later, the minstrel returns and tricks Netelneck into diving after the gold himself so he can drawn the bastard, then sets the 'little Dutchman' on the road to find his father, who proves a mere thief living in a beached shipwreck. Both join a brigand band, but it ends up arrested by the Spaniards and imprisoned under the authority of Netelneck's son, who has him thrown in an oubliette forced to scoop water, but Lotte, his only lover ever, notices something she gave him and believes her son, now she's Netelneck junior's wife, is the little Dutchman's...

A Dutch exploration team sets sail to find the North East passage to the Indies. The weather had other ideas for them.

A young peasant maid working in the house of painter Johannes Vermeer becomes his talented assistant and the model for one of his most famous works.

An artist falls for a young married woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait during the Tulip mania of seventeenth century Amsterdam.

A young woman moves to 17th century Amsterdam and hires a mysterious local miniaturist to furnish the dollhouse she received from her merchant husband as a present, but the lifelike miniatures somehow start eerily foreshadowing her fate.

An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting 'The Night Watch'.

Fate proved even more fickle in the post-feudal era for the Orange-Nassau family on the Dutch royal throne (all styled Willem, 'William') then for its realm. After exile in the French Revolution, the uniquely styled stadholders' family saw its crowned republic of the United Provinced promoted to a kingdom, covering all of the Low Countries. The same generation will lose most of the territorial gain again in the Belgian independence. Family relations are often strained or worse, especially between fathers and sons. Modern times bring more parliamentary constitutions.

An idealistic Dutch colonial officer posted to Indonesia in the nineteenth century is convinced that he can make the kinds of changes that will actually help the local people of whom he is in charge.

The Price Of Sugar tells the alternately gripping, romantic and heart-wrenching story of Sarith and Mini-Mini as they grow up on the sugar plantations of Suriname in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Where Sarith is the most beautiful woman in the colony, the mulatto Mini-Mini is forever in her shadow, slave to her own half-sister.