Black Book (2006)

Black Book (Dutch: Zwartboek) is a 2006 Dutch World War II thriller film co-written and directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, and Halina Reijn. The film, credited as based on several true events and characters, is about a young Jewish woman in the Netherlands who becomes a spy for the resistance during World War II after tragedy befalls her in an encounter with the Nazis. The film had its world premiere on 1 September 2006 at the Venice Film Festival and its public release on 14 September 2006 in the Netherlands. It is Verhoeven's first film made in the Netherlands since The Fourth Man, made in 1983 before moving to the United States.

The press in the Netherlands was positive; with three Golden Calves Black Book was the film which won the most awards at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2006. The international press responded positively as well, especially to the performance of Van Houten. It was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and was the Dutch submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007, but was not nominated.

At the time of release, it was the most expensive Dutch film ever made, and also the Netherlands' most commercially successful, with that country's highest box office gross of 2006. In 2008, the Dutch public voted it the best Dutch film ever.

Synopsis

In October 1956, Ronnie, a Dutch woman married to a Canadian clergyman, is on a package tour of Israel. While visiting a kibbutz, she sees the local schoolteacher, Rachel Rosenthal, and they realise they knew each other during World War II. As Rachel recalls the past near a riverbank, the film then flashes back to 1944, and begins the story of Rachel Stein, a Dutch-Jewish singer who had lived in Berlin before the war and is now hiding from the Nazi regime in the occupied Netherlands.

Actors