De Nederlandse Celluloid Closet

“There were no lesbian films in the Netherlands 50 years ago...”This is the refrain we often hear—and at first glance, a quick search in the Eye Filmmuseum’s database might seem to confirm it. But what if we look differently? Rewatching films for overlooked storylines, scouring festival leaflets, and tracing the footprints of queer initiatives already reveal the first clues.

The rest is a treasure hunt: coded references to queer bars, nods to historical movements, and fleeting appearances of icons—details that audiences might miss, and queer viewers sometimes overlook. Through a few carefully chosen excerpts, we’ll see how these elements leap into focus once we set aside preconceived expectations of what story a film tells.

The visibility of these films has always been fragile, shaped by the contexts in which they were shown and the platforms they could—or couldn’t—access. Alternative distribution networks, political collectives, film school experiments, and queer LGBTIQ+ series all played a role in bringing repressed stories to light. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, the fight against established norms took many forms: some films slipped in minor queer characters, others relied on coding; activist documentaries and educational works became weapons, while a rare few mainstream productions dared to swap heterosexual couples for homosexual ones in otherwise conventional romances.

What emerges from this patchwork is a resistance to easy categorization. The lesbian identities captured in Dutch cinema defy simple labels—just as they defied erasure. Starting from the Eye Filmmuseum’s collection, with its historical gaps and evolving priorities, we embrace the challenge: to sketch the contours of female homosexuality in Dutch film. Reading (40') by collection curator Lou Burkart, followed by:

Mara (Angela Linders, 1985, 57', 16mm)

A Dutch woman, Mara, goes to visit her Portuguese girlfriend Luisa but fails to meet her. Alone in a foreign country, she spends a few days in a deserted house by the seaside. Visual narration is mainly used to reveal the way that Mara's longing and passion affect her own reality. In dream sequences and flash-backs she attempts to make sense of her memories and expectations.