The Northerners

Alex van Warmerdam’s award-winning second feature is set in a remote small Dutch village in the early 1960s. The village is actually just one street of a new town that was never completed, and the behavior of its inhabitants is invariably determined by their unsolved sexual problems, leading to a number of comic situations depicted in a tradition of absurdist black humor. The director himself plays a curious postman who can’t live without opening other people’s letters., A dark and surreal comedy that takes place in a run-down 1960’s housing development. When his mother is drawn into sainthood and the resulting frustrations of his father become too difficult to manage, Thomas, a young boy, becomes obsessed with events on the broadcast news. He is encouraged in this escapism by Plagge, the postman who reads all the mail and knows all of the bizarre and intimate secrets of the eccentric inhabitants of the estate.