The Dutch actress Carice van Houten has been proclaimed best actress at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Van Houten got the prize for her role as the South African writer Ingrid Jonker in the drama Black Butterflies. 

The film was shown at Tribeca as part of the World Narrative Features programme.  

Ingrid Jonker was born in 1933. She belonged to a group of artists who developed the Sestigers (Sixtiers) movement, a group that opposed the censorship of the governing Nasionale Party. Despite the success of Rook en oker (Smoke and Ochre) her second volume of poetry, which was published in 1963, she fell into a depression and committed suicide in 1965. 

This is not the first time that a Dutch person has won a prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. Previously Cees Geel was awarded a prize for his leading role in the tragicomedy Simon. 

Sint
The Netherlands did other good business at Tribeca this year, too. Dick Maas’s horror film Sint, which was shown as part of the Cinemania section, found a distributor last week who will bring out the film in American cinemas this autumn.  

In Sint the well-known children’s friend Saint Nicholas (played by Huub Stapel) is portrayed as a blood-thirsty maniac who takes great pleasure in beheading children.