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IN BLUE

By Jaap VAN HEUSDEN

Drama - Completed 2017

When a sturdy Dutch flight attendant has to deliver a child in mid-air, she’s thrown off balance. In the emotional aftermath she runs into a boy who’s living on and under the streets of Bucharest and gets involved in a confusing mother/lover relationship with him.

Festivals
& Awards

Rome FF 2017

European premiere

Austin 2017

Best Narrative Feature

Int'l Film Fest. Of india, Goa 2017

Asian premiere

Capetown Film Festival 2017

Oostende Film Festival 2017

Film by the sea 2017

Official Opening Night, Dutch premiere

Eindhoven Film festival 2017

Special Jury Award

Berlin European Film Market (EFM) 2018

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- Year of production
- 2017
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, ROMANIA
- Languages
- DUTCH, ENGLISH, ROMANIAN
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 102 mn
- Director(s)
- Jaap VAN HEUSDEN
- Writer(s)
- Jaap VAN HEUSDEN, Jan Willem DEN BOK
- Cast
- Maria KRAAKMAN, Bogdan IANCU
- ISAN
- 0000-0004-8CF8-0000-G-0000-0000-Q
- Producer(s)
- Marc BARY (IJSWATER FILMS), Steven RUBINSTEIN MALAMUD (IJSWATER FILMS)
- Synopsis
- With her blue suit and even face, LIN (40) has been enjoying her life as a flight attendant for nearly twenty years. She keeps a firm grip on things until one day, on a flight from Amsterdam to Bucharest, she has to deliver a passenger’s baby in mid-air. Thrown off balance, she is about to miss her first flight in 19 years. As she rushes the taxidriver to the airport, they hit a boy. Instead of paying him off, Lin takes him to the hospital and misses her flight.
  
  NICU (15) quickly manages to charm Lin with jokes and offers his services as a tour guide. Lin, intrigued by the boy, accepts. The next day she even lets him take her across the tracks of a subway tunnel. Nicu is full of stories about his home and mother, but the filth on his clothing and underneath his nails tell a different story. When Lin is gone, he returns to his underground world of the subway platforms, tunnels and heating shafts, where he gets high on silver paint. And he looks after his sister FLORI (6) in a youth institution.
  
  Back home, Lin misses the boy. She starts to change her flight schedule to include Bucharest, to spend time with him. She enjoys their meetings more than she can explain. All of a sudden, she can take care of someone, like a mother. When she pays a maternity visit to the baby she delivered, she lies about having a 15-year-old son herself. But she enjoys Nicu’s physicality as well.
  
  Nicu isn’t sure what to think of the lady in blue. He’s used to selling his body to men in the public toilets. He expects her to want to have sex with him and leads on to that himself. But while having sex keeps on being delayed, Nicu realizes that he misses Lin when she’s gone. He starts lying to Flori when she asks why he hasn’t ripped off that lady in blue yet.
  
  While Lin seems to get in in touch with pain from her past, her playing the role of Nicu’s mother also starts to gnaw at her. He is still a boy. What mother would leave her child out in the cold?
  Finally Nicu trusts Lin enough to invite her into his underground world. And as Lin allows Nicu to sleep in her hotel room, in her bed even, he seems to hope that she will take him with her. But the more they are drawn together and open up to each other –and Lin seems to heal– the more it becomes clear that Nicu’s scars run much deeper and that their lives are worlds apart.

IN BLUE

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards