the netherlands

Chris Knight's avatar

This may be the most amazing tribute to David Bowie that has been done in the past few days: Dom Tower, the tallest church tower in the Netherlands, built in 1382 and with bells dating back to 1505, tolling out “Space Oddity”.




I’ve grown ever more fascinated with Bowie since it was announced that he had passed. Having listened to his final album and watched the last two videos he made (“Blackstar” and especially “Lazarus”), one most certainly gets the sense that Bowie was not only fully aware of his mortality, but that he was accepting it with a mighty grace.  I can’t help but think that there is also a sublime acknowledgement toward God in some of the lyrics and images, and that Bowie was surrendering to that.

When I posted about his passing a few days ago, I wrote that perhaps the most amazing thing of ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The second bestselling nonfiction book of all time – surpassed only by the Bible – owes its publication to this fine lady…

Miep Gies and her husband Jan were the Dutch couple who hid Otto Frank and his family in an Amsterdam office building’s secluded annex from 1942 to 1944. For more than two years, Miep and Jan Gies smuggled food and other provisions to the Franks and other Jews, protecting them as they could from the Nazi regime that was controlling the Netherlands.

In August of 1944 (not long after the invasion of Normandy) the Gestapo discovered the hiding place and captured everyone. Not long afterward Miep Gies was allowed to return and while there she gathered up numerous personal belongings in hopes of returning them. Scattered on the floor were pages of Anne Frank’s diary. In 1947 it was published and became a worldwide sensation for all time....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Something I’ve been saying for awhile: the next revolution in film-making won’t be in Hollywood. It’ll be coming from out of the hinterlands. There is something really wonderful happening across the world, my friends: a new breed of filmmaker, and I’m seeing them as young as 12 all the way up to their 50s and 60s. People armed with the new technology of cheap digital filmmaking who are doing incredible things around their hometowns and down in their basements… which are more often than not rigged-up with makeshift greenscreens. Regular people, no longer content to watch the magic on the big screen, are now telling themselves “I could do that, I can do that. Maybe I will do that!”

Marco van Bergen is one of those people. A mid-teen filmmaker in the Netherlands, van Bergen just finished his new movie Zero Hour. This past week I was honored to ...

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