Nouchka van Brakel

Nouchka van Brakel (born 18 April 1940 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch film director known for her 1982 movie Van de koele meren des doods. That movie, and a movie about Eve (1979), established her as an important Dutch feminist film director. Van Brakel said that her ambition is to make movies about women who want to change their lives and their societies.

Nouchka van Brakel was born in a socialist family which lived a fairly bohemian lifestyle: her mother was a singer and her father was a jazz musician, and they lived in Turkey for two years. She went to high school in Bilthoven, living with her mother while her father was abroad. After studying drama in Utrecht, she became the first woman to attend the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, which at the time was housed at Oude Hoogstraat 24, around the corner from her house in Amsterdam's Nieuwmarkt district. She was the only student who owned a house, which quickly became a meeting place for student meetings as well as for Dolle Mina, a feminist organization founded in 1970. In that time period she began making short political films using 16 mm film; van Brakel credits this period with giving her the desire to make movies featuring strong female characters. Her graduating class included very successful future directors and cameramen, including Adriaan Ditvoorst, Wim Verstappen, Robby Müller, and Jan de Bont.

Van Brakel's second movie, Zwaarmoedige verhalen voor bij de centrale verwarming (1975), was produced by Matthijs van Heijningen, who was responsible for launching the careers of a number of notable Dutch directors, including van Brakel. Her third movie, Een Vrouw als Eva (A Woman Like Eve, 1979), starring Monique van de Ven and Maria Schneider as lesbian lovers, was a commercial success in the Netherlands, but the sexually explicit story of two women who fall in love at a feminist conference was not picked up in the United States, despite an enthusiastic endorsement by Shirley MacLaine.Van de koele meren des doods, another van Heijningen production (he produced a great number of adaptations of literary works) was a success, and established her reputation. After 1987's Een maand later, her career seemed to falter.

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