Willy Mullens

Willy Mullens (4 October 1880, Weesp, North Holland - 21 April 1952, The Hague) was a Dutch producer, director, and promoter of movies. He is considered to be one of the early pioneers of Dutch cinema, and one of his movies was recently elected as one of only sixteen "Canonical Dutch movies." With his brother Bernardus Albertus (Albert) (20 June 1879, Harlingen - 1941) he started around the turn of the 20th century one of the earliest Dutch film production companies, Alberts Frères. By the second decade of that century he was making documentary films that premiered for royalty. His second company, Haghefilm, dominated the Dutch film market between the two World Wars.

Willy and Albert's father, Albertus Abraham Mullens (30 July 1847 Hoorn - 1890), alias "A. Alber(t)", and a German by the name of Ahrens Basch had founded a theater company (Koninklijk Nederlandsch Cagliostro-Théâtre Alber & Basch"), specializing in "mysterious and pseudo-scientific spectacles". After Albert Senior's death, their mother Christina Mullens-Verpoort continued to direct the company. Before getting started in the movies, Willy Mullens also worked at a fair in The Hague as a human cannonball. He was fired in 1897 when his act failed; he had been knocked out by a kangaroo. Christina took her sons to Paris, where they saw Auguste and Louis Lumière's movies in the Salon Indien du Grand Café. With financial aid from their mother, they bought a number of those movies; in 1899 they started showing them in the Netherlands in their traveling cinema. They chose the French name "Alberts Frères" for their production company, since the movie business at the time was predominantly French.

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