Ambition can take you quite far and Patria is a good example of this. First time director Klaas van Eijkeren wanted to make the first Dutch movie about the first world war. He based the story on the letters soldier Arthur Knaap (Timothy Flohr) sent to his father while he was fighting. This Dutch-Indonesian young man lived in France and decided to join the foreign legion to fight in the trenches. It is clear that van Eijkeren really invested a lot of time in his research to transform this into a full length film. Ambition unfortunately doesn’t always mean that you will be able to get your passion project financed, which van Eijkeren had big issues with. He finally managed to get a small amount of money, 15000 euros, and decided he would make the movie with this very limited budget. Continue reading →