Ciske the Rat

Amsterdam in the 1930s. Eleven-year-old Ciske lives with his mother; his father is at sea, his mother works in a bar and the boy is in it with her late into the night. At school he pours ink over his teacher, and in the neighbourhood he is known as the Rat. But when a boy crippled by polio joins the class, Ciske is the only one who befriends him, and takes a beating for it. The anger in him keeps growing. Guido Pieters adapted the film from Piet Bakker's novel of the same name, with Danny de Munk as Ciske; the song from the film went to number one in the Netherlands and made him famous overnight. It was one of the most widely seen Dutch films of the 1980s.