Little Crumb

1921, a Dutch port city. A ten-year-old boy everyone calls Kruimeltje, Little Crumb, lives on the street. He was taken from his mother soon after he was born; the woman raising him is poor too and expects him to bring money home every day. If he does not, the door stays shut. The boy lifts things from market stalls, sleeps in churches and runs from the police. Maria Peters adapted the film from Chris van Abkoude's classic children's novel. The telling is on the boy's side but does not make poverty charming: hunger, cold and the hostility of most of the adults are genuinely there. It is still a story about hope, and the question of who the boy is and where he came from is carried to the end. It is the screen version of a book that has been read in the Netherlands for generations.