Manslaughter

Max has driven an ambulance for twenty years. On the way to a difficult birth with his new colleague, their vehicle is blocked by a group of young men. These are the days when attacks on emergency workers are being discussed on television and everyone has something to say about it; that night Max goes past what he can take and hits one of the men in front of him. The mother and the baby survive. The consequence of the punch comes from somewhere he never counted on. Pieter Kuijpers sets it up without picking an easy side: is the man a hero, a criminal, or both at once. What the film asks is more uncomfortable than that: can you defend civilisation by uncivilised means. Theo Maassen's Max is neither a victim nor a monster, only a man who could not take it for one night. The team made the film squarely inside the Dutch argument about violence against emergency workers.