Pastorale 1943

In a Dutch village under German occupation, a few people who do not know one another well enough join the resistance. After those hiding on a nearby farm are betrayed, five men decide to kill Poerstamper, the village grocer attached to the Dutch national socialist movement. But the group is neither organised nor fearless; their plans stay half made, their decisions come late, and they cannot foresee the consequences of what they do. Wim Verstappen’s hundred and twenty five minute Dutch film was adapted from Simon Vestdijk’s novel of the same name; Vestdijk wrote the book immediately after the country’s liberation and, because he presented the resistance as well meaning but clumsy people, it stood outside the postwar account. Frederik de Groot, Renée Soutendijk and Rutger Hauer appear; it opened on 20 April 1978 and reached more than a million viewers.