The Penknife

Six-year-old Mees ends up with his friend Tim’s penknife by accident and decides to give it back. It is not simple, because Tim has moved with his family to Flevoland, and Mees is forbidden to carry a knife, so the whole undertaking has to be kept secret. In the end he enters a talent contest, hoping a song will reach his friend. Ben Sombogaart directed from a screenplay Sjoerd Kuyper wrote out of his own novel. The film takes seriously that what is enormous to a child looks small to an adult, and never patronises the child for it; what a promise means at that age is treated as a real subject. It won the Golden Calf for best direction in 1993 and was added to the canon of Dutch film in 2007.