Jan Bijvoet as the title character in Borgman Credit: Courtesy of VTIFF
The award-winning 2013 Dutch film Borgman, about a mysterious stranger who enters the lives of an upper-class family, will screen at Burlington’s Main Street Landing Film House next week. The screening, organized by the Vermont International Film Foundation, is a Vermont theatrical exclusive.

The film was nominated for the 2013 AFI Festival Grand Jury Prize, and director Alex van Warmerdam won the Best Director award at last year’s Athens International Film Festival.

The film’s title character, Camiel Borgman, will perhaps remind American audiences of the Nick Nolte character from Paul Mazursky’s 1986 comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills, another cultural satire about an oddly compelling vagrant who insinuates himself into the lives of the well-to-do. (Die-hard cinephiles may recall, too, Jean Renoir’s marvelous 1932 comedy Boudu Saved From Drowning, of which Down and Out in Beverly Hills is a remake.) These films may have similar stories, but Borgman has attracted much critical attention for its stylized mise-en-scène, as well — as evidenced by the striking composition above. And this film has a much darker edge.

Check out the trailer below for a sample of the film, which uses a fable-like structure to explore the nature of evil.


Borgman screens Thursday, August 28, at 7 p.m., at the Main Street Landing Film House in Burlington. Free for VTIFF members / $8 general admission / $5 student. Purchase tickets online.

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Ethan de Seife was an arts writer at Seven Days from 2013 to 2016. He is the author of Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin, published in 2012 by Wesleyan University Press.

One reply on “Acclaimed Dutch Film Borgman to Screen in Burlington”

  1. I’ve been reading reviews to get a better grasp. I don’t think they get it. The movie starts with the church seeking evil. Then their are conventions of society, like the children going underground and drinking. The offering of food to protect you from harm. The marked man is a social convention. Then the supernatural elements and the under the spell of evil ,the characters assume.

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