Black Book

Paul Verhoeven returns to his Dutch roots with this visceral drama of life under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. Rachel Stein is a Jewess intent on avenging her family's murder. She joins the Resistance and agrees to become the lover of high-ranking officer Ludwig Muntze in order to learn which Dutchmen are secretly collaborating with the occupiers. But she falls in love with the man rather than the monster and finds herself in danger not just from the Nazis but from her compatriots. In Dutch/English/German/Hebrew with subtitles, Charged World War II tale of a Jewish resistance fighter (Carice van Houten) who, while seeking revenge on the Nazis who murdered her family, falls in love with the Gestapo officer (Sebastian Koch) she is assigned to seduce. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, who cowrote the script with Gerard Soeteman. Though a fictional story, incidents are based on actual events. Verhoeven and Soeteman had previously collaborated on the similarly themed 1989 drama "Soldier of Orange.", Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands after more than twenty years of success in Hollywood to direct this epic-scale war drama based on a true story. Rachel Steinn (Carice van Houten) is a beautiful Jewish woman living in German-occupied Holland during late 1944. Her family members - who have been falsely promised safe passage to Belgium (their names recorded in the 'black book' of the title) are instead robbed and slaughtered by the Germans on a premeditated basis; Rachel herself manages to escape by diving into the water and swimming away. She narrowly avoids capture, then joins the local resistance movement. With her hair dyed blonde, Rachel can easily pass for Aryan, and when the leader of the Dutch resistance movement learns his son has been captured by Axis forces, Rachel is asked to use her feminine charms to persuade a German commander to arrange for the boy's release. Rachel soon finds herself caught up in a dangerous double life as she becomes a sexual plaything for the Nazis while attempting to bring down their evil empire as a spy. Zwartboek was written by Verhoeven and Gerard Soeteman, who collaborated on the 1977 international success Soldier of Orange. Zwartboek received its world premier at the 2006 Venice Film Festival.