First Contact (1983 film)
"First Contact" is the first documentary in what later became known as "The Highland Trilogy". The other two films are "Joe Leahy's Neighbours" (1989) and "Black Harvest" (1992). These three films, between them, have won some thirty major awards, included each film winning both the Grand Prix at the Festival Cinéma du Réel in Paris and AFI Award for Best Documentary.
Cinema of the Netherlands
In the years directly following the war, most effort was given to the reconstruction of the country; film was not a priority. In the late 1950s the Dutch film industry professionalized. The "Nederlands Filmfonds" (Netherlands Film Fund) was established in 1957, the "Nederlandse Filmacademie" (Netherlands Film Academy) in 1958. Documentary filmer Bert Haanstra made his first fiction film, Fanfare, in 1958. Even though the film was a big success, this success was only incidental. Dutch cinema did temporarily provide a sound of its own in this period, in the form of what is now considered to be the "Dutch documentary tradition" or "Dutch documentary school". Headed by Haanstra, who won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject with 1959's "Glass" and also won prizes in Berlin and Cannes, the "movement" also included Herman van der Horst, who won a Golden Bear for Best Documentary and John Fernhout, whose "Sky Over Holland" won a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1968.