Ein Sommer in Amsterdam (2014)

Mia Kaufmann is greeted at the Amsterdam train station by her friend Hetty de Witt. Mia has come to Amsterdam to trace the egg she donated there 25 years ago, when she was a fashion design student and short of money. Hetty thinks she is crazy for attempting it. But Mia’s search, after all this time, has a deeper purpose. It has now been a year since her 21-year-old daughter Hannah was killed in a car accident. It has been a terrible year for Mia, who misses Hannah terribly. Just as Mia is about to give up and is standing at the station again, she receives a text from Grietje Knippers, the receptionist at the clinic where Mia donated her egg back then. Mia’s desperate plea for help must have moved her after all. This is how Mia gets the address of her biological son, a man named Mathijs van Haalen. Their first attempts to get to know each other are difficult, though, because he thinks Mia is stalking him. In a conversation with his father, Jan, Mathijs learns the truth about his origins. The young man demands his inheritance share from his father because he and his girlfriend, Sanne, want to buy the houseboat they both live on. But his father makes it unmistakably clear that he should expect nothing from him and should simply work to earn the things he wants. Mathijs is a puppeteer, which his father Jan does not consider a real profession, and this has driven father and son further and further apart. Jan van Haalen runs a shipyard. In a restaurant, Mia is approached by a man who turns out to be Jan van Haalen. When she leaves, she drops a key, which van Haalen finds. He leaves it at the restaurant with a letter for Mia, whom he would like to see again. Meanwhile, Mia fills in at the guesthouse where Mathijs works when he is overwhelmed by the many guests. Mathijs wants to know what she got for her egg. “5,000 guilders,” Mia says, but that is not important. When he was eleven, his mother ran off to Kansas with a friend. When he was twelve, his father had no time for him and packed him off to boarding school. Mathijs bitterly asks why she has come now, after 25 years. He can manage on his own now, and she should leave him alone. When Mia goes to leave a letter for Mathijs on the houseboat, having decided to leave, she meets Sanne, who gives her an address and asks her to hand the envelope to Mathijs in person there instead. When Mia arrives, her son has just begun his puppet show and is impressively performing Charles Aznavour’s song “Tu t’laisses aller.” Mia leaves the envelope with Sanne after all and goes. After Mathijs reads Mia’s letter, in which she tells him about his sister’s death, he changes his mind. Delighted by how things have turned out, Mia promises her son she will support his plan to study at the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France. She also encourages Mathijs to sue his father for financial support. Meanwhile, Jan van Haalen plans to sue Mia for more than €48,000, because she once signed an agreement forbidding her to contact her child. At this point, however, he has no idea that the woman he intends to sue is Mia—the woman he has fallen seriously in love with and has spent a great deal of time with. Matters come to a head when Mathijs finds his father in Mia’s bed and thinks she is in cahoots with him. But Mia herself has only just realized, during a conversation with Jan, who the man she has fallen in love with is. A circulatory collapse suffered by Jan’s father, Willem, in his antiquarian bookshop brings them all together again. Fortunately, the old man recovers quickly, and they celebrate together on the houseboat. Jan tells his son that he has now bought the boat for him. Father and son have a heart-to-heart. Mia’s influence has changed Jan considerably, and he tells Mathijs that he can study whatever he wants. He also says he had no idea Mathijs could sing so well, and that he is really proud of him.