Successful Dutch production house IdtV Film, the company behind local box office smash and Oscar hope Twin Sisters, has lined up a slate of five new features.

Two of the projects from the Amsterdam based company are international productions. Batavia is billed as an epic about the disastrous seavoyage of the legendary Dutch East India Company, which was wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629.

The project is currently being scripted by Paul jan Nelissen and Pieter Kuijpers (the director of Godforsaken!) and will be a coproduction with an Australian partner.

The other film, Bride Flight, is based on a historic flight by Dutch airline KLM in 1953 which saw 30 brides on board travelling to meet their future husbands who had emigrated to Australia. The film will be a co-production with New Zealand-based Jump TV. Shooting should begin halfway 2005. Ben Sombogaart (Twin Sisters) is directing.

No Sense (Zinloos) is a psycho-thriller made for television and written by Arno Dierickx based on the crime-novel Violence Without Sense (Zinloos Geweld) by Rene Appel. Amazones is a comedy directed by Esme Lammers (Tom And Thomas) featuring some top Dutch actresses (Monique van de Ven, Georgina Verbaan, Monic Hendrickx and Susan Visser) who play mothers on social benefit who rob a bank, while Leef (Live) is a comedy in pre-production made by the Cloaca-team (writer Maria Goos and director Willem van de Sande Bakhuijzen).

IdtV Film had an extremely successful year in 2003, scoring well at the box office with their line-up of local features.

Three of their titles, Oscar-hope Twin Sisters, Cloaca and Godforsaken! (Van God Los) scored nearly one million admissions at the Dutch box office.

The million-mark might be even passed during the Christmas-holidays. Godforsaken! has already sold 230.000 tickets, Twin Sisters has racked up 650.000 admissions and is still, one year after its premiere, playing in theatres. Cloaca, a sleeper-hit in the arthouse-circuit, has already attracted 85.000 admissions and still playing well in 20 theatres. The film is expected to reach 100.000 admissions by the end of the year.

IdtV Film, run by producers Anton Smit and Hanneke Niens, have also achieved artistic recognition this year. Twin Sisters won the Golden Calf-Award for best film during the Dutch Film Festival in Utrecht and was sold to 25 territories, including the United States. Godforsaken! also won three Calves for best director, best actor and best screenplay. Cloaca was honoured with the Public Award and Special Jury-Award of the festival.