Klaartje Quirijns, the acclaimed director of THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION (www.thebrooklynconnection.net), winner of the Golden Eagle Trophy and the Special Jury Prize at the Human Rights Festival Paris 2005 -'Pungent and pointed?THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION foreshadows the role the US may play in the next great international conflict - whether it knows it or not.' Elliott Larkfield, Tribeca Film Festival - is working on her new film The Dictator Hunter.
Klaartje Quirijns grew up in the Netherlands and has worked as a director and producer, for the leading public television stations in the Netherlands (VPRO, IKON and NPS).
Her first film was about life in a maximum-security prison in Rotterdam. Since then, she produced and directed numerous documentaries with various subjects, e.g. about a famous Dutch case of the death of a student in the context of an initiation ritual; about a doctor who was part of the resistance during the second world war and who was appointed as the doctor for the three war criminals, known as "The Breda Three" who was entrusted with assessing whether their health merited their continued imprisonment (the film is now subject of a dissertation in the Netherlands).
The leading Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad described Quirijns as "one of the few documentary filmmakers who has managed to create cinematic pearls out of the television tap."
Quirijns moved to New York City in 1999 and has continued to work for Dutch radio and television. She was the first Dutch journalist on Dutch national television and radio to report on September 11.
She produced a documentary about the Brooklyn Dodgers and was creator of a video installation about street kids entitled "Homeless World," which was exhibited in the modern art museum'De Kunsthal' in Rotterdam.
She is currently working on a feature length documentary about psycho-therapy in New York called "On the Couch" under the aegis of her production company, EyesWideFilms (eyeswidefilms.com).