{"id":500826,"date":"2026-06-19T12:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T12:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/500826\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T12:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T12:16:08","slug":"stand-up-review-a-dutch-disability-drama-with-integrity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/500826\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Stand Up’ Review: A Dutch Disability Drama With Integrity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMost able-bodied people don\u2019t know what to say to 23-year-old Vera (Lucia Zemene) in the months following a traffic collision that left her without a leg, but one empty platitude really stands out: A friend suggests that maybe it happened for a reason. Haunted by this thought, she eventually asks a fellow young wheelchair user if he agrees, and he does. \u201cThe reason,\u201d he says, \u201cis that a truck crashed into you.\u201d That reply captures the refreshingly direct, no-bullshit tone of Mari Sanders<\/a>\u2018 \u201cStand Up<\/a>,\u201d a Dutch drama that seeks to cut through the condescending sentimentality that often characterizes portraits of disability on screen, and instead trades in more straightforward truths.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat approach begins with the casting of young actor-musician Zemene, a real-life amputee who lost her leg in similar circumstances to Vera. She and her director, who himself uses a wheelchair, bring not just lived experience but a lively, varied palette of feeling to the material. Though it tells a simple story in unadorned fashion, it\u2019s the frank, often funny authenticity of perspective in \u201cStand Up\u201d that lifts it from the familiar. Following a premiere in the international narrative competition at Tribeca, Sanders\u2019 thoroughly accessible, audience-friendly film should be a popular selection on the fest circuit, and merits thoughtful handling by inclusivity-minded distributors.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cStand Up\u201d wastes little time in getting to the crux of its story, introducing the tattooed, fun-loving Vera on a typically raucous night out in Rotterdam with her friends Inaya (Hana Hussein) and Roos (Manouk Pluis), before she tipsily wends her way home \u2014 and is hit by a truck in the road. Waking up in hospital hours later, she finds her left leg has been amputated, and the film plunges her immediately into the practicalities of living with a sudden disability. It\u2019s a wrenching challenge for a naturally independent, headstrong personality: An early scene captures the painful physical difficulties of acts as everyday as going to the bathroom, while Zemene conveys Vera\u2019s quietly seething aggravation at being told by her parents to rest as they fuss around her.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s better suited to the tough love dished out by her physical therapist Jonathan (Kendrick Etmon), who doesn\u2019t mind when she pushes back in frustration: \u201cFuck you,\u201d said with varying degrees of anger and affection, is their common language. But it\u2019s in Xander (a sharp, spiky Daan Buringa), a wheelchair user and aspiring standup comedian whom she meets in her rehabilitation centre, that she finally finds a kindred spirit \u2014 someone who vocally resists society\u2019s perception of the disabled community as essentially passive, but is equally skeptical of hollow empowerment slogans that present disability as something to be transcended. \u201cMaybe you should look closer,\u201d he says, when one of Vera\u2019s well-meaning friends banally says that she \u201cdoesn\u2019t see\u201d the wheelchair, only the woman.<\/p>\n

\n\tMost of all, Xander is an advocate for the right of people in his position to be stubborn, defiant, even badly behaved: A comic high point of the film follows a group of disabled people from the center on a trip to the cinema, cheerfully flouting rules intended to literally put them in their place. Not everyone has to be such a firebrand. While Vera forms an increasingly tender bond with Xander \u2014 the complications of sex for wheelchair users being another rarely explored detail that Sanders addresses with candor \u2014 she also gradually develops her own relationship to her new body, and her own happy medium between challenging and complying with the world around her.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis (a Yorgos Lanthimos regular) cuts the film with brisk concision, there\u2019s also a welcome temporal elasticity here \u2014 the sense that life can change in the blink of an eye, but also stall for undefined passages. Either way, no step of this journey is presented as easy or fast. Vera learns, for example, that she has a longer road than she initially expected to walking again with a prosthetic, and \u201cStand Up\u201d doesn\u2019t feel the need to follow her all the way there, since it\u2019s hardly the only victory worth celebrating. Thanks to its fluid, perceptive writing and finely rounded performances \u2014 Zemene is sometimes pained, sometimes giddy, but never martyred \u2014 the film offers an unusually convincing view of the volatile day-to-day moods and back-and-forth progress structuring the life of one disabled person, without presuming to speak for many others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most able-bodied people don\u2019t know what to say to 23-year-old Vera (Lucia Zemene) in the months following a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,230278,397,204891,67452],"class_list":["post-500826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mari-sanders","tag-movies","tag-stand-up","tag-tribeca-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}