Out (2024) by Dennis Alink

Tom and Ajani are 19, closeted, and in a secret relationship in the conservative rural town of Ootmarsum in the Netherlands. Tom is an introvert shaped by unsupportive parents — bisexual, resistant to labels, an Ingmar Bergman devotee who wants to make arthouse films. Ajani is extroverted, confident, and ready to fully inhabit the Amsterdam queer scene the moment they arrive. What they expected to be the same dream turns out to be two entirely different ones. Tom struggles at film school — told he is “not connecting” — while Ajani thrives socially. The gap between them widens. Autobiographically rooted in Alink’s own bisexuality, his upbringing in Ootmarsum, and his years at the Amsterdam Film Academy. Shot in black and white by co-writer and cinematographer Thomas van der Gronde. Made with a documentary-sized crew using a documentary-adjacent production method. World premiere Frameline48 San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival June 25, 2024. Screened at NewFest, Image+Nation, and the international LGBTQ+ festival circuit. German theatrical March 27, 2025.

Frameline’s programme note positioned the film precisely: “Recalling such classic monochromatic films about wayward youth as The Last Picture Show and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Alink and his queer collaborators present a lived-in, piercing portrait that proves coming out isn’t just a pronouncement of one’s sexuality — it’s a simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery.” Video Librarian described it as “a strong recommendation for LGBTQ+ and international film collections.” Alink is a confirmed IDFA regular — his documentary features have screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and played Dutch arthouse and commercial theatrical circuits — giving Out a pre-established institutional profile within Dutch cinema.

• The decision to shoot in black and white is confirmed by the review community as formally allegorical — matching Tom’s Ingmar Bergman sensibility and giving the Amsterdam nightlife and rural Netherlands landscape equal monochrome weight that colour would have differentiated.

• Van der Gronde’s cinematography consistently focuses on Bas Keizer’s expressive face — the camera’s relationship to Tom’s interior life is the film’s most formally specific technical choice and its most unanimously praised visual element.

• The film’s most formally precise structural argument: coming out in the countryside is the first challenge, but the LGBTQ+ community’s own group norms, social expectations, and internal hierarchies constitute a second coming-out that the film treats with equal honesty.

• The autobiographical grounding — Alink, van der Gronde, and the cast all drawing on their own experiences — gives the documentary production method its most formally specific credential.

• The Frameline-NewFest-Image+Nation festival circuit is the most active and most specifically engaged LGBTQ+ film discovery network — its recommendation functions as a community endorsement independent of mainstream critical coverage.

• Video Librarian’s positioning for library and classroom programming confirms an educational discovery pathway beyond the LGBTQ+ festival circuit — university film studies, LGBTQ+ collections, and European cinema programmes as secondary audiences.

• Frameline: “a star-making performance from Bas Keizer — a vivid and tender tale of being young and gay.”

• Video Librarian: “a moving, visually striking coming-of-age story that captures the complexities of friendship, sexuality, and artistic ambition — Bas Keizer is a real standout, doing a lot with his eyes and body language.”

• Filmysasi: “no villain in Alink’s film — it’s just about two lovers with different approaches to life; Bas Keizer is a highly watchable talent who is sure to go places.”

• IMDb audience: “both mesmerizing and oh so slow — the black and white cinematography adds depth and dimension; the chemistry between the actors is spot on; overlong and paced too slowly for an 8 but a quality gay-themed foreign independent movie.”

• Letterboxd: “very realistic — I’m in Amsterdam daily, so it was cool to see the city this way; so many boys can relate to this or just find some recognition.”

• IMDb 6.7 from 216 viewers. 12 critic reviews.

• No awards at time of writing. World premiere Frameline48 June 25, 2024 (Vogue Theatre, San Francisco). NewFest, Image+Nation, international LGBTQ+ festival circuit. German theatrical March 27, 2025.

• Dennis Alink — IDFA documentary features, Dutch television film expert, documentary maker for Netflix and ESPN — pivots from documentary to fiction with the same documentary-sized crew and location-scouting method, giving Out its most formally distinctive production identity.

• Bas Keizer (Tom) — the film’s unanimous critical consensus — a face-centred performance of sustained interiority that every reviewer cited as the film’s most formally irreplaceable element.

• Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson (Ajani) — actor and musician — brings the extroverted social confidence that Tom’s introversion requires as its dramatic counterweight; Frameline described him as “effervescent.”

• Thomas van der Gronde (co-writer, cinematographer) — Alink’s longtime documentary collaborator — whose black-and-white work is the film’s most unanimously praised technical contribution and whose screenplay co-authorship gives the story its most formally integrated autobiographical grounding.

The Frameline world premiere and the international LGBTQ+ festival circuit confirm the film’s institutional standing within the most specific and most engaged community it addresses. Keizer’s performance is the film’s most commercially durable discovery asset. The pacing is the most consistent critical qualification.

Out belongs to the European queer coming-of-age tradition — Weekend, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Weekend, Mala Noche — in which the city’s LGBTQ+ scene is both the destination and the second obstacle. Alink’s specific formal contribution is the symmetry of constraints: the rural conservative village has its norms, and so does the Amsterdam queer scene. Tom’s journey is not from oppression to freedom but from one set of expectations to another — which is the film’s most formally honest and most commercially distinctive argument within its genre.

• The Amsterdam queer scene’s own social hierarchies — physical expectations, behavioural norms, the peer pressure of the bathhouse and the nightlife — give the film a second coming-out arc that most queer coming-of-age films decline to address.

• Tom’s insistence on bisexuality rather than the “out and proud gay” identity that the Amsterdam community expects of him is the film’s most formally specific and most politically precise character detail.

• The film school as an identity mirror — Tom told he is “not connecting,” forced to give up his director ambitions — gives the artistic self-expression arc its most formally integrated relationship to the identity crisis.

• The interracial couple’s divergent responses to the same environment give the film its most formally specific structural tension: the same Amsterdam is a different city for Tom and for Ajani.

• The documentary-sized crew and location-scouting method gives the Amsterdam nightlife and Ootmarsum rural settings their most formally authentic visual texture — the camera in spaces where a fiction-crew would have been too large to operate invisibly.

• The queer collaborative production — “made with a team of queer filmmakers and actors based on our own experiences” — gives the film an authenticity that commissioned LGBTQ+ content cannot manufacture.

• Alink’s IDFA track record gives Out an institutional context within Dutch cinema that positions it within the most credentialed available Dutch arthouse discovery circuit.

• The second coming-out — navigating queer community norms, social expectations, and internal hierarchies after the initial sexuality declaration — is one of LGBTQ+ cinema’s most underrepresented and most personally resonant subjects for the community it addresses.

• The documentary-fiction hybrid has established itself as European independent cinema’s most formally productive mode for authentic queer representation — giving the subject matter a lived-in quality that conventional drama production rarely achieves.

• The bisexuality narrative — Tom’s refusal to accept the “out and proud gay” label that Amsterdam’s queer scene implicitly demands — is one of LGBTQ+ cinema’s most commercially underserved identity positions.

• The Frameline-NewFest-Image+Nation circuit is the most commercially motivated and most community-invested LGBTQ+ film discovery network — a recommendation from all three constitutes the strongest available endorsement within the queer film community.

• The German theatrical release and the international LGBTQ+ festival circuit give the film distribution reach across the European territories where the Dutch queer coming-of-age drama has its most pre-converted audience.

• Video Librarian’s library and classroom positioning gives the film a sustained educational distribution life that extends well beyond the festival circuit window.

The core audience is 18–45 — LGBTQ+ film festival audiences who follow the Frameline-NewFest circuit, Dutch cinema followers who track Alink’s documentary-to-fiction transition, and queer coming-of-age drama communities for whom the bisexuality narrative and the second coming-out arc are personally recognisable.

Out earns its institutional standing through the formal quality that distinguishes the most honest queer coming-of-age films from the merely affirming — the willingness to show that the community you fled toward has its own expectations that are just as difficult to negotiate as the ones you fled from.

Alink delivers a film of genuine formal intentionality — the black-and-white cinematography, the face-centred camera, the documentary production method, and the autobiographical grounding collectively give Out a formal identity that distinguishes it from most LGBTQ+ coming-of-age films produced within the festival circuit’s more commercial register. The pacing is slow because the observation is patient — a documentary filmmaker’s instinct to let scenes breathe rather than cut toward emotional signposts.

Works best for viewers who respond to the Gus Van Sant-adjacent naturalistic queer drama — the Mala Noche audience, Weekend fans, viewers who appreciate the LGBTQ+ community’s own internal tensions rendered without either celebration or condemnation.

The film’s most formally honest argument: Tom’s journey from Ootmarsum to Amsterdam is not a movement from constraint to freedom but a movement from one set of group norms to another. The real coming-out — the one the film is actually about — is Tom’s negotiation with the Amsterdam queer community’s own expectations of how a gay man should live.

Alink’s most precise autobiographical observation — that the LGBTQ+ community’s group norms can be as constraining as the conservative village’s — is the film’s most culturally specific and most personally resonant quality for the audience that has lived that exact negotiation.

Tom’s insistence on bisexuality — in the face of a community that reads him as simply closeted — is the film’s most socially specific and most underrepresented LGBTQ+ identity observation. The Amsterdam queer scene’s implicit demand for a cleaner identity label is the film’s most precise social argument about the limits of the liberation it promises.

Every review cited Keizer as the film’s most exceptional element — a performance conducted almost entirely through face and body language that gives Tom’s interior life a visual language more specific than any dialogue the screenplay provides. Frempong-Manson’s Ajani — confident, outgoing, genuinely thriving — is the dramatic counterweight that makes Tom’s struggle legible by contrast.

Out will be remembered as the Dutch queer film that addressed the second coming-out with the formal honesty that the subject requires — and as the film that introduced Bas Keizer to the international LGBTQ+ film festival community as a performance talent of specific and sustained authority.

• No awards at time of writing. World premiere Frameline48 San Francisco June 25, 2024. NewFest, Image+Nation, international LGBTQ+ circuit. German theatrical March 27, 2025.

Out proves that the most formally honest queer coming-of-age films are the ones that treat the community you moved toward as a second set of expectations rather than a final destination — and that Dennis Alink understood this well enough to build a film where Amsterdam is both the dream and the reckoning.

Out earns its place in the European queer coming-of-age tradition through the qualities that distinguish the most honest entries from the merely affirming — a black-and-white visual language that gives the rural and urban settings equal moral weight, a bisexual protagonist whose identity is treated with specific rather than general compassion, and a performance from Bas Keizer that the international LGBTQ+ festival community correctly identified as a discovery. Alink’s next fiction film, arriving with this formal identity confirmed, will be among Dutch queer cinema’s most closely anticipated productions.

• Movie themes: The second coming-out as the film’s most specific and most underrepresented subject, bisexuality’s invisibility within LGBTQ+ community expectations, artistic identity as the parallel crisis to sexual identity, the city’s liberation as a new set of group norms rather than an absence of them, and the argument that growing apart from someone you loved is painful regardless of whether either person did anything wrong.

• Movie director: Dennis Alink — IDFA documentary features, Dutch television, Netflix and ESPN documentary work — makes his most autobiographically personal fiction feature with his longtime collaborator Thomas van der Gronde, applying the documentary crew size and location-scouting method to give the fiction its most formally specific authentic texture.

• Top casting: Keizer’s Tom is the film’s unanimous critical consensus — a face-centred performance of sustained interiority confirmed as a star-making turn by Frameline and every subsequent review. Frempong-Manson’s Ajani gives the dramatic counterweight its most effervescent and most specifically characterised execution. Van der Gronde’s black-and-white cinematography is the film’s most praised technical contribution.

• Awards and recognition: No awards. World premiere Frameline48 San Francisco June 25, 2024. NewFest, Image+Nation, international LGBTQ+ festival circuit. German theatrical March 27, 2025. IMDb 6.7 from 216 viewers.

• Why to watch: The Dutch queer coming-of-age film that treats Amsterdam as both the liberation and the second obstacle — shot in black and white by a documentary filmmaker using a documentary crew, featuring Bas Keizer’s face-centred star-making performance, and built on the autobiographical experience of a queer team that lived exactly the journey it is documenting.

• Key success factors: Alink’s documentary authenticity plus Van der Gronde’s black-and-white cinematography plus Keizer’s star-making performance plus the queer collaborative production method plus Frempong-Manson’s effervescent counterweight plus the Frameline-NewFest-Image+Nation LGBTQ+ festival circuit endorsement plus the autobiographical grounding.

• Where to watch: International LGBTQ+ film festival circuit. German theatrical from March 27, 2025.

Out earns its critical advocacy through the formal qualities that the documentary method provides and that fiction productions with larger crews cannot replicate — the lived-in authenticity of Amsterdam’s queer spaces, the face-centred camera that never intrudes on Keizer’s interiority, and the structural argument that the queer community’s expectations are worth examining with the same formal honesty as the conservative village’s. Alink’s next fiction feature will determine whether the documentary method and the autobiographical grounding can sustain a filmography beyond the debut’s specific personal material.