page_title: Alberts Frères
section_title: Production and notable films
hierarchical_section_title: Alberts Frères / Production and notable films
caption_attribution_description: English: A 1919 Dutch silent film
context_page_description: Alberts Frères, founded around 1899, was one of the first film production companies in the Netherlands. The company was founded by brothers Albert and Willy Mullens; they were the main filmmakers and exhibitors in the Netherlands in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
context_section_description: Beside showing films, Alberts Frères quickly started making them. An early film which generated headlines was made in Maastricht. On Friday, 13 September 1907, the brothers had filmed a practical joke in Maastricht, in which an actor by the name of Tünnes (from the local Schmidt theater), pulling a donkey by a rope, took off from the local market carrying a suckling pig under his arm without having paid for it. He proceeded to visit the vegetable stands, and the scene erupts with screaming housemaids, flying baskets and vegetables, and a number of police officers.
  Their most successful production is also one of the oldest surviving Dutch fictional films, The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach, made in 1905, which in 2007 was "canonized" as one of sixteen canonical films by the Netherlands Film Festival.
  Willy Mullens later became a well-known producer of documentary films; his Holland Neutraal: Leger en Vlootfilm (1917) received a royal premiere, in the presence of Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Hendrik. The two and a half hour long film, which showcased the Dutch army and navy, was commissioned by the Dutch Minister of War Bosboom, and was intended to rally popular support for Dutch neutrality during World War I; on the other hand, the film, with its display of military might, also aimed to show that the Dutch, despite their neutrality, were not to be thought of lightly. During World War I the company was hired by Kaiser Wilhelm's Dutch legate to film German children celebrating Queen Wilhelmina's birthday in 1919. The German Bild- und Filmamt, which aimed at the production of propaganda, was to procure copies for the German market, in hopes of maintaining good relations between Germany and the Netherlands. It is not known if this actually happened.
caption: A Alberts Frères production from 1919
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