Babette Mulder

Onno (30) applies for a dream job as curator in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. He makes it through to the last round with the arrogant yuppie Alex. The younger and self-assured Alex seems to have a better chance of getting the job and Onno will not tolerate that. A few days before the last interview, he kidnaps his opponent and locks him up in a remote cottage that his girlfriend has just inherited near a railway line. As soon as he gets the job, he releases his victim. Three years later - Onno now lives together and has a son - he is a successful curator at the Rijksmuseum and needs an assistant. While interviewing applicants, he is confronted with Alex, now blind in one eye.

The film is based on the popular Dutch childrens book by Chris van Abkoude. In a Dutch port in 1921 lives a 10-year-old orphan boy known to everyone simply as Little Crumb. His poverty-stricken mother Lize van Dien filled with shame was forced to turn him over to Mrs. Koster soon after he was born. Foster mother Mrs. Koster, who has cared for him since he was a baby, is very poor too, unable to support him by herself and proves to be a cruel taskmaster who insists Crumb bring her money before shell feed him. Somehow he must earn his keep out on the streets and can only go home after he has earned enough money. Crumb becomes an urchin stealing from the streets barrows and the shops to stay alive, sleeping in churches or huddled in doorways. Sometimes he has to run off from the police and he has earned the enmity of the most grownups around him.

Former Amsterdam police detective Floris Wolfs has been transferred to the police department of the south-Dutch country town Maastricht. His metropolitan experience nicely complements the local expertise of his new country colleagues, who know the folks. Slowly he fits in, while solving countless crimes together with his female partner Eva van Dongen.