Diamond Film

The first Diamond Film was awarded to Black Book (2006) on 31 January 2007. The director of the Netherlands Film Festival presented the trophies to the producer San Fu Maltha, director Paul Verhoeven, and the film cast, during a dinner for the film crew and cast organized by San Fu Maltha. Black Book was the first film since the introduction of Dutch box office awards in 2001 that reached an audience of one million visitors.^[1] Black Book had a budget of €17,000,000, which made it the most expensive film from the Netherlands ever, at the time of its release.^[2] After receiving the Diamond Film, Paul Verhoeven says about Black Book:

It is what we hoped for. We've spent a lot of money, and it has been an expensive film. And we all knew that San Fu Maltha would get into trouble, if we would have had only half a million visitors instead of one million. (...) So actually, it is an enormous success.^[3][4]

Scenario writer Gerard Soeteman says about Black Book after it received the Diamond Film:

For the sake of films from the Netherlands, one hopes that many people would visit it. It is not just for yourself, but it means that people grow more confident in films from the Netherlands. So the public thinks: 'it can't be as bad as it normally is, let's go to a Dutch film again.' So the success of one film is actually stimulating for the generation of audience in general.^[3][5]

Between 1945 and 2013, the following Dutch films had admissions of greater than one million. In 2014, Gooische Vrouwen 2 had more than 2 million admissions.^[13]