ELKERBOUT, BEN

ELKERBOUT, BEN (1940–1987), Dutch-Jewish documentary film producer. Elkerbout joined the Dutch Labor Broadcasting Company VARA as a young man, first in an administrative position but later working as a producer of television documentaries. In this capacity he made many reports from abroad – from Vietnam, Biafra, and particularly Israel, where he felt closest to the Israel Labor party. His interview with Golda Meir in 1976 won a special prize from the international press jury at the First Jewish Film and Television Festival in Jerusalem. In 1979, together with his younger colleague Ludi Boeken, he founded the independent Belbo Film Productions Company, which specialized in documentaries on unusual subjects. The topics included the uncovering of the financial resources of the neo-Nazis throughout the world, the dumping of unlicensed medicines in the Third World, prisons in Argentina, and a reconstruction of the students' revolts in Europe in the late 1960s. In 1986 he went over to producing full-length feature films, the first of which was Dreamers, on pioneers of the Third Aliyah in Palestine. (Henriette Boas)