Het hart van Amsterdam

In the 1970s, hard drugs made their appearance in Amsterdam. Addicted users were mainly to be found in the Red Light District and the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood. All this coincided with the rise of serious, organised crime; the underworld had become an integral part of the city centre.

In the early 1980s, filmmakers Arnold-Jan Scheer and Roy Dames became friends with several key figures in the underworld, including Zwarte Joop, owner of the Casa Rosso sex club, hash dealer Frits van de Wereld and his stepson Henk de Vries, now owner of the Bulldog coffee shop chain. They decided to follow these colourful characters with the camera, without having any idea when the project would be finished. After more than forty years, the job is done; from dozens of hours of footage, they have compiled Het hart van Amsterdam (The Heart of Amsterdam), a film that tells the story of the rise and fall of the underworld in Amsterdam’s Red Light District.