On Tuesday, June 9, 2026, Nouchka van Brakel will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award during the DDG Awards, presented by the Dutch Directors Guild and the VEVAM Foundation at Boom Chicago. Van Brakel, who was the first woman to graduate from film school and subsequently taught for nearly twenty years, built a versatile oeuvre of feature films, short films, television series, and documentaries. With *Een vrouw als Eva* (1979) and *Van de koele meren des doods* (1982), both of which represented the Netherlands as Oscar nominees in the Best Foreign Language Film category, she established an international reputation that continues to this day, partly because Sean Baker publicly mentioned the Nouchka van Brakel Trilogy on Instagram.