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• About
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The Office for Nonfiction Storytelling (O.N.S.) is a documentary film and television practice based in Rotterdam, Holland.

We make documentaries, television, and corporate video, with an emphasis on people.

The focus points of O.N.S. are:
- Human strategies to live life
- Architecture and design
- Leadership

Documentary film
O.N.S. creates documentaries and television about people. We are interested in the strategies people create and use to live their lives. How do we cope with aging and our mortality? The American physician Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) put it this way:
"We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still."
All we do, whether it's our work or our hobbies, our food obsessions or our love for art, they are all strategies we develop to cope with the ‘problem’ of life.

Television
We think modern media is no longer interested in ‘the small’ and ‘the real’. All it wants to show is 'big' emotions and 'big' opinions. While society is based on its people, television shows a society built on statistics. This way the true condition of society remains unclear.
A good example of our vision on television is the show we made about the Rotterdam public transport company RET.

Commercial
People don’t want to be told what to buy, they want to relate to what they buy. They want to see real people use it or associate people with the product.
Nonfiction storytelling is an effective way of soft-selling your message, product or brand. With advertising getting smarter, the audience got smarter as well. The days of hard-selling infotainment and commercials are over and advertisers are increasingly looking for innovative ways to sell.
Documentary or reality TV are ingenious way to do just that.

Why?
Authenticity.

In nonfiction, reality TV, or in news reports, real people tell about their life and their choices in real situations. If a brand is attached to these people and happenings the audience will become sympathetic towards that brand.

Again: A good example of our vision on television is the show we made about the Rotterdam public transport company RET.

We love documentary film
Documentary film making is a constant struggle between what is reality and what is story and between what something is and what it represents.

Balancing on this verge is what makes working on nonfiction storytelling extremely interesting. Moving between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ is necessary for compelling nonfiction films because reality alone would not be a film and story alone would not be nonfiction.

Yet few doc makers use this struggle in their work and stay safe on the sides of this verge.

Unfortunately documentary filmmaking often follows paths created by predecessors. It does not invent, re-interpret, fantasize or renew itself, but it rather acts on safe ground, afraid to to fail, afraid for the omnipresent critic, and afraid not to be able to engage the audience.

Yet redefining the role of the doc has became extremely important in a world where EVERYTHING is documented. O.N.S. will engage itself with this task.

Best,

Victor Vroegindewey
Director & Producer