Biography

Dewi Evita Reijs is a Dutch actress, producer, writer and director. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam and has worked for more than twenty five years across theatre, film and television. Her screen credits include My Father is an Airplane, A Real Vermeer, Kung Fu Lion, Dolfje Werewolf, and the award-winning youth series Floor Rules. Her theatre work includes The Hidden Force, The Doctor with International Theater Amsterdam and Trojan Wives with Buddy Film Productions and Tropical Souls.

Reijs began acting as a child at Youth Theatre Hofplein in Rotterdam. At the age of eighteen, she moved to Amsterdam to study drama. During her training, her graduation performance Above Your Head was selected for the International Theatre School Festival in 2005. She subsequently performed in productions including Schiller's Don Carlos, Ben Okri's, The Famished Road, Molière's, The Imaginary Invalid, Arthur Miller's The Crucible and The Tea Lords, based on Hella S. Haasse's acclaimed novel about the Dutch East Indies.

Alongside acting, Reijs developed as a writer and director. She wrote and directed the youth play Rafi and wrote Air in the Kitchen Cupboards, which was selected for the New Dutch Festival. In 2013, she co-wrote and starred in the short film Perjalanan (The Journey) together with actress Christine Hakim, filmed in Bandung and Jakarta and selected for both the Balinale International Film Festival and CinemAsia Film Festival.

In 2015, Reijs wrote the short film The Holy Virgin, starring Liz Snoijink, and made her directorial debut with the youth film Idiot. The film centres on a mentally disabled girl, played by Rahima Gungor, alongside Emmy Award-winning actress Maryam Hassouni.

In recent years, Reijs has increasingly focused on film production and on stories dealing with migration, identity and displacement. In 2017, she co-founded the Buddy Film Foundation, a platform supporting film professionals with refugee and migration backgrounds. Since 2018, Buddy Film Productions and Buddy Film Casting have developed and supported projects centred on migration and displacement. In 2024, Reijs produced the youth documentary series I Am New, about refugee teenagers in the Netherlands.

In 2026, Reijs produced A Tenderness, a 17-minute fiction short written and directed by Palestinian filmmaker Sabrine Khoury. A Tenderness is selected for the Short Cuts competition at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where it will have its world premiere.

Reijs' Indonesian-Dutch heritage is an important influence on her work. Her mother is from Indonesia and her father is Dutch; her family fled to the Netherlands in 1949. The colonial history of the Dutch East Indies regularly plays a role in her artistic and cultural work.

Beyond her film and theatre career, Reijs served as a board member of the Dutch-Indonesian Memorial Committee in Rotterdam from 2020 to 2023 and was festival director of Floating Pasar, the first Indonesian Outdoor Memorial Festival in the Netherlands. In 2023, she gave a personal testimony during the Dutch National Remembrance Day on May 4 in the presence of the King and Queen of the Netherlands. In 2025, she was a jury member for the Big Screen Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).
- IMDb mini biography by: Buddy Film Productions BV