_{Joost van Ginkel, Urszula Antoniak & Peter Hoogendoorn}

Nude Area will be produced by Frans van Gestel, formerly of Dutch powerhouse IDTV Film, now of the recently established Topkapi Film. “The heart of the film is the examination of a seduction,” he comments. “And an added complexity is that it is a seduction between two girls from different cultures.”

Van Gestel is determined that the film will be a co-production. Budgeted at €925,000, and with €526,000 already sourced from the Netherlands Film Fund, Van Gestel is eyeing up Poland (Antoniak’s country of birth), France and Germany as potential partners.

The pair’s last collaboration, Code Blue (Cannes Directors Fortnight, 2011), proved tough viewing for some audiences as it dealt quite graphically with the theme of (in)voluntary euthanasia.

Van Gestel argues, however, that the theme of seduction is one more palatable to audiences. “On one hand you want to make a film that is accessible for a fuller audience than Code Blue,” he notes. “But on the other hand Urszula Antoniak is one of the few authors to whom I would like to give, and who needs, complete freedom to make her art. Nevertheless, in Nude Area her approach will be much closer to Nothing Personal than to Code Blue.”

Netherlands director Joost van Ginkel describes his feature project Our Sun as a ‘mosaic’ about six immigrants making their way in 21st century Amsterdam. The film is inspired by Van Ginkel’s experiences while working in the Amsterdam docks unloading and parking thousands of Nissan cars.

“I was working hard on another script at the time but I needed to pay the bills, so I decided to take a job so that could keep my head clear,” Van Ginkel explains.

For Van Ginkel, however, the most interesting part of the job was when he and his co-workers would drive together in a minibus to the loading bays.

“There was this Egyptian guy who went bankrupt and was kicked out of home by his brother. There was an Iranian guy, who spoke very little, as he was tortured. There were Yugoslavian guys who had suffered during the war. It took a lot of time to connect with these guys and hear their stories, but they made a huge impression on me.”

So the idea of shooting a ‘gritty tale of migration’ in which six stories play out and conclude simultaneously within the same cityscape became fixed in Van Ginkel’s mind. His subsequent film subjects include the Polish Reja who pays a high price for her naivety after arriving in Amsterdam to work as a model, and the Korean conductor Kwon who comes to lead the city’s Concertgebouw for two years.

Given the disparate backgrounds of the characters, the film will use many languages – Dutch, Polish, Korean, Serbo-Croat – but the unifying lingua franca will be English.

“I have been living in Amsterdam for 10 or 12 years, and I now realise that if I meet somebody in the street the chance of getting a response is greater if I speak in English than in Dutch, because there are so many cultures living there,” he comments. “This surprises me very much.”

Peter Hoogendoorn’s project Between Ten and Twelve will recount, in real time, the period during which a family hears of the death of one of its members. The film, to be produced by relative newcomer Keren Cogan Galjé and the co-pro doyenne Petra Goedings, is based on the same experience suffered by the director when in his teens.

“The framework of the film is the police car coming to the house and telling the tragic news to a boy and his girlfriend,” comments Hoogendoorn. “And after that they travel on to his father and then his mother. That was the real situation in my own life – my journey with the police. It was a strange world. It was such a dramatic situation and I was getting this macro effect, like an out of body experience, not actually in the situation.

“What I find most interesting is that the whole film is moving from space to space, and what I like the most is the energy between the people and the space - like the energy between two worlds - and to capture that in one frame,” he continues. “I want to touch the viewer by offering them a framework that confronts them with their own perspective of time passing, time lived and time experienced. With this film I want to try to capture the perception of time that changes.”

This will be the debut feature of both director Hoogendorn and producer Galjé. “After film academy we talked about this idea and I wanted to do something with it, so she recommended the Binger, where I developed the project, and she was always part of the process,” he points out. “It is my first film. I am not nervous. I just want to make it - find my actors, find my DOP and develop the script as far as it can go.”
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