_{Jammed by Isis Cabolet}

During Covid, Dutch actress and director Isis Mihrimah Cabolet used to go on bike rides or take long walks around Amsterdam with her dog. This is how she stumbled on the little suburb which features in her new short Jammed (Gleuf)*, a world premiere at Palm Springs International ShortFest.

“It’s a real place…there are all these streets which are blue and green and pink. I was so amazed by it because it was kind of like a fairy tale. The North of Amsterdam is usually quite grey and industrial.”

The local people weren’t impressed initially at having a film crew in their midst but Isis won them over. Soon, they were baking apple pies for the technicians and giving them Jägermeister shots.

In the short film, produced by Millstreet Films, 70-year-old Edith (Beppie Melissen) is living in this quaint neighbourhood. She is a lonely woman with a very set routine. She eats the same microwaved food and watches the same TV show every night. Eventually, she comes together with another loner, the young rock music-loving Zip (Michael Muller). They’re “totally different characters from totally different worlds” but they develop a close bond.

Isis reveals that the character of Edith is inspired by her grandmothers. “They were both very interesting people but they were both very lonely…the mother of my father was very eccentric and she would get in fights very easily but she was also extremely creative. I always had the feeling she had a lot of darkness in her. The war was very hard on her family.”

The other grandmother was “afraid of everything” and wanted to make her life as safe and simple as possible. She lived by a very strict routine. After her husband died, she hardly ever left her house. “She would just watch her soap series.”

The character of Zip, meanwhile, is loosely inspired by the director’s uncle. “He was, we think now, very autistic but he grew up in a generation when he was never diagnosed.”

The uncle was an eccentric, charming figure with glitter stickers in his kitchen. His house was “like a palace of his interests.” It was obvious, though, that he was sexually frustrated. After his death, when the family went through his possessions, they found hoards of vintage pornographic videos in his cellar.

During pandemic lockdowns, Isis believes that many within the Netherlands experienced the same isolation that Edith faces every day. Home for them became both “a safe haven” and “a cage.”

The director chose Melissen to play Edith after watching her in the TV show Jiskefet. “She is just this Dutch icon. She is always sympathetic even when she is mean. She is just so interesting to watch,” the director says of her lead. “What I really enjoy about her is that she creates a lot of depth with characters but also gives them humour in very subtle ways.”

Edith and Zip are, Isis points out, “socially not very gifted.” They struggle to strike up relationships. “The point of my film is that loneliness and social awkwardness is not always so cute or so nice to look at,” she explains why she didn’t try to sugarcoat the harsher elements of her protagonists’ lives. “Sometimes we have this romanticised image in our heads of lonely women just watering their plants…”

She describes the film as “a little bit of an ode to socially unacceptable people.” It ends on an upbeat, happy note with the old lady banging away at Zip’s drums with a zest that puts Keith Moon of The Who to shame.

Isis has a blossoming career in front of the camera. She started to write her film scripts because she “really missed the female perspective in Dutch television and films.” Jammed is her third short after F*ck My Life  (2021) and her short musical Oh My Night* (2022).

Now, she is busy writing a TV movie (Wheelie, about a young skateboarder) and also has development funding for her first feature, Young/Adult*, about a relationship between a drama teacher and one of his young female students. This is being produced through Smarthouse Studio.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund