The subject of Peter Hoogendoorn’s Between 10 and 12 - how a family reacts to the news of a sister/daughter’s death in a car crash - is far from abstract, but what the film sets out to portray, quite successfully, is an existential state of nothingness as each member is forced to contemplate the new void that has opened up in their own lives.

In his press notes Hoogendoorn puts it rather lyrically. “There are no codes or rules about how to deal with loss. All that is left is to travel through time and space. A journey through a vacuum, stripped of all irrelevancies.”

In interview he places this state of being within the real-time context of the film. A police car arrives at a house. The police officers inform a teenage boy (Mike), accompanied by his girlfriend Katja, of the terrible news. They are then transported by car to his father, and then the three are driven to a distraught mother, always with the same grim purpose.

“I saw it more as an opportunity to film a state of mind,” Hoogendoorn stresses. “Normally you can control a lot of things. You know that a car travels from A to B and that everything has a name. You know what a thing is and how it connects with other things. But what happens in the film is a sort of meditation within an atmosphere of impossibility, where nothing has any meaning anymore, and everything is just sound or movement.”

At the heart of the film, produced by first-time feature producer Keren Cogan, is the teenage Katja, girlfriend of Mike, who is present in most of the scenes. While we do not see the drama through her eyes as such, her status as both as an insider and as an objective outsider makes her the fulcrum for the film’s action, as well as the link between the audience and the other family members whose suffering renders them impenetrable.

“The problem is that if your characters are not allowed to develop then it stays a little bit flat, of course,” comments Hoogendoorn of the limitations of watching the family members grieve within the real-time format. “Of course it was my purpose that Mike and his father should react in the same way, and the mother is screaming, and we therefore recognized that Katja is the most interesting character as she is an insider because of the situation but also an outsider as she is not one of the family.”

The emotional maelstrom is self-evident throughout the film, but it is internalized and therefore the small and the mundane aspects of life, and Katja’s small acts of kindness and concern, take on a wider significance.

Hoogendoorn talks at length about capturing the energy within a scene, and this is quite often distilled within the “in-between moments” of awkwardness that the characters experience. This “energy” is further enhanced by his choice to shoot very long takes, which allows him to crank up the dramatic tension to uncomfortable levels.

“In the film the ordinary things are more than just what you look at. It may look like nothing is happening, but everything is breaking and is fragile… the small dialogues people have, not clean dialogue as you usually have in films - it is interesting to watch people and observe these in-between moments. I like to capture that, and in doing this I try to capture the right energy for the story, and the flow of what is possible.”

^{Peter Hoogendoorn}

Between 10 and 12 Director: Peter Hoogendoorn Script: Peter Hoogendoorn Production: Keren Cogan Films (NL), Phanta Film (NL) in co-production with Unlimited (FR), Minds Meet (BE).