News

There’s an idleness about the opening of Ena Sendijarević’s latest work which, in itself, speaks to the experience of Dutch colonials in Indonesia. Beguiled by the beauty of the jungle, its trees so tightly enmeshed that they almost conceal the river flowing through it, we are drawn into a landscape where the hum of mosquitos is omnipresent, where nothing can escape the suffocating heat. There a group of local men are setting up a trap, dangling a piece of meat from a tree, luring in a tiger for a pampered boy in linens and pith helmet to shoot.

The boy is Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas), the brown-skinned son of sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet), who proudly carries him home upon his shoulders as his servants struggle with the weight of the slain beast. Jan adores the boy, moulds him in his image, invites him to laugh along as he.

Malaise is the order of the day in Dutch-Bosnian writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s costume drama Sweet Dreams. Set in the Dutch East Indies at the dawn of the 20th century, the film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor. But for a work that’s all about boredom, Sweet Dreams is far from boring.

It’s the suspicious demise of Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) that sets the plot in motion. Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), the man’s profoundly cynical widow, writes to their son, Cornelis (Florian Myjer), telling him to return from the Netherlands to take over the estate. But when Cornelis and his pregnant wife, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), arrive, it turns out that Jan has left everything to Karel (Rio Kak Den Haas), the progeny of his unconcealed liaisons with the family’s domestic servant, Siti (Hayati Azis). If Cornelis and Josefien...

Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s Locarno prizewinner “Sweet Dreams,” a droll satire set on a sugar plantation in colonial-era Indonesia, has released its first trailer. Athens-based production and sales outfit Heretic has given Variety exclusive access ahead of the film’s North American premiere in the Centerpiece section of the Toronto Film Festival (see below).

“Sweet Dreams” is set on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies during the waning days of the colonial era. It centers on Dutch plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) and his wife, Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), who are at the top of the food chain. That is, until Jan, upon returning from his nightly visit to his native concubine, Siti (Hayati Azis), suddenly drops dead in front of his wife.

Desperate to keep the privileges of her status quo, Agathe forces her estranged son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his heavily pregnant wife, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman...

It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević’s magnificently composed, eerily satirical “Sweet Dreams” has something more like acid flowing through its veins. Acid — or maybe formaldehyde, given the embalmed pallor of the dysfunctional Dutch colonial family whose values are so elegantly dissected within it. In only her second feature, after the Rotterdam-awarded “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” the Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker has established herself as a formidable talent with an eye for absurdity in Academy ratio, and a feel for the manicured, placid surfaces that contain rot and rebellion just as corsetry cinches in flesh.

It is 1900, and this little corner of the Dutch East Indies is verdant, damp jungle terrain. The air is thick with biting insects. Vincent Sinceretti’s extravagantly rich sound design is so multilayered that you can differentiate the crickets from the gnats from the omnipresent, whining mosquitoes. But part of the wilderness has been tamed — or more accurately,...

Writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s second feature, Sweet Dreams, follows a recent trend of arthouse films — including Zama, The Settlers and The Tale of King Crab — that explore Europe’s troubled colonial history through a postmodern mix of satire, surrealism and cinematic lyricism.

All of these elements are present in a story set in 1900 in the Dutch East Indies, where a family running a prosperous sugar plantation finds its status quo upended when their patriarch suddenly passes away. Left to deal with the fallout, the landowner’s wife and children are quickly exposed to the limits, as well as the terrors, of colonialism, in the face of Indigenous people who refuse to keep bowing down.

Shot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio and divided into chapters like a novella, Sendijarević’s movie maintains a certain distance from its subject, gazing at it through a contemporary prism that critiques the racism and exploitation of the epoch.

As Leo Tolstoy wrote, all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The rich cry too and there is something universal about the rivalries between the loved and the unloved wives, sons and heirs, regardless of their social status. So, why would the family of the sugar plantation owners in the Dutch East Indies in Ena Sendijarević's sophomore feature “Sweet Dreams” be any different? The film has just world-premiered at Locarno, where we also caught it.

Sweet Dreams is screening in Locarno Film Festival

Somewhere in Indonesia in the early 1900s, Jan (Hans Dagelet) owns the plantation and the sugar processing plant and rules it with an iron fist. He is no softer even at home, where he commands over his seemingly blasée European wife Agathe (Renée Soutendijk) and his Indonesian housekeeper-lover-concubine Siti (Hayati Azis), while the two battle one another, each...

Editor’s Note: This review originally published during the 2023 Locarno Film Festival. Dekanalog will release “Sweet Dreams” in U.S. theaters on Friday, April 12.

Two-thirds of the way into Ena Sendijarević’s stylized sophomore feature “Sweet Dreams”, a heavily pregnant white Dutch colonialist, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), is attempting to relieve some pent-up hormonal tension by straddling her bedpost and getting herself off. It is at this exact moment that an Indonesian housegirl, Siti (Hayati Azis), walks in bearing a jug of water and a glass.

Josefien experiences no shame and seizes her chance to manipulate Siti, for Siti has the status afforded by bearing the illegitimate son, Karel (Rio Den Haas), of the recently deceased plantation head, Jan (Hans Dagelet). Unbeknownst to Siti, Jan left it all to Karel and now the young heir and his mother both have targets on their backs for Jan’s older son, Cornelius (Florian Myjer...

Winner of a special mention from the Berlinale Generation KPlus’ adult jury, the family-friendly, light drama “My Extraordinary Summer With Tess” is straightforward youth cinema with surprising emotional depth. Based on a prize-winning novel by Anna Woltz, a beloved Dutch writer of work for young readers, it explores family relationships and emphasizes the importance of human connection. Fronted by two charismatic tween performers, the title marks the feature debut of Dutch helmer Steven Wouterlood, who already holds an international Emmy Kids Award. The New York Intl. Children’s Film Festival will host the film’s international premiere at the end of February.

The story unfolds from the perspective of sensitive 10-year-old Sam whose voiceover musings not only provide the narrative’s momentum and glue but also articulate the film’s ultimate lessons. Sam, his parents and older brother Jorre (Julian Ras) are on a week’s vacation on a Dutch island,...

Playing sort of like the female version of Steve McQueen’s Shame comes Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak’s film debut, Hemel, a provocative and, more significantly, non-exploitative exploration of a young woman’s confused search for intimacy through (more often than not) hollow casual sexual encounters. A 2012 Berlin International Film Festival selection, Polak’s film also captures an emotionally potent performance from newcomer Hannah Hoekstra, creating a fascinating and realistic portrait of sexuality, a rare phenomenon even in the heterosexual realm.

We meet the twenty three year old Hemel (Hannah Hoekstra), which means Heaven, in the midst of a hook-up with a man she seems to have little in common with. Exchanging hostile observations supporting hostile gender stereotypes, their banter evolves into a discussion of women shaving pubic hair, which Hemel is opposed to but let’s herself be sheared anyhow. She equates a lack of hair with pre pubescence...

Rounding up a bit of what the critics have been saying about the work screening at the New Directions/New Films festival tomorrow, we begin with Adam Leon's Gimme the Loot, winner of the Grand Jury's award for Best Narrative Feature at SXSW just a last week. In his latest entry at Artinfo, J Hoberman, who was on that jury, calls it "a funny, smart-mouthed, high-energy comedy about Bronx graffiti writers that's less a remake of the 80s indie hit Wild Style than a movie in the doomed caper tradition of Big Deal on Madonna Street. Not without some dubious stereotypes, the movie transcends them thanks to Leon's adroit direction and infectious self-enjoyment of its ensemble cast."

At GreenCine Daily, Steve Dollar agrees that it "has the run-and-gun mobility and funky vibe of a 1980s downtown comedy, evoking in various ways a kinship with the likes of Susan Seidelman,...