Zara Dwinger & Frieda Barnhard

The Badlands evenings offer new Dutch film talents a great opportunity to present their calling cards. Today:

Zara Dwinger trained at the Netherlands Film Academy and works as a director and screenwriter. She directed KORT! – Yulia & Juliet (2018) in which two teenage girls find love and one another in a youth detention centre; A Holiday from Mourning (2020), about a teen in a Portugese party town trying to escape the sorrow surrounding her mother’s death; and Het meisje dat vervloekt was (2021), about a stoner girl whose life has come to a standstill until she loses herself in a strange search for a missing boy from her street.

Frieda Barnhard graduated from Amsterdam’s Academy of Theatre & Dance in 2018. She acted in the short films Ik kan vliegen (2017), Run Baby Run (2018), Eyes on the Road (2018) and Birdland (2020). On television, she played one of the lead roles in the Videoland/RTL series Judas. In 2020 she was given one of the lead roles in the first Dutch Netflix series Ares, as well as in the television series Vliegende Hollanders and De Eenling. In 2021 she appeared in Alex van Warmerdam’s film Nr. 10.

Film choice The Virgin Suicides

Dreamy, slightly melancholy debut by Sofia Coppola about five stunningly beautiful but tragic sisters whose suicides remain shrouded in mystery. With a superb performance by Kirsten Dunst. The film’s rarefied, amorphous syle is heightened by a great score from Air, supplemented by seventies hits.

Sofia Coppola's film adaptation of the novel of the same title by Jeffrey Eugenides is set in the suburbs of Michigan in 1974, where the five mysterious Lisbon sisters are worshipped by the boys from the neighbourhood. It feels like the American Dream. Then the first cracks start to appear in the family. The sisters are receiving a strict Christian upbringing from their parents (Kathleen Turner and James Woods). Their longing for freedom leads them to a desperate act.

The Virgin Suicides is filmed from the admiring perspective of the local boys, who simply can’t understand what could have driven such wondrous creatures to do what they did. No firm explanation can be given.