With ‘Our Girls’, Dutch Oscar winner Mike van Diem was determined to make an ambitious film with unlikeable characters

Three decades on from winning his first Academy Award in 1989 for his student film Alaska and his second for his 1997 historical drama Character, Dutch director Mike Van Diem is still reaping the rewards.

“I can honestly say it has only opened doors for me,” he says. “The distributors always say they’re going to put ‘Oscar winner’ on the poster. I sometimes say ‘Guys, doesn’t that get old?’ But they say there is a huge difference in a film by so and so and a film by Oscar winning so and so/ In the marketplace, they’re right, of course. It’s something I have to live with.”

After two comedies, Tulipani, Love, Honour And A Bicycle (2017) and The Surprise (2015), van Diem’s latest is Our Girls, a fraught family psycho-drama that is described as carrying echoes of Anatomy Of A Fall and Force Majeure.

Two couples, played by leading Dutch actors, Thekla Reuten, Fedja van Huêt (who starred in Alaska and Character), Noortje Herlaar and Valentijn Dhaenens, share a holiday chalet high in the Tyrolean mountains. Calamity strikes when their teenage daughters are in a horrific accident. As each of the couples try to deflect blame and save their own child, tensions mount and the mood grows ever more savage.

The €6.5m film is screening at industry showcase NLWave today ahead of its public premiere opening the Netherlands Film Festival on September 26. It will be screened simultaneously in 60 theatres across the Netherlands, and then Dutch FilmWorks will roll out the film in 120 cinemas on October 2, a wide release for a local title.

Our Girls begins its international journey at the Warsaw International Film Fesiival, followed by the Woodstock Film Festival in North America. LevelK is handling international sales.

Dark comedy

It was casting director Marina Wijn who suggested Lykele Muus’s novel ‘We Do What We Can’ to van Diem. He relocated the setting from a small coastal town in southern Holland to high up in the Austrian Alps. He also added extra narrative layers.

“With 99% of all the fiction books presented to me, I don’t see a film in at all,” he says. “But this one had a fantastic premise. There are these two couples who go on their traditional one-week vacation. The daughters are in an accident and it ultimately only one of these girls can saved. I immediately felt it could be a heart-wrenching story but also quite suspenseful.”

He hopes audiences will have very ambivalent feelings about all the protagonists, that they’ll admire the way the adults fight for their kids even if they deplore elements of the parents’ behaviour.

“The film is a highly liberal adaptation of the book. I changed three of the four characters,” van Diem confides. “I chopped up my personality and distributed my characteristics over the entire cast.”

Among the changes he made was playing up the “dark comedic moments”. At the beginning of his career, van Diem put on a stage production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virgina Woolf? and he sees Our Girls, with its increasingly barbed and vicious dialogue between the warring couples, as a story in a very similar register.

Complexities

Our Girls was a complex and ambitious coproduction. It started at Amsterdam-based production company Nuts & Bolts but the director wanted to make “a competitive European film” on a bigger scale than an average Dutch film.

Dutch outfit Kepler came on board followed by co-production partners Schubert (Austria) and A Private View (Belgium) with funding from multiple sources including Netherlands Film Fund, Eurimages, ÖFI+ (AT), Cine Tirol Film Commission, Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the Belgian tax shelter.

The crew included top Austrian cinematographer Martin Gschlacht and production designer Katharina Wöppermann, both known for their work director Jessica Hausner.

Over his three decades in the industry, van Diem has seen many ebbs and flows in the local industry but recognises it is a positive moment for Dutch cinema. He fully supports the current Film Fund policy of investing bigger budgets in fewer films, citing Belgium and the Nordics as territories whose films have consistently out-performed Dutch films in terms of international distribution and recognition.

“I very much hope that is where the Film Fund wants to go,” he says. “It would help us if we make more competitive films with higher budgets. I see no reason why we can’t make the same internationally competitive films that neighbouring countries can make. We have been lagging behind for quite a while.”

•  Netherlands Film Fund’s Sandra den Hamer on the launch of Dutch showcase NLWave25