18/12/2024 - The Dutch filmmaker and her producer talk to Cineuropa about the project that won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Prize at the Co-Production Village of the 16th Les Arcs Film Festival

Noticed with her debut feature film Pink Moon [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Floor van der Meulen
film profile] (special mention at Tribeca in 2022), Dutch filmmaker Floor Van Der Meulen has won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Prize with her new project Happy Days, a prize given to one of the 18 projects selected at the Co-Production Village at the 16th Les Arcs Film Festival where we met her and her producer Koji Nelissen (KeplerFilm).

Cineuropa: What is Happy Days about?
Floor Van Der Meulen: It’s a tragicomedy that reaches the absurd, almost a psychological thriller, that revolves around Anne, a 68-year-old woman. She is a grand-mother and she absolutely wants to please others. She’s on the verge of a burnout because she helps her children by babysitting for them so they can more easily lead their professional and social lives. She babysits her grand-children and she also takes care of her brother, who’s disabled and lives in an institution. At the beginning of the film, she receives a call informing her that her brother isn’t well and that she should come and see him. As her daughter isn’t picking up the phone, she decides to take her grand-children with her. But her brother dies and her eldest daughter is very angry because the children had never seen someone die and she finds that her mother was completely irresponsible to bring them with her. This event disturbs the family dynamics, and her brother’s death triggers a panic attack in Anne who rushes to the hospital even though she’s on the verge of a burnout. She is advised to slow down, but Anne refuses to. She believes that if one rests, one rusts away, and that one must stay active. She’s a woman with an angelic side, but also a darker, more manipulative one, because she needs to be needed, she has a need to be loved. She maneuvers people in her own way so as to make herself indispensable. Since she’s retired, that gives her a goal in life. So she doesn’t tell anyone about her panic attack and she even offers her children to do even more babysitting. And since she has a large house with many empty rooms, she also decides to host a Polish family: the woman who took care of her brother and her teenage daughter. This creates tension in her own family and her children reproach her for welcoming this Polish family to the detriment of the time she could dedicate to her grand-children. Anne promises that she’ll be able to handle everything, but the situation becomes progressively dangerous…

What motivated you to tell this story?
F V D M: It comes from my own observations. I don’t have children, but many of my friends are starting to have them and I see that their relationships with their parents are changing. It’s fascinating to see how much my friends, my generation, exploit their parents in an almost abusive way to babysit their grand-children. In the Netherlands, there’s a great taboo around saying no to your grand-kids: it’s perceived as a lack of love for them. There are therefore social expectations that you have to live with. It’s this dynamic, these levels of human hypocrisy that I observed that inspired the film.

Where are you at in the development of the project?
Koji Nelissen: The script was developed at the Torino Script Lab. We are now at V2. We sent our application for development to the Netherlands Film Fund two months ago and we’re waiting for an imminent reply that, if it is positive, would allow us to work on the script in depth, but also to start casting. Over the next six months, we will focus on the project’s development to then put together a solid package in order to apply to production support at the beginning of next summer and to adjust a strong international strategy with regards to financing and marketing. We hope to have all the financing by the end of 2025 in order to shoot in summer 2026. We’re looking for co-producers, but we of course would like the co-production to be as natural as possible with quality partners. We’re thinking in particular of getting a French editor and, since some characters in the script are Polish, we are looking for actresses from that country. So this could make it a co-production between the Netherlands, France and Poland. But we are also exploring other ideas because we are, for instance, open when it comes to the cinematography.

Will your Eurimages Prize (which comes with €20,000) have a precise use?
Yes. It is first of all a wonderful sign of trust and interest in the project, but we also have the idea of organising a therapy session with the actors we have in mind for the familial constellation in order to explore the structure of these family dynamics. It would be really wonderful to have a professional therapist to moderate that. We’d see what it could bring, where it could lead, and it would probably give us very rich material for the dialogues and even for certain potential scenes in the film.