“The first time you feel being looked at”
This summer, the 14-year-old girls Malak, Celia and Jae travel with their respective parents to a campsite in the south of France. Great expectations and strong desires await them there. This year, it just might happen: their first steps in love. Documentary makers Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden and Natalie Bruijns wonder whether reality can match those dreams. In SWEETIES, they observe the girls in their daily walk around the campsite, and talk with them about dreams and deeds. That is, if they can just get their attention away from those darn smartphones.
Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden enjoys hanging out at Filem’On. “Editing SWEETIES on my computer was a lonely and demanding process. That’s why I now immensely enjoy watching films here while everything is taken care of for me and I get offered delicious food. The way I’m pampered here is amazing.“
I don’t know if you chose the easiest or the hardest topic in the world. The easiest, because everyone can relate to it. Or the hardest, because it is so personal and sensitive.
Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden: The hardest to make, and the most fun to watch! Relationships are so terribly complicated, with all those videos on YouTube: “How to French kiss” or “Ten signs of whether a boy likes you…”. And as a kid, you still have to stumble into it! In my times, we used to bumble around, but nowadays children start with a whole scenario pre-set in their heads. And yet everyone still bumbles around.
What do people look for in a campsite anyway?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: It‘s a typical Dutch thing. Belgians make jokes about Dutch people stuffing all their belongings in a caravan, so that the vehicle drags on the ground, loaded with tins full of beans. We used to go camping too; I also made out with a French boy and rode with him on the back of his motorbike. It’s a place to briefly escape ordinary life, and then you start trying things out, including in love. You have plenty of time to be bored and reflect. On campsites, the internet connection is often very poor, so you can’t be on your phone all the time. That’s why you have to indulge in other things.
I love how you smuggled snapshots of camping life into the film.
de Lind van Wijngaarden: A man soaping up his caravan, a family who brought the airfryer, so it all starts to look like a comfortable home again… The crew also stayed at that campsite, and as soon as we rolled out of our tents in the morning, we met our entire ‘cast’ in the washrooms.
You did shoot at one campsite, during one holiday period?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: Yes, but the girls didn’t stay there at the same time – actually, they never met. We wanted to have frank conversations, and together with co-director Natalie Bruijns, we had selected girls who were eager to talk about love. During pre-production, we built up a bond with the family.
How did that selection go?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: We wanted girls with different perspectives on love; it had to be clear that love doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Jae set us a challenge. In the conversations beforehand, she was very open. But at the campsite, she was surprised at the attention she attracted, so we had to take a step back. The other girl, Malak, reflected on the topic in a rather philosophical way. It made me wonder: what is going round in your head? All the girls were around 14 years old – only those twins were a bit younger.
In the end, you did get them all talking.
de Lind van Wijngaarden: The interviews were the basis, over which we edited our footage. So we needed a place where they could speak easily and relaxed. We completely rebuilt our van, with little lights and cushions creating a cosy atmosphere. Then we drove out into the countryside, away from the campsite. Everyone got out of the van, and our quiet conversations began. To create a contemplative atmosphere, we turned up the volume in the headphones, so the girls naturally started talking softer. That’s how we kept the sound so intimate.
Those twins on the bench are hilarious! Like Statler and Waldorf in The Muppet Show.
de Lind van Wijngaarden: You can’t tell their voices from each other – they sound exactly the same. Our target audience is officially from 9 to 12 years old, but there are so many differences between them. Some are already having sex on their minds, while others are still just “horse girls”, not thinking at all about boys.
Did you find your characters liberal or rather conservative?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: These kids are prudish and cautious. Although they see and hear a lot, the threshold is still high when they themselves have to take action. Like Jae, who had been in a relationship with a boy she had never seen. She didn’t want to meet him either, fearing that from then on everything would be different. You wonder what exactly such a digital relationship means to her, but it is something very true and romantic. You support each other from a distance at your convenience, and you can always show your best side.
What has changed, though, is the gender orientation in relationships. The first question you ask each other nowadays is “are you straight or are you gay?”
de Lind van Wijngaarden: It has become very normal to check that first. There are so many options these days, which can be quite confusing for young people growing up. That openness was a very normal thing among these girls. What is also striking: if homosexuality used to be mentioned in the past, it was exclusively about that. Now people are also allowed to be special in other ways, or excel in something, and then they happen to be gay as well. Many young people have considered or discussed other options too. For instance, Malak’s first kiss was with a girl.
‘I don’t like my body,’ you do hear often.
de Lind van Wijngaarden: That’s timeless, but social media has boosted it enormously. It is peculiar to puberty, when so much happens to your body and suddenly your looks also become important. It’s also the first time you feel being looked at. The same happened to me; I was a skinny girl with very big feet. When I look back at photos from those days, I think: girl, how pretty you looked! But back then…
A campsite visually seems like a rather chaotic environment. And the sunlight is continuously bright.
de Lind van Wijngaarden: Indeed. Our DoP Jeroen Kiers was hugely concerned with the quality of the footage. Apart from the documentary scenes, which were in-the-moment, we also did interviews in a more stylised setting. For instance, we filmed Malak on a raspberry-red air mattress at sunset. Those were beauty shots. Now and then we steered things a bit. In Jae’s tent, there were a lot of kids and motion, so more directing was needed: “we are now going to film the scene in which your mother braids your hair and then you can talk about things.” To avoid things becoming a total mess, we gave reality a hand sometimes.
But not when they kiss! I was wondering, did you really want to be there at that moment?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: That kiss was totally unplanned. When she went to see that boy one evening, we kept the camera rolling for a long time, while darkness fell. In the background, Michael Jackson was sounding all the time; that was going to cause copyright problems – fortunately, we managed to filter out the music. The cameraman and sound guy stood quite close by, and I stood a bit further away, translating the conversation via my earphones, as Jeroen didn’t speak French. Through my mobile phone, I could follow what was going on at the monitor – that’s how it goes these days. I found it very uncomfortable… and then suddenly I heard these smacking noises in my ear. Our batteries were just about dead, these were the last seconds we could film, and then it happened finally! After that, we further left them alone.
Were you happy for her?
de Lind van Wijngaarden: I was! She went to the Ardèche with him afterwards, so they could spend some romantic moments without us. But it was an unusual situation. Do you think we went too far?
Anyway! But it would also have been very unfortunate if we never knew how it had ended.
Gert Hermans