19/11/2024 - The Dutch filmmaker explains why he wanted to transpose into fiction the dramatic, Kafkaesque story that opposed his country to many families forced into corners

(© Aurélie Lamachère/Arras Film Festival)

Noticed in Cannes in the short-film competition of the Cinéfondation in 2017, Dutch filmmaker Stijn Bouma talks to Cineuropa about the origins of The Hunt for Meral O. [+see also:
film review
interview: Stijn Bouma
film profile], his debut fiction feature, nominated in the Best Film and Best Director categories at the 2024 Golden Calves (the Netherlands’ major annual cinema awards) and winner of the Critics’ Prize at the 25th Arras Film Festival, where we met him.

Cineuropa: When did you hear about this story of families hunted down by the Dutch tax administration accusing them of fraud (often without evidence and wrongly)?
Stijn Bouma: I discovered it in late 2020, when a politician took hold of the case as a kind of whistleblower. When I read his report, I immediately visualised film scenes because he was describing the consequences of this hunt: people were forced to sell their homes, their property was seized, etc. I started to do some research and I found that this Kafkaesque story was powerful and important. As more and more information was emerging, I first read a lot about the case, then I met a few victims. I’ve always been fascinated by the cinema and literature from Eastern Europe, especially by the topic of the individual confronted with the State. This story gave me the possibility of combining my personal obsessions with a contemporary topic in the Netherlands.

I had all the elements of a fiction film, but with my co-screenwriter Roelof Jan Minneboo, we were looking for the right angle. That’s when the government fell because of this case. But it was the same people that got reelected, and it’s at that stage that I realised that as a society, we hadn’t understood what had happened at all: the devastation of lives. In the heat of anger, I then directed a documentary (Alone Against the State) bringing together testimonies from the victims and which had a real impact: it was no longer just a scandal that we hear about, but voices and faces, I then returned to my fiction film project.

Were you shocked by how intrusive and oppressive the tax and social services were?
Yes, especially by the home raids to find potential other sources of income. I checked the veracity of these practices and I thought I absolutely had to show that in the film. It echoes with the practices of totalitarian regimes such as those of the USSR, the Stasi and the GDR. And the victims were all the more vulnerable since they were from disadvantaged economic milieux and pushed further into this poverty by the pressure of having to pay back the undue tax debt that was asked of them. For the Meral character, I therefore combined different sadly true cases and the worst was that these victims, when they’d try to defend themselves, were not really believed neither by institutions nor by their own families. Psychologically, it’s a profound isolation, a feeling of powerlessness.

The film centres on Meral, but you wanted to inject, in small touches, the point of view of an inspector of the tax and social services. Why?
I didn’t want to make the typical socio-realist film that’s 100% on the victim’s side. I also wanted to show something of the system which, in this case, is very vast, including municipalities, the government, lawyers, judges, etc. To unify that at the scale of the social services, this inspector offered a small entry door in order to show their daily lives and point of view. It also allowed me to stimulate the audience a little with a character that’s seemingly a “villain” at first glance, but who struggles with his own conscience (because there have been whistleblowers from the social services in this case). It also offered the possibility of showing the different levels of the system, with different personalities which either have or don’t have room to act.

A secondary character discreetly alludes to fascism and the resistance. How far did you want to push this comparison for the bureaucratic machine?
It was a writing challenge since something bad was clearly perpetrated, but there is no particular culprit, or not really. But there are many accomplices: it’s Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil.

What were your main intentions as a director, in particular with this subtle play with the off-screen space?
I feel as though today’s cinema wants to show absolutely everything. I think one must find places where the spectator’s imagination can activate. Still, I didn’t want to force too much in that direction either, but rather find an organic, natural form. I thought a lot about the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, and also a little about Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers, but I didn’t want any hand-held camera nor documentary style. I’m also a great admirer of the films of Robert Bresson, and I favoured a style that’s visually focussed on the essential.

You’ve pitched your next project Little Man, What Now? to the Arras Days. What is the subject of the film?
It’s an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Hans Fallada, which was published in Germany in 1932. The story will be set in the close and very slightly dystopian future of our contemporary world. It’s the very simple story of a young couple trying to survive and find a way to start a home in an economically very difficult general environment, in a world full of people trying to take advantage of others. A topic I’d like to approach in a similar way to, for instance, A Special Day by Ettore Scola, by focusing on the two main characters with the very present background of the general context.

(Translated from French)