There’s an idleness about the opening of Ena Sendijarević’s latest work which, in itself, speaks to the experience of Dutch colonials in Indonesia. Beguiled by the beauty of the jungle, its trees so tightly enmeshed that they almost conceal the river flowing through it, we are drawn into a landscape where the hum of mosquitos is omnipresent, where nothing can escape the suffocating heat. There a group of local men are setting up a trap, dangling a piece of meat from a tree, luring in a tiger for a pampered boy in linens and pith helmet to shoot.
The boy is Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas), the brown-skinned son of sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet), who proudly carries him home upon his shoulders as his servants struggle with the weight of the slain beast. Jan adores the boy, moulds him in his image, invites him to laugh along as he.
The boy is Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas), the brown-skinned son of sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet), who proudly carries him home upon his shoulders as his servants struggle with the weight of the slain beast. Jan adores the boy, moulds him in his image, invites him to laugh along as he.
- 4/11/2024
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Malaise is the order of the day in Dutch-Bosnian writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s costume drama Sweet Dreams. Set in the Dutch East Indies at the dawn of the 20th century, the film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor. But for a work that’s all about boredom, Sweet Dreams is far from boring.
It’s the suspicious demise of Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) that sets the plot in motion. Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), the man’s profoundly cynical widow, writes to their son, Cornelis (Florian Myjer), telling him to return from the Netherlands to take over the estate. But when Cornelis and his pregnant wife, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), arrive, it turns out that Jan has left everything to Karel (Rio Kak Den Haas), the progeny of his unconcealed liaisons with the family’s domestic servant, Siti (Hayati Azis). If Cornelis and Josefien...
It’s the suspicious demise of Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) that sets the plot in motion. Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), the man’s profoundly cynical widow, writes to their son, Cornelis (Florian Myjer), telling him to return from the Netherlands to take over the estate. But when Cornelis and his pregnant wife, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), arrive, it turns out that Jan has left everything to Karel (Rio Kak Den Haas), the progeny of his unconcealed liaisons with the family’s domestic servant, Siti (Hayati Azis). If Cornelis and Josefien...
- 4/7/2024
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević’s magnificently composed, eerily satirical “Sweet Dreams” has something more like acid flowing through its veins. Acid — or maybe formaldehyde, given the embalmed pallor of the dysfunctional Dutch colonial family whose values are so elegantly dissected within it. In only her second feature, after the Rotterdam-awarded “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” the Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker has established herself as a formidable talent with an eye for absurdity in Academy ratio, and a feel for the manicured, placid surfaces that contain rot and rebellion just as corsetry cinches in flesh.
It is 1900, and this little corner of the Dutch East Indies is verdant, damp jungle terrain. The air is thick with biting insects. Vincent Sinceretti’s extravagantly rich sound design is so multilayered that you can differentiate the crickets from the gnats from the omnipresent, whining mosquitoes. But part of the wilderness has been tamed — or more accurately,...
It is 1900, and this little corner of the Dutch East Indies is verdant, damp jungle terrain. The air is thick with biting insects. Vincent Sinceretti’s extravagantly rich sound design is so multilayered that you can differentiate the crickets from the gnats from the omnipresent, whining mosquitoes. But part of the wilderness has been tamed — or more accurately,...
- 8/25/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s second feature, Sweet Dreams, follows a recent trend of arthouse films — including Zama, The Settlers and The Tale of King Crab — that explore Europe’s troubled colonial history through a postmodern mix of satire, surrealism and cinematic lyricism.
All of these elements are present in a story set in 1900 in the Dutch East Indies, where a family running a prosperous sugar plantation finds its status quo upended when their patriarch suddenly passes away. Left to deal with the fallout, the landowner’s wife and children are quickly exposed to the limits, as well as the terrors, of colonialism, in the face of Indigenous people who refuse to keep bowing down.
Shot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio and divided into chapters like a novella, Sendijarević’s movie maintains a certain distance from its subject, gazing at it through a contemporary prism that critiques the racism and exploitation of the epoch.
All of these elements are present in a story set in 1900 in the Dutch East Indies, where a family running a prosperous sugar plantation finds its status quo upended when their patriarch suddenly passes away. Left to deal with the fallout, the landowner’s wife and children are quickly exposed to the limits, as well as the terrors, of colonialism, in the face of Indigenous people who refuse to keep bowing down.
Shot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio and divided into chapters like a novella, Sendijarević’s movie maintains a certain distance from its subject, gazing at it through a contemporary prism that critiques the racism and exploitation of the epoch.
- 8/7/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Editor’s Note: This review originally published during the 2023 Locarno Film Festival. Dekanalog will release “Sweet Dreams” in U.S. theaters on Friday, April 12.
Two-thirds of the way into Ena Sendijarević’s stylized sophomore feature “Sweet Dreams”, a heavily pregnant white Dutch colonialist, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), is attempting to relieve some pent-up hormonal tension by straddling her bedpost and getting herself off. It is at this exact moment that an Indonesian housegirl, Siti (Hayati Azis), walks in bearing a jug of water and a glass.
Josefien experiences no shame and seizes her chance to manipulate Siti, for Siti has the status afforded by bearing the illegitimate son, Karel (Rio Den Haas), of the recently deceased plantation head, Jan (Hans Dagelet). Unbeknownst to Siti, Jan left it all to Karel and now the young heir and his mother both have targets on their backs for Jan’s older son, Cornelius (Florian Myjer...
Two-thirds of the way into Ena Sendijarević’s stylized sophomore feature “Sweet Dreams”, a heavily pregnant white Dutch colonialist, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), is attempting to relieve some pent-up hormonal tension by straddling her bedpost and getting herself off. It is at this exact moment that an Indonesian housegirl, Siti (Hayati Azis), walks in bearing a jug of water and a glass.
Josefien experiences no shame and seizes her chance to manipulate Siti, for Siti has the status afforded by bearing the illegitimate son, Karel (Rio Den Haas), of the recently deceased plantation head, Jan (Hans Dagelet). Unbeknownst to Siti, Jan left it all to Karel and now the young heir and his mother both have targets on their backs for Jan’s older son, Cornelius (Florian Myjer...
- 8/5/2023
- by Sophie Monks Kaufman
- Indiewire
At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 37 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.
It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year,...
It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year,...
- 7/8/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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