A case that baffled and horrified almost everyone in the Netherlands. Three men deliberately injected HIV-infected blood into acquaintances they met at sex parties in Groningen, in the year of 2007. After their trial started, the men that commited this horrendous act, were portrayed as extremely evil. Leyendekker's Feast, which had its world premiere in IFFR's Tiger Competition in February, explores the circumstances behind the case.

Leyendekker understands the public indignation following the event, as it is very hard to make sense of the actions committed by these men. All of them had regular jobs. One was a bartender, another was an account manager at an electricity company, while the third was a nurse. However, for Leyendekker, monsters, which was coined by the media at the time, is a term too simple to describe such a bizarre behaviour. Why did they do it? In Feast, director Leyendekker looks at the story from different perspectives in an attempt to put their actions in context. 

Ask Leyendekker about the structure of the film and he misleads you, as he cites Plato's The Banquet. This consists of seven monologues, all trying to find the definition of love, truth and beauty. "Sex always comes from something positive, I guess," Leyendekker notes, as he analyses the convicted men. He wants to explore the space between the horrendous crimes and Platonic ideals of love. Leyendekker divides the film, which is produced by SeriousFilm and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, into seven chapters, each shot by a separate cinematographer. One of them is Reinier van Brummelen, who has worked on many Peter Greenaway films.

"I thought that it would have these different viewpoints and to pack that into a format that is not a standard feature film or a standard documentary."

It has been fourteen years since the incident in Groningen. Leyendekker acknowledges that completing the film was a very long process. Even though his background is in fine arts and one producer urged him early on to make Feast into a conventional art house film with a traditional narrative, he decided to take another route. He wants to provoke the audience and encourage them to look critically at the story, not just lose themselves in the flow of the narrative.

Leyendekker tried to contact the men in question during the creation process. Through one man's lawyer, he eventually got his contact. After his release, Leyendekker received a long email from him. Even though he knew he had his contact, he decided not to push too much and only stayed in touch with the man for about two years. They eventually did an interview and in the end, the man agreed to be filmed. 

In Feast, after this moment, an interview follows with another person, who is, in contrary, very particular about his representation on screen. This is typical of Leyendekker, who blures the lines between "what we perceive as real and what [is] not." There is an ambivalence in the storytelling style that intends to put viewers on edge.

In an early scene, a police official displays all the objects, some of them very banal, taken from the sex parties. Among the bric a brac crammed together on a table is a dildo, sweets, Feyenoord FC replica clothing, crisps, sweets, beer and discarded old coke tins. "The sequence is 10 minutes long and it really unpacks everything that happened there through objects," Leyendekker explains.

Yes, the director already has a new project in the making. Object Memory Loss (working title) will be "a very personal film" looking at how souvenirs of the dead keep their memory alive. He develops a project about writer and philosopher, Susan Sontag.

For more information:

Production company:
SeriousFilm
+31 6 2073 7277
marc@seriousfilm.nl

Sales:
Square Eyes
+31 6 2207 6717
info@squareeyesfilm.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Last February, SEE NL spoke to Tim Leyendekker about Feast for IFFR. This interview has been updated for IFFR June edition.