_{Luka by Jessica Woodworth}

“It was maybe the best experience I’ve had on a set,” young Dutch star Jonas Smulders enthuses about playing the title role in US-Belgian director Jessica Woodworth’s hugely ambitious and offbeat epic Luka.

A world premiere in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition, the film (sold by Films Boutique) is inspired by Dino Buzzati’s classic novel The Tartar Steppe. A Belgian-Italian-Dutch-Bulgarian co-production with Armenian support, it is shot in black and white and made in English, although it is based on an Italian book.

Smulders plays young sniper Luka who travels across rugged terrain to Fort Kairos, an isolated frontier fortress where an army commanded by the formidable General (Geraldine Chaplin), is standing guard against the enemies from the north.

The original intention was to shoot the film in Armenia. In the end, Sicily was chosen instead. Woodworth was determined to make Luka in black and white on Super 16. She cast Smulders after seeing him give an interview at the Berlinale in 2018 (where the actor was chosen as the Dutch Shooting Star).

“She contacted me directly. She doesn’t work with any casting directors,” Smulders says. He was invited to Ghent (where Woodworth and partner Peter Brosens are based) to test for the role. “We did two whole days. That was super-intense but also very nice. We instantly clicked.”

It was a punishing shoot, albeit a very rewarding one in very beautiful locations. These included an old dam and a stone mine created 200 years ago and carved deep into the mountains. The heat in Sicily was intense and there wasn’t always shade.

The cast included actors from Japan, Bulgaria and Armenia as well as Belgium and the Netherlands. Playing an ace sniper, though, didn’t prove such a stretch for the young Dutch actor. He received some training from a real-life sniper - a soldier from the special forces in the Belgian army.

“And actually, my grandfather, he had a big piece of land in the south of the Netherlands and I shot a lot of bugs there - so it was not my first time holding a gun. That helped me get into the physicality of it.”

The extras included soldiers from the Italian army as well as some martial arts fighters. The production was based in a part of Sicily where US soldiers had been stationed during the Second World War - so it wasn’t hard to get into the military mindset.

It may have helped, too, that the young actor also co-starred in Jim Taihuttu’s 2020 Dutch war film The East*, set in Indonesia during the revolution of the late 1940s and touching on Dutch colonial war crimes.

Smulders pays tribute to Geraldine Chaplin, the daughter of Charlie Chaplin and a celebrated movie star in her own right with credits ranging from Dr Zhivago to Nashville.

“She [Chaplin] was very kind and very generous - and very modest as well,” he says of the 78-year-old. “She looks really fragile in a beautiful way, but she gives a full 100%. To do that at that age is incredible.”

The multi-national cast and crew also managed to get over the language barrier. Smulders talks of going for a meal with an Italian colleague from Sicily - Mimmo Cuticchio, master puppeteer. “He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Italian but we had the most wonderful dinner for three hours. With hands [signals], we tried to have a conversation. Actually, that was one of my best nights there.”

It helped that Woodworth was multi-lingual. “Jessica, she speaks six languages, which is incredible,” Smulders says in awe of his director.

The project’s Dutch co-producers are Denis Vaslin and Fleur Knopperts of Rotterdam-based Volya Films.

Vaslin has been an admirer of Buzzati’s novel since he first read it as a 15-year-old. ”I had a big background of Italian culture and literature because I studied Italian literature at the Sorbonne,” the French-born, but Dutch-based, producer notes. He felt that the book’s themes, in particular its treatment of “toxic masculinity” and its futuristic elements, were “very much in the air of the time… people waiting for an unknown enemy, an invisible enemy.”

The Volya boss had also been a fan of the work of Woodworth and her Belgian partner and collaborator, Peter Brosens, since the duo made their very first film Khadak in 2006. He first encountered Luka at the Torino Film Lab, where the project was presented.

Generally, Woodworth and Brosens direct their films together. Luka was a “solo project” for Woodworth, but with Brosens as producer.

The pair had worked successfully with Dutch producers on previous projects and Vaslin didn’t think Volya would be in the running as a potential co-production partner. But after they met at a festival, this was proven not to be the case. “He [Brosens] wanted to talk to me because he had heard about us from other people,” says Vaslin. “We had a good talk and he told me ‘I want to work with you on this project.”

“I think our creative input was more important at the editing stage,” Vaslin suggests of Volya’s contribution. He and Knopperts made trips to Ghent to watch the film alongside the other co-producers and to give feedback.

There was a significant Dutch contribution to the project. Financing came through the Netherlands Film Fund and the Netherlands Film Production Incentive. Smulders (described by Vaslin as “one of the most fantastic actors of his generation”) was secured to play the lead. The sound mix was also done in the Netherlands.

Dutch distribution is handled by De Filmfreak whose head of acquisitions Kamiel van der Ster saw the film earlier this summer. “His enthusiasm was so big that it was difficult to refuse. He really understood the movie, he appreciated the movie and saw the multi-layered aspect of it… he was meant to be the distributor,” says Vaslin. The Benelux release is set for September 2023.

Get a full overview of all Dutch films screening in the main programmes at IFFR 2023 by visiting our line-up page here.
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*The East is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive