_{Kiddo by Zara Dwinger}

Not every kid is as unlucky as Lu, nor as lucky in many ways. The eleven-year-old lives in a loving foster home, where she misses her frequently absent mum, Karina. The thing is, Karina is not your average mum. In Lu’s eyes she is glam and groovy and works in Hollywood as a stunt driver. So when the glam and groovy Karina turns up to claim her daughter, in a beaten up Chevy, decked out in denim shorts, cowboy boots and fluffy disco top, and prepared to wear a new wig for any occasion, Lu is thrilled.

But it isn’t a ‘day out’ that Karina has in mind, rather the kidnap of a willing daughter and subsequent odyssey by road to Poland to the house of her own mother, because there is a mysterious package there that must be collected. Little by little, Lu and Karina do a Thelma and Louise or, more accurately, a Bonnie and Clyde, as they channel Karina’s inner tendency towards petty criminality. But at some point, real life must intervene. Karina must face up to the demons that are driving her psyche off course, and Lu must get back to the stability she needs, albeit as a changed and newly emboldened adolescent girl…

There is so much that is totally excellent about this film, recently picked up for international sales by Amsterdam and LA-based SKOOP Media and due for release in The Netherlands by Gusto, it is hard to know where to start. Director Zara Dwinger helps out by highlighting the performances of lead actors Frieda Barnhard and Rosa van Leeuwen.

“When Frieda [Barnhard] first auditioned, it was immediately clear that she was perfect for the role,” says Dwinger. “She was unique. She was brilliant, actually.” In the film the character Barnhard plays is, in equal part, fantastically great fun, dangerous, psychologically unhinged and inspirational, at least to an 11-year old who worships her.

For the character of Lu, Dwinger discovered an amazing talent in Rosa van Leeuwen, who was just out of single digit years herself when the production began. “She was 10 and so accidentally professional,” laughs the director about the child actor and her thespian qualities. “It was my first time directing someone so young on this scale. And I was always thinking, where did you learn to act like this?”

Dwinger and co-writer Nena van Driel put a lot of research into mental health but the film was, the director stresses, “born out of something personal,” and so the pair allowed themselves the latitude to tell a rich, expansive and fantastical story, as seen through the eyes of a child. Karina may have 180-degree mood swings, from total loyalty to full-on filial dependency, from crying with laughter to crying out of despair as she identifies with the fractured icons of Marilyn, Judy and Britney, but the world of her imagination is nevertheless thrilling and cinematic, and is one that Lu is totally drawn to.

Kiddo was shot, in the main in Poland, but it is delivered with a colour-saturated, big-screen aesthetic and a Wild West audacity. Much of the action is played out beneath vast skies and in open spaces and, like all the best road movies, along freeways with their attendant truck-stops and diners.

“I wanted to create this American Road movie in Poland,” says Dwinger. “For me it was very important that the trip the two were taking reflected the way both Karina and Lu cling to fantasy, instead of facing reality. So it had to be this fabulous 'movie-version' of a road trip, as that’s how both would prefer to see it.”

Kiddo is produced by Studio Ruba. Sales are handled by SKOOP Media. It is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive.
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