Still: The Shore - Eron Sheean

Australian-born Dutch-based filmmaker Eron Sheean likes to describe himself as a “bit of a Swiss army knife” of filmmaking. That means he can perform multiple tasks. “I have done a lot of jobs, I am a pretty good all-rounder.” He’s a cinematographer, writer and producer as well as a director. He is experienced as an animator too, and has worked as a props maker and in special effects.

“It’s quite a convoluted story,” Sheean laughs when asked how he ended up working and living in the Netherlands. The short version is that several years ago, he was chosen for a 3-month artist’s residency at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. He ended up living in Germany for many years. Then he “met a girl” whose science job brought them to Amsterdam.

The 47-year-old filmmaker’s new Dutch-made short, The Shore, screening in the Official Fantastic Shorts Competition at Sitges, is a poetic black and white drama, very rich in symbolism, about a boy abandoned on a beach. Its real subject is ageing and loss.

In the film, abandoned by his parents, a boy embarks on a journey through time, meeting various versions of himself that slowly transform from boy to adult - all the time offering clues as to his parents’ whereabouts – eventually to the older man who offers to lead him through one final doorway…

“When Covid came along, one of the few things we were allowed to do was to go to the national parks. I came up with this project to do with my son because I saw that he had the potential to be a good little actor,” the director explains how the short was conceived. “It became this little thing to do, just to get us out of the house.”

Sheean was working with a tiny crew. For much of the time, it was just him and his boy. The film was self-financed. “It took us over a year to shoot it because I wanted to shoot over different seasons.”

By using black and white, Sheean hoped to give the film extra “texture” and an atmospheric “period feel.” He shot on a Sony A7RII, “a very simple camera.” He was very careful, though, with the lenses and the use of natural light. He wanted a “dream-like feel.”

The film picks up on the sense “of isolation and separation” which many felt during the pandemic. “I also had this sense that as you get older, however much you try to differentiate yourself from your parents, you inevitably become them as you grow older. What got me thinking about this story was [the idea] that eventually we turn into a version of our parents.”

Much of The Shore was shot on Bloemendaal beach in Kennemerland National Park in the north of Holland. The ever-resourceful Sheean also filmed in his backyard, constructing an elaborate bunker set with discarded boxes from the local bicycle shop. 

The director’s previous short, The Rock Of Ages, which follows a mysterious soldier across a bleak volcanic Icelandic landscape, screened at Sitges in 2021. The Spanish event may be known as a genre festival but Sheean relished the range of projects presented. They’re not, he says, just horror and fantasy films but “dance in between things.”

Now, the director is developing a new project. “I feel I am in a good place to try and get another feature film going,” he says of his next venture, a Gothic thriller which he is putting together as a Dutch-UK coproduction. This already has a world sales and executive producing partner (name to be revealed soon) while Rotterdam-based Make Way Film is the Dutch partner. The film has the working title of Medusa.

“It’s about a vigilante nurse who takes it on herself to punish people she perceived to have done terrible things. She puts them into a coma in hospital but then she starts to believe one of these people in a coma is coming back to look for her…it’s a very unusual ghost story all set among people living on the canals,” he says of a project which promises to be every bit as eerie as The Shore.