Still: Days of Spring - Arianne Hinz

Days of Spring, which has its international premiere at the Sitges Film Festival, is a veritable feast for the eyes, a film in which a group of friends, all girls and wearing near identical diaphanous white dresses, gambol and delight in countryside that could be in the heart of Middle Earth. In fact, the children themselves could be the offspring of elves, with faces in equal part beautiful, joyous and serious.

But an ominous theme pervades the girls’ play as they slowly adopt ritual behaviour, the non-observance of which is met with silent and unnerving disapproval by the group. A bird is sacrificed. Chanting accompanies the passing of a stone above the head of a spooky and similarly attired plastic doll, and the coming of ‘darkness’ is invoked in a song. And then a plastic bag is placed over the head of one of the girls and tightened at the neck, stopping the supply of air…

The film may be of no more than 10 minutes duration, but it delivers a considerable punch, whether in terms of its delicious other worldly aesthetic or the uncanny potential for evil we observe in the seemingly innocent children. “I've been influenced by horror films and I like to work with children,” comments director Arianne Hinz. “I really like this combination of their presumed innocence and what they're often actually capable of.”

Furthermore, Hinz has an interest in cults and sects, a subject that she intends to explore in a feature film she is developing titled Marionettes, for which Days of Spring is both a “snippet” and a “proof of concept.” “What I’m actually doing is using the workings of cults to tell a story about belonging, i.e. the struggle between conforming to belong and staying true to who we really are, in a much broader sense.” the director says. 

Days of Spring (produced by Ibrahim Karatay for Alchemic Film and co-produced with Reinier Selen from Rinkel Film), was originally intended to be located within a forest terrain, but this idea had to be ditched due to the requirement for a film licence and the decision of the original DOP to abandon ship for another production. Even though the film was shot in the southern province of Limburg, close to the German border, the terrain is very un-Dutch, being hilly and sumptuously verdant. For Hinz the location was “more perfect” and “better suited” to the film than she could have imagined.

Originally, the girls were going to become increasingly puppet-like throughout Days Of Spring, but Hinz, an avowed fan of filmmakers the Brothers Quay, decided to wait for her feature before she fully develops that idea, choosing this time to accentuate their ethereal appearance with white paint smeared on their faces.

The upcoming feature (Marionettes, also a coproduction between Alchemic Film and Rinkel Film) has received development funding from the Netherlands Film Fund. Unlike many Dutch films that feature kids in the main roles, this will not be intended for young audiences. “We also don't really have a very big tradition of films that play with genre. So this was one of the reasons why we thought the feature needed a proof of concept to give people an idea of what I had in my mind,” says Hinz. 

Marionettes is currently at scenic treatment phase, with a finished script expected Spring 2024, at which point the process of production funding will commence. The film is slated to shoot in 2025.