Still: Where Dragons Live - Suzanne Raes

On a symbolic level at least, mythical fiery creatures are at the heart of Suzanne Raes’ new film Where Dragons Live**, sold by Liselot Verbrugge’s Film Harbour and world-premiering in the Memories strand at Sheffield Doc Fest.

In 2012, Raes directed The Successor of Kakiemon, a film about Japanese porcelain (which can often feature dragons in its decorations). Through that film, she met the Dutch-based English artist Harriet Impey, whose husband was an expert on Japanese art. Together they hatched a plan to make a documentary about how dragons are portrayed in different cultures across the world, using Harriet’s family home (Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire) as “a framing narrative.” It was the house where Jane’s mother, renowned academic and scientist Jane Impey (née Mellanby) then still lived.

But when the pandemic hit and Jane Impey died in 2021, Raes and DOP Victor Horstink travelled, together with Harriet, to Cumnor to film the house before its potential sale.

Gradually, director Raes realised this was not going to be a film directly about dragons, rather about what dragons represent as projections of fear. The backdrop would be the eccentric, brilliant and sometimes dysfunctional English upper-class family having to clear their house and coming to terms with childhood, especially “the fears you have as a child, the things you don’t understand.”

Raes was able to draw on old 8mm home movie footage and the many strange artefacts the family members had gathered over the years. Nothing was ever thrown away at Cumnor, therefore the house and its contents served as a time capsule through which the siblings could go back to their childhood to be “confronted with so many objects and documents bringing up memories and trauma.”

“The film shows these very different memories they had of their parents,” Raes adds.

Where Dragons Live was made through Docmakers, the filmmaking collective founded in 2012 and which includes Raes, Aliona van der Horst, Sanne Rovers, Yan Ting Yuen, writer Fabie Hulsebos and producer Ilja Roomans. The production started without any budget but soon got support from the Netherlands Film Fund and later Screen Scotland and the NPO-fund. The Dutch release of the film is being handled by Cinema Delicatessen. 

“We came back in the summer because I knew the grandchildren would be there. In a way these extremely eloquent grandkids relive the youth of their parents by running amok in the ‘secret garden’ and exploring hidden nooks of the house. Places they were never able to be before,” says Raes.

Where Dragons Live represents (once again) a change of subject matter from the director’s previous films. Her hit documentary Close to Vermeer* (2023) tells the story behind the recent Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Over the years, Raes has made films on everything from Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior to the work of the social services in Rotterdam.

“This was a completely English film,” Raes reflects on Where Dragons Live.

“We are Dutch filmmakers but I’ve had a love for Jane Austen since I was 16. And, of course, Downton Abbey and everything like that I am really into.”

She may have been an anglophile but she and her producer Ilja Roomans thought it would be extremely important to work with a UK editor. So they brought in Glasgow-based Reece Cargan of Scottish outfit Bombito Productions who introduced them to editor David Arthur.

Early on the Dutch director decided that the entire film would be set entirely within the house and its grounds; this ‘secret garden’ in which the grown-ups could return to their childhood and almost become children again. Shooting took place over almost two years. As time passed, Harriet and her brothers begin to see their parents in a different light. 

Strangely, the recently deceased grandmother’s presence lives on. She left labels and lists all over the house, warning the family about everything from how sharp some of the knives are to how best to load the dishwasher. “At the beginning of the film, she is like this mysterious person talking from the grave through her notes.”

By the end of the film, as you get to know her a bit more, these simple messages take on a different quality. "They’re signs of her care and concern for her family.”

Dragons loomed large in the mythology the family created around their own lives. The house had originally been bought with the proceeds of the sale of a 15th Century painting of St George and the Dragon by Rogier van der Weyden. The father, Oliver Impey, a zoologist and curator of Eastern art, shared, together with Harriet, an interest for the beasts. “The Impey children grew up between pickled reptiles and Asian art, and books like Beowulf and Ovid’s Metamorphosis in which dragons play their part,” says Raes.

“Of course, the film is not about dragons but about what the dragon represents; it is about the stories we create around things that frighten us,” she signs off.

Find out more about Sheffield DocFest here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Production Incentive