Still: Reedland - Sven Bresser

Early on in Sven Bresser’s Reedland** (premiering in Cannes Critics week and sold by The Party Film Sales), a farmer is shown painstakingly scything down huge reeds. This is Johan, played by non-professional actor Gerrit Knobbe. When Johan finds the dead body of a girl in the fields, a strange moral darkness creeps into his otherwise peaceful world.

Bresser himself grew up in a small village in the Waterland region where the reeds (used for making roofs) were still harvested. That way of life no longer exists today. With the childhood image of the reedlands in his head, the director went “seeking for the same kind of landscape” to use in his film.

He eventually found it in Weerribben-Wieden, in the northern part of the Netherlands, the site of a famous national park. “I had heard about this place already from old reed cutters in my area that there was a lot of reed there - and an active, commercially growing reed community.”

On one level, Reedland is a crime story. A young girl has been killed and the murderer might still be living within the community. This element was partly “ignited” by real life cases, in particular the killing of a woman in 2003 whose body was discovered just outside the village where Bresser grew up. “This was when I was around 7 or 8. I was the whole day with my brother, with some lunch, looking at this investigation that was going on.”

Families based in Weerribben-Wieden think they will almost certainly be the last generation to be able to make a living from the reeds.

Shooting on the film took place from February to April 2024.“That is also the reed harvest season,” the director notes. By then, Bresser knew the area intimately. He had been visiting for three years off and on, living there briefly on a small house boat, and helping local farmers collect the reeds.

From the outset, Bresser knew he wanted to cast non-professionals. Johan is a challenging role for anyone, let alone a newcomer. He’s a sullen, solitary figure who dotes on his grandchild, but is prey to vengeful and violent thoughts.

“There are quite some heavy themes to deal with,” says Bresser, whose Corsica-shot short film The Summer and All The Rest (which played in Venice in 2018) also featured non-professionals.

“[But] to explore the landscape and the rituals that are connected to it in an honest way, for me the only way to do it was to work with people who had already lived there for generations. Their way of talking, their hands, their faces, the way they work the land is something very hard to replicate…most of the time, when I see an actor play a farmer, I get a little bit uncomfortable, especially in Holland.”

Bresser wanted someone with a ”physical presence” to play the farmer, not an actor who might “intellectualise the themes.” When he first saw Gerrit Knobbe at a farmers’ meeting, he was intrigued, and when he spoke to him he knew he had discovered “a very special person, and that he was the one.”

“He has something harsh to him but also something very gentle and kind,” the director underlines.

Usually, Bresser is reluctant to let actors read the script in advance. However, with Reedland, he knew it was vital that Knobbe knew exactly what the was letting himself in for. Now, the farmer-turned-movie star and his director are close friends - so close that Bresser even helped him again with the reed cutting harvest.

The film is produced through Marleen Slot’s Viking Film. “First of all, I think Marleen is an amazing producer and person. She works with people in a very human and honest way,” Bresser says. He and Slot had previously been developing another feature project. When this stalled, they turned to Reedland. “It feels like we have already been working together a long time and have made a lot of films but this is actually the first movie,” the director states.

The director talks of the influence on Reedland of post-war Dutch artist Armando, famous for his notion of the “guilty landscape,” and the film ends in a deliberately ambiguous fashion. Is Johan “a perpetrator or an angel?” That’s a question Bresser has already been asked but he makes it very clear it is not one he is going to answer.

Find out more about the Dutch line-up in Cannes here.

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Reedland is produced by Marleen Slot for Viking Film (NL) and co-produced by Dries Phlypo for A Private View (BE) and broadcaster VPRO (NL). Paris-based The Party Film Sales is handling international rights. The film will be released in the Benelux by Cinéart and in France by The Jokers.

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*film supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Netherlands Production Incentive