Photo: Digna Sinke (Tara Fallaux)

Maverick Dutch director Digna Sinke is the subject of a 13-film retrospective at the Viennale (Oct 16-28) - and will also be celebrating her 76th birthday during the festival in the Austrian capital.

The selection stretches back more than 50 years to her graduation short, Greetings from Zonnemaire (1972), shot in the village where she was born, and includes both documentaries and fiction. It was put together by the highly respected former-IFFR programmer, Gerwin Tamsma.

“I gave him [Tamsma] screeners of almost all my films - and he discovered the common things in those films,” Sinke comments. “It’s amazing that in Greetings from Zonnemaire, [made] when I was trying to find out how to make film, there are still a lot of elements that are still there in almost all my other films.”

Her most recent feature, Key to Heaven*, which premiered at IFFR earlier this year, has the same deeply personal focus as the work she was making at the start of her career. Partly autobiographical, it follows a fictional photographer, Lea, working on a research project in the port of Amsterdam and, at the same time, delving deep into her own memories. In particular, she can’t help thinking of Boudewijn, an intimate friend and correspondent who died suddenly long ago.

“It is now a kind of hybrid film but it started being a documentary about the changes in the landscape….but no-one was interested in it, and so I decided to make a fiction film out of it,” Sinke states. “In that fictional version, I felt a freedom to give it personal elements. Lea is, in a certain way, me.”

Like her 2014 feature, After the Tone, based around the voice-mail messages of someone who has disappeared, Key to Heaven was made on the relatively small budget of €500,000 - and that, she believes, gave her extra freedom. “I really wove it like a very special carpet, with a lot of personal elements in it. Those letters from Boudewijn, these are real letters. I had a friend who wrote me those letters, and he committed suicide. That’s reality, real history, [but] I changed the name, of course.”

On her latest film, Sinke was working with some established actors including Gijs Naber and Jacqueline Blom. The film was produced by Monique Busman of Tomtit Film. Sinke’s SNG Film, the production outfit set up in 1979 and which her partner René Scholten managed until his death in 2001, was the co-producer.

As ever on a Sinke production, the mood on set was relaxed. At the start of her career, she was hired as an assistant to editor Jan Bosdriesz on Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight (1973). Although she got on very well with him, there was so much angst on set that she vowed that she would never again work in an atmosphere as fraught as that.

“I learnt very much in this period, not only that I didn’t want to be a director like Paul, but that I had to find out what kind of director I wanted to be,” Sinke remembers.

The director cherishes her older movies and remains deeply emotionally connected to them.

“They [my older movies] are never out of reach. They are still very close to me.”

Anyone who has seen her 2018 documentary feature, Keeping & Saving or how to live*, will know she is a bit of a hoarder. Her home and office used to be filled with 35mm and 16mm canisters containing her old movies - but they’re now stored at the Eye Filmmuseum. 

Sinke also likes to stay in touch with her protagonists, and mentions that she has just received an email from the farmer who played an important role in her 2014 film Wistful Wilderness, in which she explores the landscape of the island of Tiengemeten while again ruminating about her own life.

Certain films have an extra resonance for her. She describes her 1978 documentary A Van Gogh On The Wall, about people who turn to reproductions of the great Dutchman’s works, as “in a way, life-changing.” At the time she made it, she had “more or less given up the idea of becoming a filmmaker,” and was about to start studying history of art instead. A Dutch broadcaster supported the Van Gogh project - so she was able to make the movie, but then she had to give any hopes of becoming an art history expert!

Now, Sinke is being honoured in Vienna and is not quite sure what to expect. “I don’t know. I asked Gerwin Tamsma. He was talking about a Q&A after the films, maybe some words before the films…I’ve never been to the festival so it is all completely new for me,” she signs off.

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*film supported by the Netherlands Film Fund