Berlinale feature presentation
Breaking free she admits she was immediately fascinated by the subject matter. She had a grandmother who grew up in a similar background. “I felt immediately - wow! This is great. I want to do it,” the director recalls. Tallulah Scwab
Yes, Tallulah Schwab reveals to Geoffrey Macnab, she is indeed named after the classic American actress, Tallulah Bankhead. “It was my father’s fascination with film,” the director explains of her exotic Christian name. Her mother was a production designer and her father was a huge movie fan who had always wanted to pursue a career in cinema. (His mother, though, insisted that he study medicine.) At the age of 41, Schwab has made her feature directorial debut, thereby fulfilling one of her father’s ambitions in the process. Confetti Harvest, supported by the Film Fund, screens in Berlinale 2015 Generation Kplus, following its successful Dutch release late 2014. Confetti Harvest is based on the best selling novel by Franca Treur. It’s about a precocious 12-year-old girl growing up in a very strict Protestant background in a rural community in Zeeland during the 1980s. The girl has a vivid imagination and a yearning for escape. Production company Column Film brought the project to Schwab and
What intrigued her about the novel was its sense of balance. The author wasn’t caricaturing the religious community or exaggerating its zealotry. She was respectful of its culture, even if she did acknowledge the constrictions placed on the young girl. “There are so many rules and so many different groups within the Protestant church. Every single tiny group has a totally different set of rules!” Schwab notes. The film doesn’t try to depict the girl as being “in hell and trying to get out.” Instead, Confetti Harvest accentuates the beauty of the locations (what the director calls the “Vermeer tones” and the “soft yellow of the corn”) and tries to show the loyalty and affection the girl feels for her community. “But sometimes what you love holds you back. There is an enormous amount of courage needed to go against that or to decide for yourself, ‘I need something else.’” When it came to casting, the director was looking for someone perched between childhood and adolescence - a girl who would have innocence, vulnerability and also a measure of defiance. “In that group, you have to have long skirts. I
Confetti Harvest Director: Tallulah Schwab Script: Chris Westendorp Production: Column Film Sales: Mountain Road Entertainment
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wanted her (the main character Katelijne) to be a type who wasn’t comfortable in a skirt - a little bit of a wilder one.” At the casting sessions, actress Hendrikje Nieuwerf made an immediate impression. “She was so smart and intelligent and she had that vulnerability but was also really quick in talking back.” Nieuwerf, the director enthuses, is a “marvellous actress” who, in spite of her inexperience, understood fully the subtleties of her role. “It was a lot of fun working with her because she is such a funny girl.” Schwab acknowledges it has been a long journey toward her first feature. “I’ve just been doing the things that were interesting and fun and came on my path.” The experience of shooting a feature wasn’t so different, she suggests, to shooting a TV movie or short. “But I was fantastically excited I could do it.” Her partner is fellow filmmaker Martin Koolhoven (the acclaimed director of such recent films as Winter In Wartime and Schnitzel Paradise). No, they’re not competitive with one another. “I feel it is very inspiring. We are obviously very interested in the same things. We love watching films together and discussing them. We’re never on each other’s turf because we are both directors - and directors are not on each others’ sets.”