^{Farewell to the Moon. Photo: Aryan Kaganof}

Director, artist and writer Dick Tuinder draws on the landscape of his 1970s childhood for his second feature-length film Farewell to the Moon, set in 1972, the year of the United States’ final Apollo 17 moon landing.

The picture revolves around Duch, a boy on the cusp of adolescence, obsessed with space as well as his neighbour, the beautiful, bored, pill-popping housewife Mary. In the forefront, the marriage of Duch’s parents unravels after his father Bob leaves his mother Piet to move in with bohemian neighbour Loes. Duch and his sister Esther look on helplessly as their parents rip themselves and one another apart.

In the opening scene, NASA images of the final lunar-walk play out on the big screen to the lyrics of late Belgian singer Jacques Brel’s Litanies Pour Un Retour, in which a man rejoices over the return of a lost lover. “I’ve always wanted to do something about the moon missions but in a different way. I remember watching them as a kid and I was hugely disappointed when they stopped,” says 49-year-old Tuinder. “But when I looked back at the programme, I came to the realisation that it was a purely symbolic undertaking, which was very sexual, very Freudian... almost like an act of making love.”

At first, the director considered basing the film in 1969, at the time of the first man on the moon, and then he decided that the event of the last man on the moon was actually more dramatic. “It dawned on me that 1972 was a turning point in Western history. Three years before that you have pop music, plastic, optimism and the first man on the moon, and then three years after that it’s the oil crisis, defeat in the Vietnam War and ‘no future’... the mood had changed completely,” explains Tuinder. “And this turning point was perfectly symbolised by the last man leaving the moon. Giving up. Returning home.”

“In his 1962 speech announcing America’s space programme President Kennedy said, ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things’ but no-one ever really worked out what the ‘other things’ were... there was really nothing to do there,” continues Tuinder. “The space programme turned out to be a perfect symbol for the changes in the lives of the characters in the film and their longings to get something outside of themselves which they can’t get.”

The period was also a transitional time for society, comments Tuinder, during which traditional family and social structures came under pressure.

“It’s more-or-less autobiographical although my youth was not as plot-driven as that of Duch. I never got to kiss my neighbour,” explains Tuinder, with a laugh. “As with the space mission programme, sometimes it takes time to figure out what something really means and that also goes for my youth. As a child I experienced things but it sort of happened outside of me... when your parents divorce as a child, you have to choose sides, one of the parents inevitably gets demonised - as the bad guy, or bad woman... I was trying to humanise my memories... especially those of my father. The film’s partly tragic but I also wanted it to be funny - it’s a comedy of weaknesses.”

The film unfolds within an already crumbling, late 1960s apartment block. The action takes place inside three adjacent domiciles situated along the same walkway. The director decided to transpose the block’s original city setting to the countryside, juxtaposing a sense of claustrophobia inside the apartments with the wide vistas outside. For the purposes of the shoot, he and his crew reconstructed the apartments in the studio.

“It’s a very claustrophobic stage but at the same time it’s very spacious because of the views to the horizon,” says Tuinder. “When you live in a building like that, your floor is your world, you know everyone on your floor but no-one in the rest of the building... also because you’re very high up, you’re completely disconnected from the rest of the world. I remember as a kid sitting on the balcony and there was nothing but wind and air.”

“It’s not necessarily obvious but for the different apartments we used different styles of filming. For Mary and her apartment, for example, the range of focus is very small, so the foreground and background are out of focus, so it seems like she is always in a haze,” he adds.

The film, produced by Column Film and supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, features a strong ensemble cast. Popular actor Marcel Hensema plays Bob opposite Pauline Greidanus as Loes and Lotte Proot as Piet. Elise Schaap is the vacuous Mary.

Farewell to the Moon marks Tuinder’s second feature-length film after the fantastical 2009 Winterland. Dubbed “a true story that never happened” the complex work was a film-within-a-film revolving around an actress whose story becomes muddled with characters and plots from Tuinder’s other previous short stories and drawings.

Alongside making films, Tuinder also writes, paints and illustrates books and magazines. “I always work on a lot of things at the same time. So sometimes I have periods when nothing comes to fruition and then suddenly four or five things come together at the same time,” says the filmmaker.

^{Dick Tuinder}

Farewell to the Moon Director: Dick Tuinder Script: Dick Tuinder Production: Column Film Sales: Media Luna New Films.