The genesis of The Paradise Suite, Joost van Ginkel’s second film, premiering at the Dutch Film Festival, is as complex as the lives of the film’s key protagonists. Set within the polite suburbs, refugee hovels and Red Light district of Amsterdam, the film is a story of vengeance, betrayal, faith and salvation, played out both violently and, at times, with profound tenderness. The film’s visuals are accompanied in part by the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem.

Beautiful Jenya’s hopes of being a model are horrendously dashed by the Serbian war criminal Ivica, himself a new and loving father. The saintly African Yaya compromises his faith while elevating his neighbours out of poverty, in the process encountering Jenya and her plight. The Bosnian Seka re-lives the war’s atrocities on a daily basis, and seeks the strength to exact vengeance. Meanwhile an orchestra conductor and his prodigy son must deal with their cold and fractured relationship.

Over two decades ago van Ginkel was working as a cameraman when he met Nedzad, a Bosnian director and refugee, who wanted to make a documentary about the Bosnian refugees in Holland. Van Ginkel shot the doc and filmed people telling their war testimonies. “People told about seeing their children shot in front of them, but at the moment I was filming these stories I did not understood them of course because I didn’t speak Bosnian. Later on when I was transcribing the stories I realized what I really filmed the day before.”

A little later he worked at the port of Amsterdam with a crew made up of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. There he heard more shocking stories of suffering and survival. “All of these stories I have carried around with me for years. They really opened up my vision on the world.”

Van Ginkel was also determined to make a mosaic film, a form that he advocates for the complexities it can elicit both in plotting and characterisation. “I love this form and it gives you as a filmmaker room to intertwine and connect more themes because all our lives are never about one theme or one subject, or one thing,” he says. “What I really love is when you bring five or six different people together at the heart of a film, and they share the same moment at the same time in the same place, but they all have a different perception of the things that are happening.”

Van Ginkel’s actors are required to go the extra mile in the portrayal of their characters. Some of the scenes involving Jenya (played by Bulgarian Anjela Nedyalkova), for example, are brutal in their violence and (unwilling) sexual engagement. The director was determined however that he and producer Ellen Havenith created a safe haven in which these scenes could be played out. “These are scenes that nobody likes to do on set, really no-one. But we were so specific about what she had to do, and how many times she had to perform them. Anjela was completely cool and she trusted me and she trusted Ellen as we were both so honest about it.”

Van Ginkel has no illusions that his wise and authoritative film will make a dent in the treacherous trade of people-trafficking and extortion. “People assume that things in the world are getting worse. This is not the case. Things have always been worse. And they will continue to be worse. In the 1940s, during the Yugoslavian war, now in Syria. And it will happen in another ten years and another 500 years, because the problem is that human nature will never change. This is my pessimistic view. I don’t like it, but it is true.”

Script: Joost van Ginkel Production: PRPL (NL), Bastide Films (NL) Co-production: GötaFilm (SE), Film I Väst (SE), KaBoAl Pictures (BU) Sales: Media Luna New Films