Still: Donkey Days - Rosanne Pel

Anna and Charlotte are sibling components within a toxic family trio that is completed by their elderly mother Ines. Ines may be a matriarch, but she is far from maternal. While both sisters vie for her attention, Ines will blithely choose who to favour, patronage proffered and cruelly withdrawn, all the time giving very little away. When and why, for example, did she decide to invest thousands of euros in a donkey and its offspring? And when the girls are asked to spread the ashes of their late Uncle Henry, Ines’ brother, why does that same uncle later turn up alive and well at a family funeral?

What’s more, it isn’t just one mother that the sisters have to deal with. Ines’ younger self is there as well, parachuted into their present, just as poisonous and beautiful as her older iteration. “You are dealing as a family with past time which can also be sometimes projected weirdly into the future,” says Pel. 

In one late scene, as Charlotte scrambles along a metaphorical vaginal canal, each of her mothers is waiting at either end to torment her. “I wanted to create a mother figure which is almost more like an icon, and with that remains abstract. I think the sisters are not only dealing with their own mother but with a problematic heritage which is caused by a social construct of how women have been shaped over time in how they should be and which standards to follow.”

Donkey Days**, world-premiering in Locarno International Competition, is very funny. But it is also a serious psychological analysis of a family in meltdown, and a fascinating take on the three-body problem and the chaos that can ensue. In this family, three really is a crowd, and a venomous one at that.

Surely, then, this a story told from close observation, such is its emotional clarity and verisimilitude? Actually no, director Rosanne Pel tells SEE NL. “I never go from complete personal experiences - it's just a strong interest I have in family dynamics,” she says of her approach. Her intention is to interrogate “the complex and very grey area where human relations are not so easy to pinpoint.”

At one point in the film it seems that the three-body problem may have been resolved with the withdrawal of Mother. Maybe, now, the two sisters can finally see eye to eye. Not a bit of it. “It's so deeply rooted, this dynamic. While in other circumstances there may have been a healthy sisterly bond, it [their mutual hostility] is rooted so deeply that it cannot be different. They are dealing with a profoundly problematic history.”

“In the end, I hope that an audience can feel it as a scream for solidarity. And I think, right now, this is the time to scream, and not whisper softly,” she adds.

It’s not the first time that Pel has set out to create fascinating psychological profiles in her film work. Her debut feature Light As Feathers (2018) tells of 15 year-old Eryk whose relationship with his manipulative and domineering mother is at times too intimate, even as he in love with his 13 year-old neighbour Claudia.

As in her first film, Pel took a palimpsest approach to her new material. “I first start with the script but then I actually throw the script away at the moment of shooting, and then I shoot over five periods. Then after each period of time, we edit and then I rewrite again, and then we rehearse again. And during this rehearsal, I am also already again to start adjusting,” she says. “It's a great fuss for the production, but I'm very grateful that I'm so much supported by my producer Floor Onrust (Family Affair Films) in my working method.” (The film is co-produced by Verena Gräfe-Höft of German outfit Junafilm.)

“I worked very closely with Aafke Bernink, the DOP, and also the actors, of course, to really all the time question the material,” Pel adds. “And this we kept on doing in the editing, and with the music and the sound. There was a constant question of the balance of the characters, and how they come together visually and sonically, and in in terms of time.”

Shooting in her adoptive city of Hamburg was a no-brainer for Pel, given its close proximity to The Netherlands. The crew was Dutch but the main actors are German/Swiss. (That said, we see cameos from Dutch acting royalty, Thekla Reuten and Jeroen Spitzenberger.) “Hamburg is also a very left-wing city, very progressive. So it's interesting and appropriate that this story is set here,” Pel signs off.

Donkey Days is directed by Rosanne Pel and produced by Family Affair Films, in co-production with German company Junafilm. International sales are handled by Totem Films.

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