Still: Last night I stayed within myself and this morning I decided to live here - Fé Baan

“I get it. People have a lot of interpretations of it, and most of those interpretations are also true, I guess,” says Dutch director Fé Baan of her surreal, highly expressionistic short film, Last night I stayed within myself and this morning I decided to live here, selected for Karlovy Vary Imagina section. The film world premiered to the delight of Dutch audiences at IFFR in January 2026. “If you see something and you feel that that's you, yourself in the film, then that’s equally ok, I guess.”

Baan’s film evokes the likes of Luis Buñuel and Maya Deren, even Ingmar Bergman, in telling a tale set in the liminal space between dreams and consciousness, between reality and fantasy. In the process, she and cinematographer-cum-producer Ese Roeper have a wonderful in plumbing the depths of their individual subconscious states.

Baan suggests another cinematic influence, the Armenian Sergei Parajanov, who conjured up magic in every frame of his splendid oeuvre. “Just that theatrical way he has of portraying different tableaus, also in the way he uses symbolism, with fruits and animals,” Baan explains Parajanov’s modus operandi, something the filmmakers set out to replicate in their film, set on the magical Dutch island of Texel, in the North Sea.

Texel was chosen as the location as it represents sanctuary from the urban sprawl of Rotterdam, where nature is buried beneath concrete and tarmac. The island offers elegiac respite, and the chance to revert to a former, more fundamental form of human existence. It is also a place of myth, and of animals.

“It's a film about escapism, and just as in your fantasy, everything can be true. So it's about what is real, and what isn't.”

The heroine of the film, Rikke, traverses Texel in a white dress, encountering a dramatically clad female witch/shepherdess who can make sheep travel both forwards and backwards. Rikke is tempted to eat rotten fruit by malevolent tree-dwelling sprites, lies on the bare back of a horse and undergoes a ritual baptism. An alter-ego of Rikke, also in a white dress, cleanses the mouth of the sprite, using a watering can. Rikke’s attempts to escape the witch by climbing a hill are continually thwarted, and when she inevitably tumbles to the bottom, she finds herself back in Rotterdam.

“Rikke is all the time in the city, but in her head she is in this world of nature, which was originally part of that city, but is not anymore there,” notes director Baan of her film, which is rooted very much in the realm of the imagination. “But she can flee to there in her mind.”

Cinematographer Roeper, himself from Texel, concurs:

“I think there are so many people who have that same feeling, one is longing for one thing, the other one is longing for another thing. So yeah, it was not about specific things, it was just a feeling we both had with our [respective] environments, and that was the starting point of the film.”

Baan tells SEE NL that the ‘fantastic’ is a core determinant of her cinematic style, and that she is inspired by the Dutch ‘De Fantasten’ movement of the 1990s. The group wrote a manifesto decrying 'the dictatorship of realism' and argued for a major cultural change in Dutch cinema, to create more room for imagination and fantasy.

This will be the defining aesthetic of her upcoming feature debut, Of iets met een tijger? (Or something with a tiger?). “I think it's an incorporation of bringing the fantastic into the real world, but what is real? What if the real world also becomes this fantasy? That's what my new film about,” she explains its fantastic appeal.

Equally, cinematographer Roeper is moving on to an idea he has been mulling over for a long time, to make a feature across three formats; 8, 16 and 35-millimetre. “I can't really say what it will be about yet, but I want to let those three formats speak for something,” he says. 

“And after we finish these projects, we’ll do something together again - a more hybrid film,” Baan signs off, with more fantastic offerings in mind.

Last night I stayed within myself and this morning I decided to liver here is produced by FÉSE.

Find out more about Karlovy Vary here.