Introducing: Future Me
20 December 2020
Dutch director Vincent Boy Kars has collaborated with Amsterdam production company HALAL since his graduation film. The short My First Porn was an early example of Kars’s preoccupation with the digital age and its influence on relationships, authenticity and identity.
As such his subsequent work has self-consciously traversed the line between documentary and fiction, with his feature debut Independent Boy premiering at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in 2017, before the follow up Drama Girl competed in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2020. Both investigate millennials and the extreme versions of ‘the self’ created in the social-media age.
“We always knew that there would be a third film in the trilogy,” says producer van Leeuwen. “Vincent was sure that his third film should be about the future but it took him a long time to realise that it should also be about himself.” The film will be a documentary-fiction hybrid, with Kars himself alongside an actor and a psychologist, who create and act out hypothetical situations for Kars’s future. Putting together this complex web of dynamics and form has been the initial challenge for the project, according to van Leeuwen: “The first stage of development took almost 10 months. It is quite a difficult project but that is also what makes it so appealing.”
CineMart will be an important next step in the project’s development as they look for co-producers and financing. HALAL has a great relationship with IFFR, according to van Leeuwen: “We really like IFFR, we are there every year. Last year we had Drama Girl in competition and we had our co-production Mother by Kristof Bilson screening. We also won a prize at CineMart with our co-production La hija de todas las rabias. So it was a very good year. And also in retrospective our last real festival before the lockdown.” Although this edition takes place online, she is still sure it will be as valuable as ever: “It’s just the way it is! We are honored and happy that we can be a part.”
