Tiger #5: Quality Time - Daan Bakker

An absurdist mosaic of things many men encounter during their lives. That’s perhaps the best description of Dutch director Daan Bakker’s first feature film. A debut that immediately landed him a Tiger nomination.

By: Sophie van Leeuwen & Pieter-Bas van Wiechen

Nervous

Daan Bakker (1979) nervously paces the meeting room at Pupkin Film in Amsterdam. It’s almost as if he’d prefer not to be here. He checks his phone, moves his keys, then walks to the window and stares outside.

Why so restless? Daan looks me in the eye and admits: "I've never been interviewed before except for the local paper and then I answered questions I didn’t know the answer to and had trouble articulating myself." The only Dutch person to be nominated for this year’s IFFR Tiger Award is going to be forcibly subjected to interviews though. After my turn, the Het Parool, NRC Handelsblad and De Volkskrant newspapers are all desperate to have a word with the new talent. Why not use me as a test run, I joke and we get to work.

Awards

Bakker grew up in Harderwijk and knew he wanted to be a filmmaker early on. Nevertheless he started two other study programmes before doing admission for film school. He was, as he puts it, “beating around the bush”. He first applied to study film and television. When that proved a poor fit, he studied being an independent theatre maker for a while. A step in the right direction, but not enough. "I learnt a great deal from studying those things. I still go to the theatre a lot. It is enormously inspiring because in theatre the makers and the audience have a very clear agreement: we are going to pretend. That’s why theatre enables you to do more extreme stuff. When I write for film I try to approach the poetic truth theatre has."

Daan was around 25 when he applied to film school. What followed wasn’t a rapid rise, but more of a carefully considered climb. First two short films Jacco's Film and Bukowski that both won awards. From then on he primarily worked in the wings on other people’s films. "I co-conceptualised and wrote scripts. It only struck me when wandering around IFFR two years ago that I wanted to make my own film again. At the time, I took part in the oversteek [the crossing], a project aimed at helping young filmmakers take the next step in their careers and was selected. Luckily they still remembered me. That resulted in what can now be seen at IFFR."

Absurdism

Quality Time, Bakker’s first feature film, consists of five separate parts that could also be watched individually. "Initially I planned to make a single, feature-length film. The idea was for a man to play the lead, but every time the character needed to develop I thought it problematic." 

"Ultimately I stopped working on the main gist of the thing for a while and started writing scenes intuitively. I love short films as you can do mad stuff in them. Absurdism isn’t as suitable for long story arcs. Nevertheless, I hope the individual parts still constitute a whole and need each other."

As a filmmaker, Daan Bakker regularly goes too far. In the first part of the film, dialogues are even abstracted into schematic displays. "If I both write and direct a film, I like to seek out the medium’s boundaries," says Bakker clarifying his choices. "I microscopically examine what happens." Once, at the Nederlands Filmfestival in Utrecht, Bakker spoke to famous Dutch director Jos Stelling. He had seen his short film and liked it because the tension was good. "Film - according to Stelling - is ultimately about the tension between the actors."

Bakker studies that tension by leaving things out. Intonation, facial expressions, the actors. The film’s first section has almost nothing in it, except the characters’ positions. "I wanted to create distance so audiences can assign their own meanings to it. I hope the beginning rocks audiences’ perceptions so they are open to the rest."

Cool

Luckily, Bakker's IFFR audience is one that is accustomed to this kind of thing. "I think IFFR is an exceptionally cool festival because it screens stuff others don’t. Sometimes things that are so special they make you think: what on earth was that? It’s a great compliment to have been nominated for a Tiger Award."

A face appears, the next journalist is ready to interview Bakker.

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