Upstream subtly moves viewers
Quietly, in the middle of a scorching hot week, young Dutch director Danyael Sugawara’s debut film Upstream offered the Brussels Film Festival competition its fair share of emotions and suppressed tears.
It’s all in the silences, missed meetings and blind spots… Without us really understanding why, without a traumatic event sealing the separation, a mother and her son, who have formed a reluctant couple since the father’s death, drift apart in fits and starts.
Damiaan (18) has just passed his final-year exams. This sensitive boy, who is passionate about art and music, wonders about his future, which studies, career path and freedom he should choose. Aleid, a devoted mother, falls under the spell of Roel, a fair-weather sailor who welcomes her onto his barge.
While the mother relives her youth, her son experiences his first taste of youth. Without realising, they drift astray, swept along by their amorous emotions. When Aleid believes she can escape by following the current, Damiaan shuts himself away in an artists’ squat, defying his mother’s control by living in the cold and filth.
Between petty jealousies and major misunderstandings, their separation seems irrevocable, but love and sorrow will reunite mother and son.
Here, there is nothing to suggest that Damiaan’s legitimate need to cut the cord will lead to such a separation: mother and son are able to talk to one another and both seem ready to listen, with their feet firmly on the ground… The story hangs by a thread, with no major upheaval or tragedy, no irreversible clash, and the great strength of screenwriter Marieke van der Pol and young director Sugawara lies precisely in the way they explore the tenuous territory of the intangible.
The film is bolstered by the performances of Winger Windhorst (in his first major role) and Anneke Blok (well-known by Dutch audiences for her numerous television and film roles), whose naturalness and warmth are breathtaking.
Produced by IDTV Film, Upstream received the Audience Award at the Utrecht Film Festival, which celebrates the best Dutch films of the year.
(Translated from French)
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