Dutch director Sam de Jong has presented his third film, Met mes [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Sam de Jong
fiche film], in the Tiger Competition at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, a visually captivating movie featuring a clash between a self-centered TV presenter and a teenage boy, accused by her of a crime he did not commit. We talked to the director about the connection between Met mes and his debut, Prince [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
interview : Sam de Jong
fiche film]; the imposed social stereotypes and the difficulty in overcoming them; as well as the team’s conscious decisions regarding the film’s imagery.

Cineuropa: Both in your debut Prince (2015) and in your latest film Met mes, you are dealing with adolescent characters from minority communities. Why did you choose their point of view?
Sam de Jong: Prince was just made with a Dutch-Moroccan kid, and although it provoked a debate about his representation, I was not particularly interested in the character’s background but was rather aiming to tell a coming-of-age story. In Met mes, I wanted to talk about how the media and the established order treat marginalised groups, as well as the power we have as filmmakers. This film is more than anything else a media satire and it also provides room for self-criticism.

That is really notable as the camera is presented as a dangerous tool, something which in the end is even verbalised — it’s a weapon.
When I made Prince, it was just a coincidence that the kids I worked with had a minority background. Then it eventually turned into a story about ethnicity and thus I realised the power and the responsibility of filmmakers while they are portraying people. So I wanted to show in Met mes that those working with media should be really careful in the way they frame stories, as people tend to behave according to the stigma imposed on them. In this film, the journalist creates the boy as someone “with a knife,” while he throws the image of a victim onto her, which she willingly embraces. Hence, they both serve the stereotypes projected onto them, while the camera is the catalyst and the reason why all this happens in the end. In that sense, the film might be perceived as a cautionary tale.

What feels a bit sad is that both characters realise they are following stereotypes, however they cannot abandon them. Especially the journalist, who openly states at the beginning that she wanted to change her life, but it seems she has a limited capacity to do it.
That is a big tragedy for many of us. The premise that we can completely transform into someone else has its boundaries. Very often, films lead people to believe they could become a different person, but at the end of the day we are limited by our genes and there’s not so much margin for change. However, maybe a change of values is possible within society. For the journalist, being seen was just enough, up to a certain point; the role of being a TV show host was fulfilling. But in this day and age, that is not enough anymore. She starts doing art in order to show she is morally right, since that’s how it is perceived today. Her artistic ambition is to change society and the film wants to explore this situation and its outcome.

We can also say that Met mes is sort of a moral tale, told in an unusual way. What provoked your choice to apply vintage disco aesthetics to a socially engaged narrative?
It is basically the story of a boy with a Northern-African background falsely accused of a crime, and we wanted to show how this stigmatisation works. But while making such a film, we are actually reinforcing the idea, by confirming the stereotype. In order to avoid that effect, we decided to skip the realistic tone and instead to make all the production departments visible, so that the viewers would be constantly reminded they are watching a film and that reality is manipulated. That is why I chose that super loud and vibrant visual aesthetics. Also, my second film, Goldie, was very close to documentary aesthetics despite being a fiction, so as a reaction to this, now I felt like doing something very stylised and orchestrated. It made sense doing it in Met mes, as we found a way to motivate it from the inside out. We wanted to make some technical details visible, like the dolly shot or the gripper’s work through those notable clunky movements.

Why have you decided not to translate the Dutch title into English?
As a kind of a response to this big current trend in the Netherlands, where even the Dutch films that do not have an US or British distribution all have English titles. I think we can be proud of our language, so we just keep it with a Dutch title. Met mes means “with a knife” but I don’t think it translates well into English.