Paradise Drifters (2020)

Directed by: Mees Peijnenburg | 85 minutes | drama | Actors: Jonas Smulders, Tamar van Waning, Bilal El Mehdi Wahib, Joren Seldeslachts, Camilla Siegertsz, Steef Cuijpers, Micha Hulshof

Mees Peijnenburg was highly regarded in 2015 with his TV film ‘No kings in our blood’, from the series ‘One Night Stand’, which gives young filmmakers the opportunity to show themselves to a larger audience. With his raw, penetrating portrait of a brother and a sister who grow up in a youth care program, he immediately won two Golden Calves, for best television drama and best actor in a television drama for lead actor Jonas Smulders. With ‘Paradise Drifters’ (2020), Peijnenburg is making his first feature film. Again the talented Smulders plays one of the leading roles. Thematically, this film is a sequel to ‘No Kings in Our Blood’. Because what happens to young people from youth care as soon as they turn eighteen and are expected to stand on their own two feet? We see how Yousef (Bilal Wahid) celebrates his eighteenth birthday with the other boys in the institution. But it’s not a party for him. The fact that he is now on his own, has no place to go and no one to fall back on makes him anxious. Wandering through life and affected by suicidal thoughts, Yousef flirts with death.

The 19-year-old Chloe (debutante Tamar van Waning, who ended up in the film world through her participation in the TV program ‘Dream School’) has just as hard to endure. Pregnant by her stepfather and abandoned by her angry mother, she leaves her parental home. Chloe has come into contact with a shady organization to whom she is going to sell her baby. With her backpack and a note with an address in Barcelona, ​​she hitchhiked to Spain. With the money from the sale, Chloe thinks she can break free and leave her old life behind. Twenty-year-old Lorenzo (Jonas Smulders) visits his brother Ivan (Joren Seldeslachts) in prison. When his brother announces that he will be getting early parole soon, Lorenzo takes on the responsibility of keeping Ivan on the right track. He tries to solve his brother’s problems. To earn money, he decides, through a contact of his brother, to transport a package to France as a courier. His attempt to solve his brother’s problems gets him more and more in trouble.

We do not find out much more about why these young people ended up in such a hopeless situation. However, Peijnenburg focuses not so much on their past, but on the fact that all three want to escape their situation. As young adults, they must learn to stand on their own two feet; life becomes survival. They have only their primary instinct to rely on. Their flight abroad to start with a clean slate is as naive as it is understandable. Coincidentally, they meet at a gas station along the highway, after which Chloe, Yousef and Lorenzo leave for southern Europe together. But although they unexpectedly find trust and security in each other during their journey, it is difficult to escape from real life. With raw images, Peijnenburg and cameraman Jasper Wolf draw the viewer into the lives of the three protagonists; the camera is very close to them. Peijnenburg, who also wrote the screenplay, does not need many words to describe the hopeless feeling these young people have. The scenes are kept short with a blunt axe, and not all images stick for the same amount of time. And we are constantly confronted with heaps of stuff from people who are forced to live on the street, people like our three young protagonists. Peijnenburg only points out what happens if the (social) safety net disappears, but that could have been done a little more subtly.

‘Paradise Drifters’ has three fantastic young actors in the house. Smulders and Wahib (who, by the way, come off a bit poor in the script) are just about the two greatest young acting talents in our country. It should come as no surprise that they impress. This does apply to Tamar van Waning, who has never starred in a film before, but here in a very natural way portrays a vulnerable and broken girl who desperately tries to get her life back on track on her own. It is a pity that Peijnenburg has rushed the end a bit, so that ‘Paradise Drifters’ doesn’t close completely satisfactorily. But it’s nice to see how much talent there is – both in front of and behind the camera – in our country and to see that they have the guts to stick their neck out for quality films!