take this production

Retrospekt

Feature film, 2018, 101 min.

Release date: 21 February 2019 (Netherlands). Retrospekt is a brutally poetic, suspense-packed, modern-domestic fairy tale seen through the eyes of Mette, a confidant and successful young mother, struggling with life’s absurd purposelessness.

Mette (Circé Lethem) is in the final phase of her rehabilitation, when one day Miller (Lien Wildemeersch) pays a visit, trying to get Mette to testify against ‘Frank’; Miller’s boyfriend who apparently put Mette in a wheelchair. Mette can’t seem to remember anything. Then, left alone and in a haze of medication and increasing anxiety, Mette has time to reminisce.

In an escalating puzzle-like narrative, we inhabit Mette’s consciousness and see the events in the film unfolding through her fractured memory. Trying to juggle daily pressures of relationship, career, and motherhood Mette inevitably slowly drowns in a cacophony of repercussions. Blunt, semi-operatic voices and music echo her fragmented daydreams of the events leading up to her accident.

Sitting at home on maternity leave, Mette is struck by the increasing absence of satisfaction that she once felt from her organized life. Both her family and job as a Domestic Violence councilor no longer provide her with a sense of purpose. When her husband Simon (Martijn van der Veen) is away on a business trip, Mette learns that a former client of hers (Miller) is in trouble. On a whim, Mette ceases the opportunity to do something ‘meaningful’ and invites Miller into her home, fully aware of the potential consequences.

Retrospekt is life’s sense of humor or proof many of us are living a fairy tale; it is easy to make sense of ‘it’ all in retrospect, but the chaos of everyday life blurs our vision at the point in time when decisions are made.

won prizes

  • CA - Toronto International Film Festival selection
  • DE - Berlin International Film Festival Forum selection

View on IMDb View ISAN

Director

Writer

Producer

Co-Producer

Associate producer

Executive producer

Line producer

Composer

Cinematographer - DoP

Editor

Casting director

Production designer

Cast (5)

Stunts

Costume design

Assistant to producer 

Script advisor

Production company

Qualified producers

Co-production company

Casting Agency

Post-production sound

Post-production facility

Distribution company

Production Incentive

Majority Coproductions