Dutch Marina Meijer’s 42-minute documentary, world-premiering in IDFA’s Youth Competition, tells the story of the adolescent Sezer, whose unruly behaviour (rudeness, theft) is of great concern both to his mother and to the authorities. But in the film, shot over a summer, Meijer introduces a wholly different side to Sezer, a thoughtful boy who is merely growing up, trying to understand the world, fishing with his mates and frolicking with his older brother.
In many ways the film resembles Shamira Raphaëla’s superb youth feature Shabu (2021), also about a teenage kid and set in the same neighbourhood of Rotterdam. But whereas Shabu plays it for fun, Sezer’s Summer reveals the inadequacies of a social care system that makes tick-box judgements over the fate of the boy as it decides whether he stays at home or goes into care. The family is poor (tick), there is no father on the scene (tick), Sezer has ADHD (tick) and his older brother Tayfun was taken into care in the past (tick). Case closed. And a final ruling will be determined during an impersonal and detached Zoom conversation.
Yes, the mother, Claudia, is at her wit’s end at times (what parent isn’t?), but she is a loving and caring mum. What’s more, Sezer is himself lovable, if at times obnoxious (what 14-year-old boy isn’t?). He is also funny, commenting to his mum after she complains about his theft of a shiny new bike, “you told me, if you do something, do it properly.”
Meijer’s father gave her an old Super-8 camera around the time she was making the film, which she uses to give the film a wonderful sense of nostalgia, like past summer holidays.
As we see both on video and 8mm stock, Sezer has moments of youthful respite at the Rotterdam harbour as he fishes in its waters, contemplating the surface. That said, he is wary of jumping in, conscious that the currents may drag him away.
“The waterside is this nice emotional landscape and, just like his home, is supposed to be a safe haven where he can fall asleep on his mother’s couch,” says director Meijer. “At the same time, there’s the threat of being taken away from that home. So there’s always tension there and there are fights and heavy conversations over the phone. At the waterside, I felt the same thing. He can relax there, he can play with his friends. But at the same time, the water has this dangerous side. ‘Will it pull me away?’”
Meijer knew the family well having followed older brother Tayfun in her 2018 IDFA documentary Carrousel, noticing the traumatic effects on the family when Tayfun was removed into enforced care. When she embarked upon her latest film, she was pregnant with a boy and “interested in mother/son relationships,” and aware of the problems Sezer was undergoing. When she asked mother Claudia if she could follow the young lad with her camera, there was a huge sense of relief within the family. With history looking like it may be repeated, “I think they felt like, ‘okay, we want someone with us,’” the director notes.
“And so I started to film them, but I made very clear from the beginning, for me, this is not a film about youth care. It is a film about a boy and his mother and […] the threats from the outside world… but we’ll just see what happens. And it was actually a very different film process from Carrousel because it was a very intuitive film. I didn’t have any film plan. I just started shooting,” Meijer adds.
“What I found interesting is that all kids discover their boundaries, what they can do, what they cannot do. But I think this threat from the outside world of him being taken away from home made him push his boundaries even more. He is a boy who needs to be understood and not to be told, ‘if you do this, you will be removed from the home.’ That makes it even more complicated for him,” continues Meijer. “It’s very painful to see how people don’t take the time to look at who the boy really is.”
