These are hectic times for Laura van Dijk from Amsterdam. The film she wrote a few years ago will hit theaters next week. He has won 3 Golden Calves and is the Dutch Oscar entry. Culture Club visited her.
Life is hectic these weeks. Laura goes from interview to red carpet to awards ceremony and back again. She spends the free moments she has with her children, 6-year-old Yago and toddler Mia.
But even while sorting out ocean pictures with Yago and a friend, time is made for a conversation about Narcosis. Laura: “The film is about losing someone and the mourning that follows. Grieving is so personal, everyone does it differently and you can lose each other in that. How do you continue and when?”
Gate of love and of fear
In Narcosis, the father of a close-knit family dies during a professional dive. His wife and their two children are left devastated. Van Dijk made the film together with her husband, director Martijn de Jong. “There is a lot of personal in it. When Yago was born, a kind of gate of love opened, but also a gate of fear: what if something happens to him, or Martijn or myself? I became a half-hypochondriac who with every pain thought; I’m going to die! It’s my fear and a little bit of my family that I’m writing about.”
Laura van Dijk has been writing film and TV screenplays for 20 years. Previously there was the series ‘Poesjes’ and the book adaptation ‘My very strange week with Tess’, a film that is also about being alone and moving on.
Van Dijk: “I have had a fascination with and fear of death from an early age. I can still see myself lying in bed in my children’s room, when I realized: this life will end someday and after that there will be nothing. inside. Maybe I’ll write my fears off, it’s a kind of therapy. But what I mainly want is to tell a beautiful story, something that touches and that makes you laugh. Like life.”
Narcosis hits theaters on October 20.