Boys

A Dutch film about early adolescence. Sieger is fifteen and does athletics. Over the summer he trains with a relay team and starts to feel something towards his teammate Marc. The film does not announce what that is; Sieger does not know either. The method of the narrative is not to speak. Feeling is carried by looks, silences and physical closeness. Sieger denies it, pulls back, and comes closer again. There is another weight in the background: since their mother's death an unspoken tension has run between the father and the older brother, and Sieger is caught between them. It was made as a television film, shot for the telefilm strand of the Dutch public broadcaster NTR. It was shown at festivals afterwards and found an audience outside the country. Gijs Blom plays Sieger and Ko Zandvliet plays Marc. It runs seventy-eight minutes. Mischa Kamp directed. A careful, unexaggerated example for anyone who likes quiet coming-of-age drama and stories of first love. For a viewer expecting incident, the film is made almost entirely of small moments and it is short.