Still: Sweeties - Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden & Natalie Bruijns

What were they like as adolescents? Did they have crushes and secret trysts with boys in the woods? Directors Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden and Natalie Bruijns take these questions in good heart. 

After all, their new feature doc Sweeties (an international premiere at Hot Docs) is one of the frankest and most intimate films about the lives of teenage girls yet made in the Netherlands. The film portrays three Dutch 14-year-olds on their summer holidays at a campsite in France where they are learning familiar lessons about life and love.

“I was basically a hopelessly desperate romantic,” Natalie confesses of her teenage self. “Most of my time was dedicated to looking in all corners to find someone to love. We talked about that a lot. We wanted to make a film that we wished could have been there for us when we were 14!”

As for the teenage Anneke, she was “super shy” and “found it very scary, all the love stuff with boys. I was always looking at boys but I was a bit too shy to speak to them.” She speculates that if she had had a smartphone when she was an adolescent, she would have been on it all day long too, just like some of the girls in the film. “I also went to a campsite in France with my parents when I was young…and I did do some kissing there as well, shy as I was!”

Natalie is 36 and has a 2-year-old daughter. Anneke is 52 and doesn’t have children.

Watching the film, many viewers will be startled at how successfully the two directors have become part of their teenage subjects’ private worlds. Surely the last people the teenagers wanted to be around were adults like them…

“Actually, that’s true but that depends on what kind of adults it is. The fact that we don’t have teenage daughters makes us more relatable for them because we were closer to being 14 than to being mothers of teenage girls,” Natalie suggests.

“We spent so many hours with them. There were a lot of conversations that took place before we went [to the campsite] about love, and about who they are. There were countless hours of intimacy we had with them. At some point, they just forget you. The first day, the second day, they see the camera, they feel it. But then we were also on the campsite with them. It’s like going to the swimming pool. In the beginning you look at everyone and you think everyone is looking at you - but at some point you just forget it.”

Anneke emphasises that the two directors weren’t outsiders, coming in to film and then leaving again. They were a part of camp life themselves.

“And they [the girls] know everything about our love lives,” Natalie points out that the communication between filmmakers and subjects always went both ways.

The directors were filming at the campsite for around five weeks. They chose their subjects carefully. Malak, Celia and Jae were all open and ready to share their hopes, dreams and anxieties with the documentary makers. They also enjoyed the filmmaking process.

“It was important for us to have different main characters. We wanted teenagers to reflect about love but what was really important was that there were different stages,” Natalie explains what they were looking for in their protagonists. 

“It would have been impossible just to go to the campsite and find girls to film. We wanted to know them in advance and build up a relationship before filming with them,” Anneke says.

Natalie worked with Anneke on a series about teenagers making art and that’s when they had the idea for the movie.

“We were really different. I am a romantic. She is shy and funny. I guess in our conversations about love, we were really open to each other about how it can be, that when we are in love, I still feel like a 14-year-old girl,” Natalie reflects. They wondered what this meant. Had they learned nothing? Had they never grown up?

The film offers a positive portrayal of the vagaries of adolescence. Potentially nasty moments - for example the girls being sent “dick pics” by anonymous boys - are dealt with in humorous fashion. At the campsite, the sun seems always to be shining. There aren’t too many references to eating disorders, drug addiction or teenage misery.

“We often see them as victims in the media. When we see 14-year-old girls, it is usually about destruction and victimising…,” Natalie reflects on the negative stereotypes of adolescence that they were determined to avoid.. She notes, though, that for the three girls, these romantic adventures and misadventures are “pretty serious” and not to be trivialised.

Anneke recently made another documentary, This Was Your Nicest Auntie Ria (2022), about her beloved aunt who was beginning to succumb to dementia. The film was shot guerrilla-style on a tiny budget but Anneke says that the aunt was a free spirit and as full of mischief and curiosity as the three girls in the new doc.

Sweeties was produced by Witfilm. The project was delayed by Covid (the campsite shut during the pandemic) but has received strong backing from the Netherlands Film Fund. After all, this is a project that fits in with the Fund’s goal of attracting young audiences back to cinemas. It is distributed in the Netherlands by Amstelfilm and went out in Dutch cinemas in mid-April.

Find more information on Hot Docs Festival here.

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