By Gerwin Tamsma
Looking back, one might say that Digna Sinke has crafted her body of work much like a landscape architect designs a garden. She started out by learning about what grows close to where she lives and making use of that knowledge. The specific personality of this cineaste-as-gardener becomes more and more visible in the process, and with each new season separate parts of her particular plot of land have grown together and connected in surprising ways. Trees and plants have taken root, and different, sometimes forgotten flowers have bloomed.
She is a gardener who has managed most tasks by herself. This is partly out of necessity, because the gardener’s support association is unwilling or too slow to support her plans, and also because she simply likes to do things all by herself. Due to the materials she works with, the fruit of her labours is recognisable as a Dutch garden. But in this fertile soil, the gardener has found tremendous freedom to express ideas, interests, joys and sorrows, which reverberate far beyond their specific context.
This gardening comparison is actually Sinke’s own. On her website, she talks about filmmaking and its segues as follows: “I know a little bit about most things, but what I really know about is maintaining a kitchen garden on loamy soil. That is also largely a question of ordering things, lugging things and toiling; and doing things in the right order. But always with complete dedication. Otherwise, there’s no point.”
Her latest feature is called HEMELSLEUTEL (2025), which translates as “key to heaven”. The title refers to the towering cranes that pierce the skies, but it is also the Dutch name for a sedum plant (Hylothelephium telephium) that goes by the German name of Herbstfreude, Autumn Joy. If we take this metaphor one step further, this late career highlight gives a sample of each “season” of her oeuvre, with all the elements of her earlier work now in full bloom.
Associative, uncompromising and dedicated to putting things into order
HEMELSLEUTEL shows the process of creating a possible feature from the filmmaker’s perspective. The idea, as Sinke explains in voiceover, was to make a fiction film in which a photographer is tasked with documenting the clean energy transition in the port of Amsterdam. “Originally, I wanted to make a meandering film. Associative. Uncompromising,” she muses, as if having already failed before even starting. Her memories summon forth a strange and strong nostalgia, as unstoppable as the incoming tide.
There are doubts and ghosts from the past at every turn, unresolved traumas and forgotten regrets. But the precisely framed images also capture a resilience typical of her firm belief in our ability to face the future. It’s as if we can see the filmmaker’s creative force shaping this still-hypothetical feature right at that very moment, before our eyes: associative, uncompromising and dedicated to putting things into order.
Many of the film’s elements will be familiar to those who have seen her previous films. Clouds, both natural and industrial. Boats, busy on the water. A death of a friend, some long time ago. An admiration for the engineers who genuinely care about their huge installations and massive infrastructure. The mechanisms of getting things done. Dutch faces, portrayed as if little has changed since the 17th century. All these things take on an existential meaning in the light of Sinke’s Socratic self-questioning.
Sinke is fascinated by what the landscape does to people. The Dutch landscape—“created by the Dutch, not God”, as Descartes quipped—is always changing. Sinke’s classic WEEMOED EN WILDERNIS (2010) shows the transition of the small island of Tiengemeten from a small, isolated agricultural community to its current ecological function as a wildlife reserve. Farmers are slowly forced from their lands. Time passes. A new form of carefully monitored nature moves in. Over the course of thirteen years, Sinke patiently documented this process of change, loss and regeneration. And in the middle of shooting, she learns that René Scholten, her partner and producer, has a terminal illness.
The world of experimental, young and innovative international cinema
The two met at the Dutch Film Academy, Scholten having already produced Sinke’s graduation film GROETEN UIT ZONNEMAIRE in 1972. He was part of the famous leftist film collective Amsterdams Stadsjournaal, from where he started his production company Studio Nieuwe Gronden (SNG), which became an important breeding ground for the Dutch cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. With his sudden death in 2001, Sinke decided it was best that she take over the company, as she knew better than anyone what had to be done. Since then, Sinke has basically juggled two jobs, continuing making her own films while also producing the work of upcoming talents such as Sonja Wyss (WINTERSTILTE, 2008) or Janis Rafa (KALA AZAR, 2020) under the SNG banner.
When Sinke entered the Film Academy in Amsterdam in 1968, at the age of eighteen, Anton Koolhaas had just been appointed its director. A respected novelist and the father of starchitect Rem Koolhaas, he had written the scripts for several films by Bert Haanstra, the most successful Dutch filmmaker of the era. Haanstra’s brand of humanist cinema, ethnographically humorous and aesthetically engaging, showed the Dutch how they preferred to view themselves and their country.
But this was not the sort of cinema that had attracted the young Sinke to filmmaking. Attending grammar school as a teenager in Utrecht (the subject of DE HOOP VAN HET VADERLAND, 1982), she went to see the “strange” films programmed at events organised by Huub Bals taking place at the Cinemanifestatie, who a few years later would become the founder of the Rotterdam Film Festival. Sinke was particularly impressed by the talks with visiting foreign auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette or Agnès Varda held at the “Cinecave”. This was the world of experimental, young and innovative international cinema that she wanted to be part of.
At the Film Academy however, Koolhaas made it clear that he thought the cinematic experience had little future. He would eventually change the name of the institution into the Dutch Film & TV Academy (a decision that was reversed in 2013). Like so many countries at the time, the times were changing in The Netherlands. A rapid increase in wealth and mass consumption went hand in hand with cultural “depillarisation”, liberalisation and, of course, inevitable polarisation.
A landscape of open, flat farmland and scattered villages surrounded by dikes and tidal water
Sinke still learned a lot at film school. She enrolled there with a special love for photography, only to find out women were not supposed to become cinematographers. As a result, she became a jack of all trades, helping others to finish things, working as a sound recorder, a continuity assistant (at the time referred to as ‘script girl’, a job often closer to that of assistant director) and doing a lot of editing; her credits from those years include an assistant editor role for the Dutch classic TURKS FRUIT (1973) by Paul Verhoeven.
When her class, in the democratic spirit of the times, had to decide which student film project they would produce together, they chose Digna Sinke’s scenario for GROETEN UIT ZONNEMAIRE, which focuses on a young woman who spends a few days with her aunt in a quiescent village. Gradually, she comes to realise things have changed and she has lost her connection to both this rural society and to her childhood. As a result of this group decision, Sinke became a film director almost by accident.
With GROETEN UIT ZONNEMAIRE, Sinke’s filmography starts with the first of what will turn out to be many returns to the islands of the Dutch delta, with their landscape of open, flat farmland and scattered villages surrounded by dikes and tidal water. She was born in Zonnemaire, a small village on the Zeeland island of Schouwen-Duiveland. Her “loamy clay kitchen garden” is there. As a preschooler, she experienced the disastrous North Sea floods of February 1953 that cost the lives of nearly two thousand people. This so-called Watersnoodramp, caused by an unholy mix of a north-westerly storm, spring tides and undermaintained dikes of post-war Netherlands, would usher in an enormous transformation of the Dutch coastline (defences) in the form of the so-called Delta Works constructed between 1954 and 1997.
Sinke felt lost, insecure and not in control while shooting her thesis film. Half a century later, she acknowledges that it is a real ‘Digna film’ after all. But at the time, she thought about giving up film altogether and started studying Art History, only to return to filmmaking when she was given the opportunity to make EEN VAN GOGH AAN DE MUUR (1978) for the groundbreaking television series Beeldspraak. Comprising a series of encounters and interviews with a broad cross section of people who happen to have a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Caféterras bij nacht (Terrace at Night) on their wall, the film offers both a Walter Benjamin-inspired analysis of the meaning of art in the age of reproduction and a poignant look into the private living spaces of the 1970s. Aired on television in the Netherlands and elsewhere, it was the Dutch entry to compete for the Prix Italia, drawing international interest.
Her great skill as a fiction director
Her first foray into fiction features was DE STILLE OCEAAN (1984), which premiered in Berlinale competition. It is the only film that she didn’t write or conceive herself. In order to secure funding for a story originally set in Belgium, she changed the setting to the Dutch river delta. Despite the warm reception of this drama about a journalist returning home from traumatising events in South America who is unable to express her feelings except to her mentally disabled brother, she continued to have difficulties financing narrative features.
This suddenly changed for a brief period in the early 1990s, when she shot two features back-to-back that both show her great skill as a fiction director. The first was BOVEN DE BERGEN (1992), a hiking film inspired by Wim Wenders’ road movie trilogy. Wenders’ legendary Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller was approached to shoot the film, but was not available; his replacement, Goert Giltaij, captured the Dutch landscape in equally lyrical black and white. The other film was BELLE VAN ZUYLEN (1993), a carefully modulated romantic drama based on the life and writings of 18th century proto-feminist Whig-era icon Belle van Zuylen (internationally known, as is the film, as Madame de Charrière).
Despite their obvious differences, Sinke’s tendency to connect her films can be seen towards the end of BOVEN DE BERGEN, in a mysterious scene where our disillusioned baby boomer hikers meet a group of people in 18th century costumes, who come across like refugees from revolution-era France trapped in a time warp.
A steady stream of excellent documentary films
Internationally speaking, Dutch cinema is probably better known for its documentary filmmaking than its narrative fiction. From Joris Ivens to Johan van der Keuken, numerous filmmakers from the country have found true artistic freedom in their personal and cinematic approach to documentary subjects. Sinke has, equally, produced a steady stream of excellent documentary films in this tradition.
In the 1980s, she made NIEUWE GOLF (1985), about the Dutch contemporary classical music scene, and NIETS IS VOOR DE EEUWIGHEID (1990), turning vanishing Dutch industrial heritage into something highly personal. In between working on her Tiengemeten series that would eventually lead to WEEMOED EN WILDERNIS, she also made BROSSA (2005), a lovely film about an unfilmed script by the maverick Catalan poet Joan Brossa. Her preoccupation for how humans deal with the changing landscape surfaced again in ONDER DE OPPERVLAKTE (2015), which empathically but ruthlessly dissects the complexities of contemporary political decision-making processes.
In all these films, she manages to introduce an element of the personal, immediately raising the stakes with a simple remark, memory or anecdote. This tendency also provokes, and often raises questions about who she is or her work as a filmmaker. In BEWAREN OF HOE TE LEVEN (2017), starring her nonagenarian mother with whom she shares an urge—and a talent—to keep and to save ‘things’, she muses:
“It’s not about things, it’s about what they stir up in your memory. I notice how things work like a time machine. Near, yet so far away. Is that why I kept things? To turn back time, is that the only answer? Or do all those material things help me to create my own territory, in which I am my own boss, to which I alone have the key and only sparingly grant people access? Do all these things lose their value when I’m gone?”
To answer that last question: I can’t speak for the value of her old postcards, hippie dresses or sugar sachets. But her films will remain valuable or even invaluable. In BEWAREN OF HOE TE LEVEN, Sinke includes an extraordinary clip from a roll of 16mm Ektachrome film that she used for one of the lighting tests for GROETEN UIT ZONNEMAIRE, showing Digna Sinke herself at 22 years old. “Why is it a confrontation to watch myself?” she asks, “It’s as if I can glance into my own soul. For a brief moment, I realise who I was at the time.”