“Crows Nest” By Flynn von Kleist
On the day Joey (13) celebrates his return home to live with his mother, a crisis tests his resolve to restore the balance of their relationship. Based on a true story, played by the boy who lived it.
Be sure to check out Flynn’s statement on his film below!
Credits
Director - Flynn von Kleist
Writer - Jeroen Scholten van Aschat
Produced by - Guusje van Deuren, Rianne Poodt, The Rogues
Director of Photography - Tim Kerbosch
Production Designer - Nelli Bodt
Sound - Regard Ibrahim
Editor - Fatih Tura
Music - Terence Dunn
Beyond the Short
The idea for Crows Nest began when I made a documentary about a Dutch-Surinamese boy called Yfendo. In the film we followed his return to live with his mother, who had regained custody over him and his younger brother and sister after they had lived with their aunt for three years. Back at home Yfendo and his mom struggled to rebuild a new sense of trust in each other and in the documentary we focused on how Yfendo was able to escape from his troubled home life by dancing and making music. As I was completing the documentary, I felt the strong desire to further explore the themes which I saw arising from their situation. These were universal themes like trust, love and self-worth, issues which also played an important role in my own relationship with my mother when I was a child. I think almost everyone will recognize their own personal connection with these themes in some form or another.
This convergence of similarities but also differences between Yfendo’s life and my own situation led to my desire to further explore his life’s story and dramatize it. This is where the idea first arose to construct a feature film around Yfendo, based on his real-life story and played by the only person who could tell it in a truthful way: himself. This would become the feature film now called I Don't Wanna Dance, which I shot in the summer of 2019 and which has, a year later, almost been completed. In order to explore the oftentimes challenging and complicated task of constructing the story around Yfendo (a fifteen year old non-actor) as intimately and truthfully as possible we decided to shoot a short film first, Crows Nest, as a proof of concept. Besides being a good practice run for myself and everyone involved in the long-form project, it allowed me to create an effective approach to casting the other roles, developing the characters and directing Yfendo to an emotional and convincing performance in a relatively safe and flexible environment.
We shot the film over three shooting days on a shoestring budget and this approach to the project gave us the freedom to experiment and make mistakes, which was a really rewarding experience and which I would definitely recommend to other filmmakers working towards their first feature film. All the main crew members were carried over to the feature film project, making their investment in Crows Nest a worthwhile one. I'm very proud of what we achieved and am looking forward to presenting I Don’t Wanna Dance, the feature film version of Crows Nest, to the world in the nearby future!
“Crows Nest” was submitted to us by Flynn von Kleist. Have a film of your own you’d like us to check out? Click here!