Weemoed & wildernis

The island of Tiengemeten in Haringvliet, just south of Rotterdam, originated from a sandbank in the seventeenth century and has now been given back to nature. When the go-ahead for the project was given in the 1990s, Digna Sinke followed the planned development of the agricultural area into a nature reserve from 1996 through 2009. Using fixed camera angles, she filmed, at intervals, the changes in the landscape, thus giving an account of the typical Dutch concept of manipulability of wilderness. The voice-over is Digna Sinke's own. While shooting the film, she lost her partner René Scholten. Without melodrama, she blends the forced departure of the farmland tenants, the digging up of roads, the felling of trees and the cutting of dikes for depoldering with memories of Scholten and her childhood in Zeeland. Her personal story promptly gives the rigid and panoramic images in time lapse and slow motion a deeper connotation of wistfulness.