Wasteland Jury Version

For me good sci-fi criticizes and reflects on our current realities. The driving force behind ‘Wasteland’ is a personal necessity, I felt that I had to make a film around happiness, suffering, freedom and oppressive technologies. The inspiration is our world, I believe we're in a transitional phase. We have to make choices and can only hope that enough people will make the right choices. But what are the right choices? How are we living the right way, what is our purpose as human beings?

My characters don’t have an answer to these questions but they do know they are feeling something, something new and exciting. They're waiting.

I find utopias and dystopias fascinating, how people think everything could be perfect or not. I like the contemporary implementation but also stories from the past. I personally think that the line between utopia and dystopia is very thin. It just depends on the perspective you have. What a utopia is for someone within a certain system, can be viewed as a dystopia by an outsider. Who you are as a person, how you grew up, what your references are,... determines what is utopian or dystopian for you.

With ‘Wasteland’ I imagined a parallel world that has evolved in such a way that everyone who lives in it believes they live in an almost realized utopia. But I still believe in some kind of primal human instinct that can break such systems. I believe it can get better and better.

With this film I want to make people feel something and raise questions. Let them dwell on life and its absurdity. In the end I don't know either and I’m waiting -just like my characters. But I believe that film is one of the few ways to make people think about and feel what it is to be human.