Ambition can take you quite far and Patria is a good example of this. First time director Klaas van Eijkeren wanted to make the first Dutch movie about the first world war. He based the story on the letters soldier Arthur Knaap (Timothy Flohr) sent to his father while he was fighting. This Dutch-Indonesian young man lived in France and decided to join the foreign legion to fight in the trenches. It is clear that van Eijkeren really invested a lot of time in his research to transform this into a full length film. Ambition unfortunately doesn’t always mean that you will be able to get your passion project financed, which van Eijkeren had big issues with. He finally managed to get a small amount of money, 15000 euros, and decided he would make the movie with this very limited budget.
The movie opens at the moment in which Arthur is still living in France and when his father returns to the Netherlands. Hij hears the news about the war and decides to fight for his country. After a short training he goes into the trenches and sends letters to his parents to tell them how he’s doing.
Despite the low-budget, the film looks good and manages to convincingly show the feeling of fighting in the trenches. So visually it looks good, but this isn’t always the case when it comes to the sound. The sound effects for the guns never convince and the soundtrack, which mainly consists of synthesizer music isn’t varied enough. My expectation about a movie which is set in the trenches is to get a feeling of what it was like to live there day in, day out, in small spaces with a few men. Except the actual fights the movie unfortunately doesn’t show that enough. This is a missed opportunity of generating a bond between viewer and characters. Because you don’t get to know them enough, you aren’t as moved when something happens to them. The acting isn’t always strong, resulting in dialog missing weight.
Despite that criticism I still think it is impressive what has been made on such a small budget and I’m interested to see what director Klaas van Eijkeren would be able to do with a bigger budget. He shows that ambition can take you a long way. With more money that could take him all the way and result in something really good.
