Vincent Fitz-Jim | Daniël (Daniel) / 2012

house by the river

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martijn Cousijn and Vincent Fitz-Jim (screenplay), Vincent Fitz-Jim (director) Daniël (Daniel) / 2012 [8 minutes]

 

This lovely Dutch coming of age movie has no dialogue, leading the viewer through it’s simple moment of transcendence through the acting, the lovely images, and its music (by The Album Leaf).

   A young boy (Bas de Vries), dressed in a yellow shirt, rides through the fields on his bike before laying down among marigolds for a morning nap, having travelled to a spot by the river. Suddenly, from a tree overhead, a small sparrow falls beside him. As he scoops it up to protect and nurse him, he suddenly sees another image shadowing over him, a lovely young girl (Eva Oosters), carrying a large stick in her hand.

    Before he can even begin to realize what is happening, she has rowed him by boat to a lovely house on the river’s edge. There she presents him with birdcage, in which the boy happily places he injured bird, and smiles deeply at the boy, obviously seeing him as a possible new boyfriend.

    The boy and girl go swimming, joined by the brother; but it quickly becomes clear the boy prefers the company of the brother to the sister.

    Soon after, however, the two, the boy and the girl lie in the grass to dry off, while the brother remains on the small dock looking off into the water. The girl gets up, dries off, and moves inside, applying eyebrow pencil to her lashes, determined to attract the newcomer.

    A few minutes later, her good-looking older brother (Frederik Stuut), slightly older also than the boy, appears, watching the bird in the cage and, in particular, keeping his eye on his sister’s new catch.

   But the two boys, in the meantime, catch each other’s glance, returning to the birdcage where they check up on the bird and gradually move toward each other for a kiss.

   However, before they can join up, the bird falls from its swing to the floor of the cage, the girl suddenly appearing from the other side and whisking the cage off is if it never existed.

    In the next frames we can see the two boys burying the dead sparrow, their hands brushing across one another’s as they proceed.

     The girl stands up against the house, obviously in a fit of pique, as her brother now rows the boy back to where he had originally begun his morning journey. He deposits him back to where the has left his bicycle, gently kissing him on the cheek before the boy rides off.

     Gay teenage love was never so beautifully innocent as in this film.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).