When filmmaker Roy Seerden receives the news that his mother is seriously ill, he drifts deeper into the night, moving further and further away from everyday life. While searching for his former neighbour Antoine, the boundary between reality and imagination slowly begins to dissolve.
For this documentary, Julia van Emmerik was responsible for the production design. While documentaries are traditionally associated with truthfulness, this project explored what happens when someone’s perception of reality becomes unstable, particularly in moments of grief, when the mind searches for ways to cope with emptiness through distraction or escape.
Julia approached the visual world as an extension of the protagonist’s inner state. The environment was designed to subtly shift with his psychological condition, allowing the world to appear thicker, distorted, and filtered through his subjective experience. To evoke this sense of disorientation, the same house was constructed twice and mirrored, creating a spatial duplication that reflects the gradual loss of grip on reality.
Within this film, production design did not function merely as decoration, but as an inner spatial language, a tangible translation of what it feels like when reality slowly begins to slip away.
Several scenes were carefully staged to intensify this atmosphere of distortion, while elements of constructed reality were introduced into existing environments. These interventions allowed the film to move beyond simple observation and enter the emotional and subjective world of the main character.
