Where Dragons Live
Following the death of their parents, Harriet and her siblings must unpack their childhood fears as they prepare to sell their dragon-filled Oxfordshire home. Suzanne Raes’ film follows the Impey family through a major transition: rifling through the contents of their childhood home in preparation to sell it, with their own children watching on. Between the clutter and the boxes, the siblings find themselves haunted by the memories of their late parents: a dragon-obsessed father and an exacting mother, and the esoteric collections of objects they left behind. Working through her award-winning documentary collective, Docmakers, veteran filmmaker Raes (0.03 Seconde, Two Men, Close to Vermeer) carves out a disarmingly tender rumination on parent-child relationships. Giving equal weight to each sibling, balancing the light and shade of the physical and emotional spaces of their lives, Where Dragons Live also features some dazzling visuals in the way it presents this personal history.
Suzanne Rae
Suzanne Raes has been working as an independent filmmaker for more than 20 years. Her early films The Houses of Hristina (2007), The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island (2009), and The Successor of Kakiemon (2012) premiered at IDFA and won several awards at international film festivals. Her film Come Closer about Boudewijn de Groot received the IDFA Music Audience Award in 2015.
For her film about the Rotterdam social service, Quid pro quo (2015) Raes won a Golden Calf, the most important film award in the Netherlands. The international co-production Ganz: How I Lost My Beetle (2019) had a theatrical release in the Netherlands and has been broadcast in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland.
In 2023, her film Close to Vermeer was the only Dutch feature-length documentary that qualified for an Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature, following successful theatrical runs in the Netherlands, United States and Germany. The film was also nominated for a Golden Calf and won the Special Jury Prize at Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival. Close to Vermeer has been sold to 15 countries to date.
","author_name":"Martin Lennon"}