It has been quite a year for Brussels-born director Laura Wandel. Last July saw the premiere of her debut feature film, Playground, at the Cannes film festival; since then, this stomach-churning drama about the psychological minefield of the schoolyard has gone on to garner awards and adulation at festivals around the world and became Belgium’s entry for the 2022 best international feature Oscar..
Playground is about a seven-year-old girl named Nora who must quickly adapt to the social order of her new school with older kids, which includes her brother, Abel, who has his own bully-shaped obstacles to overcome. “What I was interested in,” says Wandel, “is a young child who leaves the world of their family and finds themselves confronted with a new society. The challenge of integration is something we find at many stages of our lives – this need to fit in.” This, she believes is made all the more complicated by the bonds of the sibling relationship: “When you enter this new society, what are you prepared to let go? What are you prepared to become?”
Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is the way it plunges the viewer into the nerve-jangling noise and tension of the school environment. From the first moment – in which Nora is seen tearfully clinging to her father at the school gates – to the last, the camera remains at Nora’s eye level. “It took me a long time – five years – to write the script,” she says. “I went and spent a lot of time in schools. I needed a refresher. I couldn’t base everything on my personal history and memory.”
“I felt that the angle was the best way for the spectator to feel completely immersed in that experience, to be at that level and, hopefully, reconnect with their own childhood.” Adults who appear in the film are often cropped at the waist, like the grownups in cartoons, though Wandel is adamant that her film is devoid of judgment regarding how they deal with the situations that arise. “It meant that when you see them, it’s because they’re suddenly crouching down; they’re really listening, they’re really hearing, and trying to engage directly.”
This compositional device creates a powerful visual effect, but it presumably placed more pressure on the child actors, particularly Maya Vanderbeque, who plays Nora. Wandel says she felt that the only way to manage this was to engage the children in the creative process. “The kids never received the script. It was very important to me that it wasn’t adult dialogue in children’s mouths.” Instead, Wandel worked with a specialist teacher who helped her devise a system for developing the action. “We worked for three months with the children. We would give them a situation and discuss with them where they would go with it. We worked in a way that then led them to, pretty much, what was in the script.” It meant that they brought something of themselves to the film, actively taking part in the creative process. What about the references to TikTok? Wandel laughs. “TikTok came from them.”
The casting process for Vanderbeque involved seeing more than 200 children. “I asked them to draw the playground and tell me the games they play,” recalls Wandel. “Just doing that on camera, she was exploding the screen.” Playground both adopts her perspective but also allows her face to act as the receiver of things taking place outside the frame. “Working with what’s happening off-screen is something that I love because it gives room for the viewer to experience, to live through.” This is partly the reason that the enveloping soundscape of Playground works like a musical score. “Each yell or cry that you hear,” says Wandel, “has been put very specifically at that moment to elevate the anxiety. The brutality of the playground is conveyed through the noise.”
Ultimately, this provides the chaotic milieu in which Nora must find and forge her own path. “Of course Nora discovers violence, but she also discovers goodness, and kindness, which is what I wanted to explore.”
• Playground is released on 22 April in cinemas.
