The Dutch Women

In this short,ruthlessly brilliant international sensation, an obsessive theater maker and his doomed ensemble set out into the jungle where two Dutch women disappeared, repurposing the facts of the case into an unwieldy – and increasingly real – work of art

A renowned writer receives a call from a famous theater producer desperate to involve her in her latest project—a play set in the South American jungle. At the center of the play is an unsolved true crime case from several years earlier, in which two Dutch women disappeared, leaving only a digital camera behind, whose ninety-one images leave strange traces of what the women wanted to capture.

The writer agrees to join the director and his ensemble on their journey, to record her impressions of what she sees. When she arrives she feels a kind of danger, a discomfort that washes over her in waves, though she is unable to tell whether this comes from the dense landscape and climate or from the director’s plans. The disorientated feeling she gets from being displaced, the deserted roads, abandoned plantations, the silences are all the things that the director has asked her to transcribe. The deeper she goes, the more she loses: language, concepts, her own self, her sense of the world.

At once cerebral and immediate, unsettling and profound, The Dutch Women, by the Swiss literary sensation Dorothee Elmiger, tells a story of humans and monsters, of fear and violence, of being lost in the universe that is both hugely modern and ancient.