J Paul Johnson
Endless Summer Syndrome (Le syndrome de l’été sans fin) is nothing if not provocative, tackling taboo with visual panache and Hitchcockian tension. Its distinctive visual style, superb performances, and thorny moral dilemmas make it one to watch for as it arrives on digital and in select theaters in North America. In it, a single anonymous phone call exposes the cracks and fissures behind a well-to-do French family’s façade: high-powered lawyer Delphine (Sophie Colon) is told her husband is having an affair with one of her two adopted teen children.
The film’s director, Kavesh Daneshmand, is an Iranian writer, director and producer based in Prague. He is the artistic director of ÍRÁN:CI Film Festival that he founded in Prague in 2011. Daneshmand also teaches film directing at Prague Film School and Iranian Cinema at Charles University. His first short Occasional Showers received the Best Short Film Award in 2016, at the Writers and Critics’ Awards in Iran. His second short Alula (2019) premiered at the 65th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2019.
Gem Deger plays the role of Aslan, one of the family’s two teen children, and he is, like Daneshmand, both a co-writer and co-producer of Endless Summer Syndrome. Deger is a Turkish multi-media director, writer, and actor, liek Daneshmand based in Prague. A pop culture and art fanatic, he developed a subversive form of expression for his critically acclaimed debut feature film Playdurizm, which received five Best Feature or Best Director awards at international festivals.
As Endless Summer Syndrome began its theatrical and streaming run in North America, Daneshmand and Deger spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about their film’s inception and production. The transcript following the video has been edited for space and clarity.
Welcome, both of you, to Film Obsessive. Can I start with you, Kaveh, and have you tell our audience what Endless Summer Syndrome is about?
Kaveh Daneshmand: Endless Summer Syndrome is a story of a mother who receives a phone call about the possibility of her husband having something “going on” with one of the two adopted children. And the story follows this mother as she goes through investigation, through self doubt, to discover whether this allegation is true or not.
It’s a fascinating story. And since the two of you are co-credited with it, can I ask where it comes from and how it took shape in its development?
Kaveh Daneshmand: Well, the the idea, the one-liner of the story was a matter of a discussion between me and Gem one evening. We were brainstorming various stories, and eventually, we reached this point with this mother and we think, Okay, this sounds like an interesting setup. Let’s explore it. And it’s literally as simple as that. We were really workshopping many ideas, thinking, What about this? What about that? And then this one when it was uttered, we were both looking actually, this seems like something we can explore. And that’s how it started.
It strikes me as a setup and a script that both require a degree of sensitivity towards and understanding of your central female protagonist. Could you and Gem speak to that?
Kaveh Daneshmand: Well, I’ll say a little bit. I’m sure Gem can add a lot to it. Of course, it was quite hard to write a female character, right? We had to live in her shoes. And every moment of the story as we were building it, we were thinking, where is she is she mentally? Where is she emotionally? We kept asking ourselves. And of course, this process continued even when we co wrote the script with a French writer [Laurine Bauby] who is a female writer. And then when the story went on to be re-explored by the actors. It went through many, many filters and layers of supervision and observation by various creative forces in the story. Gem had a lot of insights and inputs in the story, not only the main character, but also the other characters, and some of the most important twists in the story. So I’ll leave the rest to Gem to continue.
Gem Deger: Well, regarding the female perspective in the film, honestly, when we were writing the story or not even writing, just constructing the story, I don’t think I personally really focused on the female perspective because I think what this character is going through is would be quite terrorizing regardless of gender. You know, you’re receiving a phone call about one of your kids having an affair with your partner. So regardless of the gender of the lead character, I think it’s a hook as a story. Immediately, you’re interested on this story is going to take us.
I’ve never treated this character in its creation as, you know, a female character or a male character. For me, what was important is that what she is going through, which is which is paranoia, which is very human. So I didn’t really personally, I didn’t really think of her gender throughout the creation of the character.
And can I ask you both are based in Prague, is that correct? And was it always the intent to have the family be French and the film set on the location that you had found?
Gem Deger: Yes, we are [based in Prague]. But as a topic, it’s quite universal. First, we didn’t really think about the setting. Initially we wanted to shoot it in Prague. However, we didn’t want to set the story in Czechia because both of us we don’t really speak Czech. It felt quite irrelevant. Initially, we wanted to make it in English. But then we couldn’t really come up with a believable family who who would speak in English, who would be, you know, native English speakers and live in Prague and go through this. So at that point, we started to really brainstorm over which nationality this family should be. And then we decided that it would be French because we also had some friends in France who who would help us with finding a location and so on. So it was not really calculated, I would say.
I’m curious if there are directors or films which you discussed as potential influences. To me, the film seems in some ways, very much like a paranoiac thriller, but also in the tradition of maternal melodrama without being excessively melodramatic or anything like that.
Kaveh Daneshmand: I will just say one thing that I think sheds light on this process of watching reference films. Gem and I have a long tradition of watching films together. We have a film night that has been going on for a very long time. We have tons of films that we watched together. Of course, as soon as we came up with this idea, our film lines were quite directed to finding exact references that would inspire us. The obvious inspiration was Swimming Pool by François Ozon. And there were plenty of other films, but I think this film was the most iconic reference, visually, the suspense, the swimming pool, the nudity, the sexuality and the tension that’s in the sexuality and the mystery of following this woman who is trying to decipher the environment around her.
You also found yourselves a marvelous location for the shot. Can I have you speak to that?
Kaveh Daneshmand: It is a fantastic chateau, which belongs to a couple who are very, very deeply supportive of culture, and we had a very nice meeting with them, and we [introduced] them to our cinematographer and one of our producers, one of them is from the region where the chateau is. So they knew the chateau owners in person. And they were very supportive of us. It was during the lockdown, so the chateau was locking the empty for the period we wanted to shoot. And they were very kind to let us not only accommodate our cast and crew. In fact, all our cast members were living in the same rooms as their characters in the story is, which was quite fun. And then we also shot the film in the location and beautiful 20 days of a stay in this chateau.
It works incredibly well for the film. And one of the other things I wanted you to comment on was the casting in the film. I’m suspecting that the two of you had always agreed that Gem would play in the film.
Gem Deger: Yes, that was that when we were already writing the story. And the moment when we had the idea, I mean, there was not a debate, you know, it was. I’m [going to play] Aslan, for sure. And as we were writing him, he became more and more me. I mean, I put so many personal things onto that character. So before we even shot it, even on a script level, I was pretty much connected with him. But it wasn’t the case for the rest of the cast, but however, each cast member, we picked them on a very fun process, actually. For example, Sophie [Colon], who plays Delphine, we decided that we want her from a photo only. You know, we had some options of actors who could who could play her. And the moment we saw her face, we were like This is somehow is the woman we’ve been imagining, and it’s really her. So I really feel like cast casted themselves into this film rather than us picking it because I don’t really feel like there was a choice there. You know, we saw these people, and then we were sure that we want to make this film with them.
Props to all of you, and you are excellent in the film. Kaveh, you are making so many interesting directorial choices. Are there a couple that you would wish to speak to for our audience, you know, just in terms of perhaps creating suspense or using the now somewhat unusual squarish aspect ratio for the film or your cinematography, whatever you might like to discuss?
Kaveh Daneshmand: Well, the idea we had when it comes to suspense was we were not planning to hide information from the audiences. You know, minute 50, we know who is in a relationship with who? You know, minute 70, we know there is a suicide. Minute 75, we know that three family members are alive and are giving interviews in the police station. So it’s not the material we wanted to work with, which was unexpected twists. We were thinking on how to tell the story in an exciting way. There are a lot of borrowings from, of course, the great works of Hitchcockian cinema, right? Our main compass what was that form of cinema. That works with very rich suspense. We tried to do as much as we could with our limited number of shooting days, which was ridiculously low.
There were a lot of tricks, clichés, such as the imagination scene of the mother seeing the father and the daughter. Water in the kitchen. It’s a very typical cliché scene, but the way we tried to do it was we tried to do it in a captivating way so that this cliché comes to be acknowledged, not as a cliché. As a very striking, even breathtaking moment, we hoped. So clearly, all these ideas were decided in a group. I was not the only person making the decision. A lot of these decisions were made between me and Jem. Then Laurine [Bauby], who was the co-screen writer, got involved, then the actors got involved, then the DP got involved, art director got involved, sound design.
And I believe that’s why this film is really a result of a group of creative minds. All had one direction, create suspense, meaning full hopefully, and then try to find the best ways given the limited resources we had to execute it.
Did the fact that the script is dealing with such an explicit taboo impact your filmmaking choices in any specific ways?
Kaveh Daneshmand: Well, on a story level, it was already quite explicit. I remember Gem can also talk about it when we would come up with some scenes, for instance, you know, Adia (Frédérika Milano) being naked by the pool just casually. You know, We were thinking, this is not going to be very comfortable, especially after the phone call and after all the paranoia around them. And we were giggling as we were working on the scenes because we knew it would feel uncomfortable, right? Of course, we were already thinking we need to create a very safe environment for our cast.
And we did, and I’m sure Gem agrees that we are quite close to our cast up until today, three years after the principal shooting. So By the time we were shooting, everybody understood what we were doing. There was so much transparency about our film language that actors were completely okay. I mean, Gem was in a very, very intense scene himself. So I think he can speak much better than me about how it feel to deal with nudity, I mean, before we even shot the film.
Gem Deger: I mean, well, that’s the point, you know, because the product, the film you see, you know, it’s only the final result, right? But how we ended up with that film is basically it had so many stages on the way. I think the main stage of why this film is highly provocative. Because we felt like that’s the only way because—I don’t know if you’re aware of how the film industry works in Europe, but Kaveh is from Iran, I’m from Turkey and we both live in Czech Republic, and the film industry in here works with public funds—but usually we’re never eligible for these funds because we’re not from Europe. We’re basically two randos who don’t have a home, literally, trying to make a film on a different culture.
And since the odds are against us, and this includes for distribution and all the later processes of the film, one thing that we had to be was brave and different. You know, there is no place for anything mediocre when you’re working with very limited resources because you don’t want to just make a film, you want to make a film that is going to intrigue people. It’s going to make, people really want to talk about it, hate it even, doesn’t matter, but it has to really bring some sort of an extreme emotions on the audience. So that’s why that was basically the main reason why we wanted to take a provocative road on making this film.
And also, you know, the topic itself. It has so much background to it. There is even a porn category as, you know, father-daughter, father-son, stepfather-stepson, and it goes on and on. So basically, yes, in in the context, it’s quite disturbed, sexually disturbed. It’s f*cked up, yeah, hands down. But again, even though it’s disturbed and it’s f*cked up, people do click onto these pornos and watch and because they’re curious, it really makes them curious in the end. So basically, at that moment, once we had the main idea for the film, we knew that it it’s clickbait, almost, you know.
It’s something that people will find problematic for sure. But also they’ll find it interesting enough to want to see that. So once we were aware of the territory we’re in, we had that deliberate decision: Let’s force this. This is our winning card as an independent filmmakers. This is the catch, and this is what we’re going to play on because we don’t have a named actor. One thing that it can’t be is boring. We knew this was our strong card. We basically just leaned on it and really put that aspect of the film forward.
And I want to congratulate you both for that. And those are the things that make the film exciting, interesting, worth discussing to me. And as you put it, both brave and disturbing. Gem and Kaveh, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us at Film Obsessive today.
Both: Thank you. Thank you.
