ENA SENDIJAREVIĆ

“Sweet Dreams”

Sendijarević was born in a small town in Bosnia, but her family fled the country when war broke out, moving to the Netherlands when she was 7 years old. The writer-director’s memories of that tricky adjustment — including taunts from Dutch kids to “go back to your own country” — informed her 2016 short, “Import.”

“There was a lot of absurdity there,” says the writer-director, whose work finds humor in the most unexpected places. That’s the case with her wickedly funny second feature, “Sweet Dreams,” a surrealist period satire set on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies. Selected to represent the Netherlands at the Academy Awards, the movie questions the country’s colonialist past.

“I’ve been living in Amsterdam since I was 17, and I wanted to understand a bit more about this country and how it relates to the rest of the world,” Sendijarević explains.

“Sweet Dreams” also sticks it to the patriarchy, as when the old white guy running the operation suffers a heart attack early on. His wife does not react as most audiences would expect, and from that point forward, it’s the dreams of the female characters’— one his widow, the other his mistress — that power a film full of subversive choices.

“I try to write in images, and that’s when the most interesting scenes come forward,” Sendijarević says. “There was even a version where the size of people would change.”

She graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy, where students were pushed toward social realism. But her sensibility swung hard in the opposite direction, tickled by the playfulness of the Czech New Wave and Yugoslav Black Wave in particular.

“Those films were an entrance to me to make my own style, as well as to use a certain kind of humor,” says Sendijarević, who’s now developing an English-language film — this one set in a desolate natural location.

— Peter Debruge

Reps: no agent, manager or lawyer Influences: Juraj Herz’s “The Cremator.” “All Godard’s films are very political, but extremely playful.”