How can you tell a young boy that his sister is dead? How does this young boy then tell his father the news? And how does this same father say it to his wife? In the intriguing Between 10 and 12 the admirable characters have this impossible task to do.
For his directorial feature film debut, Peter Hoogendoorn started with events he lived himself. He even filmed in the same places, in Rotterdam, where his sister died and where he had to announce it to his father. But the film is more distant than it seems from what these personal antecedents suggest, and this is certainly not a bad thing. Hoogendoorn does not put us at the place of a member of the family. The attention shifts, while the group widens every time someone learns the terrible news: from the police to the son and his girlfriend, then to the father, then to the mother.
The only characters’ point of view we share is the one of the girlfriend –the stranger–, who is in an awkward position, particularly uncomfortable at being in the heart of this intimate drama. But what emerges even more is perhaps a point of view of sadness, which draws her like at the side of an abyss.
Hoogendoorn takes always time to observe the simple everyday life of family members before they learn the horrible news. As a spectator, you do not live first with their pain, but you observe above all how they face the pain that falls on them, in masterly choreographed scenes where the smallest little gesture changes significantly.
(Joost Broeren, de Film Krant)