The cycle of life and death is played out across four generations of the same family in Crocodile Eyes. We talk with filmmaker Ingrid Veninger about her Dogme 95-inspired narrative non-fiction feature.
Crocodile Eyes paints an unfiltered portrait of a multi-generational family over the course of nearly two years, as they go through the physical and emotional hardships of life and death.
As director Ingrid Veninger states, the film explores the process of coping with change and the connections that hold us together.
“It’s about how we process grief and the things we experience in our life. It’s about perception, and how we perceive what is real to us. And it’s about family and the things we experience in our lives,” she says.
Along the way, the film blurs line between documentary and fiction, incorporating scenes of real human birth and dying and calling out the ability of cinema to represent reality.
“It sets up the question of capturing real moments, how realness can be subjective, and can what I feel as being real, be captured authentically through the mechanics of a camera and translate as something real to an audience,” Veninger says.
Shooting with a Sony Handycam, natural lighting and no external mic, “Canada’s Queen of DIY Filmmaking,” as she is sometimes known, set out to make Crocodile Eyes with minimal infrastructure and little intervention.
“I really wanted to interact with the Dogme 95 rules, that vow of chastity created one drunken night by [Thomas] Vinterberg and [Lars] von Trier where they said, ‘Let’s just challenge ourselves in this way,’” she explains. “I was interested in looking at those ten rules 30 years later to see what it would be like to play with them. So that was a core idea.”
“I was interested in looking at those ten rules 30 years later to see what it would be like to play with them.”
In addition to directing the project, Veninger appears as an on-screen version of herself in the film. With the exception of Simon Reynolds (who appears as her husband), the remaining characters are also played by the filmmaker’s real-life family members.
“It started as a fiction, and then the more I started investigating real moments, the fiction dissolved, and it just became this unfiltered sequence of scenes that then found their own structure,” she says. “All this scaffolding of character and structure and plot and the Dogme rules then fell away, and what remained, the distillation of those two years, is the final film.”
With only a set of note cards and no script, Veninger worked in an intuitive way years with little idea of where the film would take her. In the process, she admits, there were times when she tried (unsuccessfully) to give the whole thing up.
“I’d send a voice message to the family saying, ‘This film, it was great. Thank you all. This was a fantastic experience. I’ll use it as research material for something I’m gonna write and shoot. And I’m stopping it,” she recalls. “And, the next day, I’d wake up and the film would grab me by the throat and go, ‘Sorry, you’re not done. I’m still here, and you gotta deal with me.’”
“We were living, breathing, eating, having baths, making love, shitting the world of the film.”
Ultimately, the film’s mix of real and staged elements makes Crocodile Eyes difficult to categorize. The end product, however, is the result of what Veninger describes as a form of “method filmmaking.”
“There was no difference between when we were rolling and when we weren’t rolling. We were just in it. It was completely immersive,” she says. “We were living, breathing, eating, having baths, making love, shitting the world of the film. That’s what Crocodile Eyes was. It was exhausting, but it was amazing.”
Crocodile Eyes is set to make its world premiere in Toronto at this week’s Canadian Film Festival 2025, a milestone Veninger says represents the final leg of the filmmaking experience for herself and her family.
“For my granddaughter, it will be the first time she’s ever seen a movie in a movie theater. So, this is going to potentially be a core memory,” Veninger says. “She’s turning six in May, and so she’s going to remember, and she’s going to see her mother giving birth, and she’s going to see herself magnified 200 times. So that’s going to be a thing.”
She further emphasizes that the setting will be one of the limited opportunities the public will have to see and engage in conversation about the film.
“This film will never be streamable. The festival is the only way that Toronto audiences will see the film,” Veninger says. “The film is not for sale. It’s not going to be distributed. This is a film festival film and we can have live person connections afterwards.”
Find out more about Crocodile Eyes here.
