Take Me Somewhere Nice
- Directed by: Ena Sendijarević
- Released: 2022 (educational)
- Year of Production: 2019
It’s one debacle after another for Alma (newcomer Sara Luna Zorić). When her long-estranged father is hospitalized in his native Bosnia, a not-quite-headstrong young woman leaves her home in The Netherlands to visit him. When she lands at the airport with a few Bosnian phrases and a new dress, her distracted older cousin Emir neglects to drive her to the hospital, preferring to hang out with his buddy Denis, “who has a girlfriend, so don’t even think about it.”
After dyeing her hair and outlasting her patience, she hits the road on her own, quickly losing her luggage, her money, and her mooring. Along a bizarre chain of events and interactions with a cast of road-weary characters, Alma faces disappointment after disappointment with devil-may-care detachment and a newfound maturity.
In its breathless series of hotels, cars, buses, and waiting rooms, Take Me Somewhere Nice captures the dreary, fish-out-of-water isolation of the unfamiliar highway. An endearing update of Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, fused with the jazzy cynicism of Wim Wenders’ and Jim Jarmusch’s 70’s road movies, and the stark, sunlit despair of a David Hockney painting.
Recipient of the Special Jury Prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Take Me Somewhere Nice is the unpredictable, neon-tinted feature debut for Ena Sendijarević, a Bosnian-born refugee raised in Holland who is now one of Dutch cinema’s fastest rising talents. Her film’s breezy wit and pastel color palette disguise dark truths about national identity, gender, and coming-of-age, making it the first essential road movie about the TikTok generation.
Mill Valley International Film Festival Official Selection 2019
Vermont International Film Festival Official Selection 2019
Chicago European Union Film Festival Official Selection 2019
Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival of New York Official Selection 2019
Winner of the Heart of Sarajevo award for Best Feature Film at the 2019 Sarajevo Film Festival
“Handsomely shot, with a brash candy colour palette and skittish, off-kilter framing. A film which combines a sense of youthful rebellion with an interrogation of the contradictions at the heart of one girl’s life and of the Europe she lives in.” – Screen Daily
“Take a hefty amount of Jim Jarmusch, mix in a few heaping tablespoons of David Lynch, leaven it all with Bosnian absurdism and you can envision ‘Take Me Somewhere Nice,’ the stylistically quirky debut feature from Ena Sendijarević.” – Variety
Ena Sendijarević (1987) is an Amsterdam based, Bosnian-born filmmaker. She studied Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität Berlin, before graduating from the Netherlands Film Academy as a writer/director in 2014. She wrote and directed several short films, including TRAVELLERS INTO THE NIGHT (2013) and FERNWEH (2014). Her latest short, IMPORT (2016), premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section of the Cannes Film festival 2016. Ena's debut feature film TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE (2019) had its world premiere in the Rotterdam Film Festival 2019 TIGER competition, where Ena won the Special Jury Award for outstanding artistic achievement.
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