In her film '100 Girls A Place We Go', Sietske Van Aerde takes viewers through a series of playful transformations. Inspired by the nymphs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who are constantly changing shape as a result of harm inflicted upon them by the gods, the film tells the story of several people searching for ways to exist in a world that can sometimes feel heavy. Van Aerde films her own surroundings, bringing friends, artists, and passersby into view as they speak about themselves. We see a range of inner portraits unfold.

The narrative begins with drawings of half-human, half-animal beings, figures in the midst of transformation. Due to Van Aerde’s background in costume design, these resemble sketches for possible costumes, designs that allow one to assume a new form. The film explores the role of clothing, makeup, and hair as tools of transformation, ways in which people define their identity. A series of colorful characters, whose outward appearance either reflects or conceals their inner world, pass before us. They speak about their childhood, about deviating from the norm, and about how they have transformed, or are still transforming, themselves.

The film moves fluidly between different registers. Van Aerde films people she encounters in everyday life: a woman on the tram wearing a leopard-print coat, a girl with long, dyed red hair, people whom she suspects express themselves, consciously or unconsciously, through their appearance. Alongside this, metamorphoses are visualized through body paint: characters transform into the moon, a tree, a spider, a parrot, an ox. A recurring thread throughout the film is the story of two characters who have each transformed themselves in their own way and find recognition and love in one another.

'100 Girls A Place We Go' is a film about the places, both physical and imagined, that we go to in order to be.