Still: Nusa Ina - Anne Jan Sijbrandij

Anne Jan Sijbrandij’s short film Nusa Ina (a world premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight) is one of several recent Dutch documentaries probing into the country’s colonial past. Its main subject is Loey Tamaëla, a Moluccan living in the Netherlands. He still pines for the lost world of his childhood on the island of Seram, known locally as Nusa Ina, which means ‘mother island.’ His family left because of the political tensions within Indonesia following the Moluccan fight for independence. His father had been an officer in The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army.

Nusa Ina was made by its director as his graduation film at RITCS (Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound), the leading Belgian film school. “I made it for my documentary masters course,” the young director explains. Even before making Nusa Ina, he had begun to explore his own family heritage in an earlier short, The Silence Of A Flower. “I started digging into Indonesia and the history of colonisation…we call it the Dutch-Indonesian silence.”

The new doc’s subject is Loey, a family friend. Sijbrandij has known him all his life but knew only vaguely about his past. “What I did was I went to him just to know more about the topic. I didn’t want to make a film about him initially,” he recalls. But the more he discovered about Loey, the keener he became to make him the subject of the film. 

Nusa Ina benefits from some very rich archive material. This includes some very evocative 8mm footage shot by Loey’s father, a keen amateur filmmaker. Loey had kept this footage for years in his attic and Sijbrandij laser-scanned it.

“He [Loey] is really a thinker. He doesn’t talk that much…he holds a lot in,” the director says of his enigmatic subject. “I can never really know what he truly feels.” 

Loey dreams a lot of returning to Molucca but he’s a pragmatist who knows this is unlikely to happen. As time passes, he and his family are becoming more and more integrated into Dutch society and the links with Nusa Ina are loosening. 

Sijbrandij left film school last year. He has worked as an editor and researcher on other directors’ projects. He is now planning further films on the Dutch colonial legacy in East Asia. “I am far from finished with knowing enough about it,” he signs off.

Still: Hotel Mokum

Hotel Mokum* is about a cheap, shabby hotel (previously called Hotel Marnix) close to the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. Tourists stayed here, drinking and smoking weed on the stairs. When it closed down a couple of years ago, a squatters’ collective took it over. The new occupants were young idealists protesting against the large number of vacant properties in Amsterdam at a time when there is a chronic housing shortage. 

Young self-taught filmmaker Yannesh Meijman was one of the squatters. His short documentary, produced through leading production outfit Halal, is a world premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight. 

In 2018, he made Radio Voorwaarts, a short fiction film about the last party thrown by a group of alternative house dwellers and misfits before their eviction. The new film covers similar terrain. As we see in the documentary, the squatters live in the newly named Hotel Mokum for just over 40 days. They repair the property, put in plumbing and a functioning toilet, and many people sleep there. People would get sick “because we had all this pigeon shit and it was also dirty and dusty,” says director Meijman. However, the squatters did everything they could to improve their living conditions. Nonetheless, the police eventually evict them in blunt and brutal fashion. 

“It was really fun. Obviously, it was also stressful,” the director adds of the squatting period. He had somewhere else to stay and so wasn’t sleeping there all the time but was present throughout the occupation. “It took a lot of our energy to turn the space into a place that was liveable in, but it was also super gratifying. There was just a high creative energy in that time in a way I’ve never experienced [before].”

As an artist and filmmaker, Meijman is outspoken in his criticism of town planning in Amsterdam - in particular, the huge number of unoccupied properties in the city at a time many are struggling to find homes. 

The director hopes to use squatters’ organisations to get Hotel Mokum seen. “I want to do a distribution strategy that will target squats throughout the Netherlands and Europe, the world even,” Meijman says. He is planning to work with website radar.squat.net and will offer it for free to any squat that wants to screen it. He is also hoping for more conventional distribution. Meanwhile, he is planning further films in a similar vein. “This doc-fiction approach to filmmaking, I find quite interesting…I want to continue working around the theme of scarcity of space and how people are creative with their response to this.” 

IDFA takes place on November 8 - 19. For an overview of Dutch docs selected for IDFA 2023, inlcuding screening schedule, click here.  ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund