Still: Neshoma - Sandra Beerends

Sandra Beerends’ Neshoma**(a Hebrew word that mean ‘soul’) spans the interwar years, from 1919, when the lives of Amsterdam’s Jewish population was infused with a new sense of hope, through to 1942 when the city’s Jews were transported to Germany, supposedly to be employed in boosting Germany’s war effort. 

In the film we follow the fictional character of Rusha, initially a teenager living within a working-class Jewish household, whose life story is told through archive sourced from numerous sources, and through letters she send to her older brother Max who had left for Indonesia for a new life in the Dutch colony just before the conclusion of WW1. They also play chess via correspondence, and the games moves follow the pattern of the history that subsequently unfolds.

Neshoma is in equal parts joyous, tragic, informative and cinematic, depicting both family and societal life within a monochrome and hectic Amsterdam as well as the unfolding of global events, culminating in Nazi jackboots and armoured cars defiling the streets of Amsterdam. 

It also forms a companion piece, of sorts, with director Sandra Beerends’ They Call Me Babu** (2019) which tells, also through archive and found footage, the life story of a fictional Indonesian nanny in the early 20th Century. 

What is fascinating in Neshoma is how Beerends never resorts to hindsight in telling the story. We hear Rusha’s narration as if in real time, and both the oppression of the Jews and the city’s resistance to the German is only fully evident when the full impact of invasion is felt. At which point Rusha, her family and her community are no longer seen as Amsterdammers but solely as Jews, and her narration stops just as she is ‘relocated’ to Germany…

Throughout the film, Beerends’ method offers almost unlimited potential in terms of storytelling, with wonderful archive throwing up delicious asides, such as the well-dressed woman on the factory floor who turns out to be snooty wife of the company owner, or the brazen woman who goes straight to the head of the very male cinema line. 

A flip side is when the director has a scene in mind that she needs footage for, such as the drunken pianist she heard stories of in the city’s TipTop Cinema, a local cinema in the Jewish neighbourhood that doubled as a community centre. Her researcher Hans van den Berg eventually found archive of a beer-swilling pianist hilariously accompanying the visuals on screen before him, and so the segment was complete.

Beerends herself is of Indonesian heritage. Did she ever fear that she was not qualified to tell this story of Jewish life during this period? It was a concern that she articulated to her Jewish husband.

He had reservations “not because he was thinking that I will not be showing integrity and respect, but because that history is still an open wound,” she says.

“But I think maybe I feel familiar with this wound because my mum had also a war trauma from the Japanese camps in Indonesia. So, it's not for nothing that I know a lot of couples in Amsterdam where one is Jewish and one is from Indonesia, because there are stories to share how it is to live in captivity.”

Neshoma is the third film in as many years that Amsterdam-based Family Affair Films has made to document this period in history, following on from Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening, about 1938 found footage of a pre-WWII village in Poland, and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City in which the past and the present collide in an exploration of daily life in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation. “They are three films on different angles, but in a way they also belong together,” says Beerends.

One story we are told in Neshoma is the construction of the Tuschinski picture palace and its renaming of Tivoli during the war in order to expunge any Jewish associations. On November 17, the film will play the Tuschinski’s (hopefully) sold-out main auditorium. 

“It is known as the world’s most beautiful cinema theater, and it is a great honour for us to premiere Neshoma there,” says Beerends. That said, don’t expect to see a beer-swilling pianist accompanying the film’s beautiful and dynamic visuals on the screen before him..

For more information about IDFA 2024, click here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Production Incentive