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“The devil is in your body.” That was the reaction of the Brazilian relatives of the Brazilian-Dutch Jean, when he told them years ago that he liked men. In his later life, Jean struggles with depression and dark thoughts, which he talks about in the documentary From lifewhich premiered this afternoon at the Roze Filmdagen in Amsterdam.
The reason for the film are hard figures: according to the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP), almost half of Dutch lesbian, gay and bisexual adults have ever had suicidal thoughts, more than five times as many as the entire population.
Thoughts of suicide are even more common among trans people. According to 113 Suicide prevention transgender people make a suicide attempt about five to ten times more often than non-trans people.
Break taboo
Filmmaker Tim Dekkers knew those figures, he says on the phone. But when he heard from his good friend Henk Burger that he had already lost more than ten acquaintances from the LGBTI community to suicide, he realized that he wanted to make a documentary about this theme. Because it is hardly talked about, he says, and little is known about it in the community. “I wanted to break that taboo and offer guidance to people in mental distress.”
For the movie From life Dekkers and Burger followed three LGBTI people for two years. In addition to Jean, Solange and Kris also tell their story in the documentary. All three have known black periods, in which they had suicidal thoughts and attempted suicide.
“Adolescents are cruel anyway, and if you are a minority or outside the group, you will be bullied,” says Solange, who as a trans woman did not feel accepted in her environment for a long time. “I thought: then just a way out,” she says in the film.
Solange is now active as a model, among other things. In 2020 she was the first trans woman to win a regional beauty pageant in the Netherlands:
As a teenager in the Frisian village of Harkema, Kris also felt like the odd one out. His high school days were an “accumulation of negative misery and shit all the time,” he says in the documentary. His peers called him effeminate and gay, partly because he had a higher voice than others. “I couldn’t take it anymore, that new day.”
Kris has been living in Amsterdam for a few years now, where he is a member of the city council. In the documentary he goes back to Harkema:
According to documentary maker Dekkers, in the first twenty years of life, everyone creates a kind of “underlayer” that you can fall back on for the rest of life. If that layer is thin because you were bullied or not accepted, for example, “then you will fall right through it if things go wrong”.
Seeking help is often difficult, Dekkers saw. “As a minority you want to show that you are doing well, that you can succeed and have a good time just like the rest. The pink community may hide behind a facade of success, parties, glamor and glory more than others. We prefer not to talk about the dark sides.”
It was a big mistake not to share that darkness and thoughts inside sooner, says the ‘muscular acrobat’ Jean in the documentary:
Filmmaker Dekkers hopes that his documentary can remove the subject of suicide as a “crowbar” from the taboo atmosphere. “We should not look away and get stuck in superficialities, but pay attention to each other as a community, especially if someone has not been heard from for a long time.”
Dekkers has offered his documentary to regional chapters of the LGBTI interest group COC Nederland and to hundreds of LGBTI film festivals worldwide. “I especially hope people talk about it.”
