Miep Bakker, Museon-Omniversum ‘Boys are taken away from their mothers’. Drawing from one of the camps
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Broadcasting West
NOS News•today, 09:52•Changed today, 11:01
There are hardly any images of Japanese camps during the Second World War, and certainly none of women and girls. As a result, few documentaries have been made about the camps in the former Dutch East Indies. A Dutch filmmaker late in the documentary When I close my eyes thirteen women who survived speak.
It is nice that they are now being heard, says director Pieter van Huystee. That hasn’t happened in a long time. “What united the women who experienced it was the frustration that they were never heard in the Netherlands after the Second World War,” he says. Broadcasting West. “It is not about who suffers the most, of course we must commemorate May 4 and 5, but it is also time to hear the story from Indonesia.”
This is the trailer for ‘When I Close My Eyes’:
Van Huystee came up with the idea to make the film as early as 1981. “Only then was an article published about the second-generation camp syndrome for people from the Dutch East Indies. That was the first time I thought I had to tell this story,” he told the regional broadcaster. “Never before has an ambitious film been made about it. That’s very strange.”
His own mother and grandmother had been in the Japanese women’s camp Tjideng. Only after they had both died did Van Huystee realize that he had not asked much about their experiences.
In When I close my eyes, which is now showing in cinemas, the filmmaker asks thirteen women who survived the Japanese camps the questions he did not dare to ask his mother.
Drawings
There are few archive images from Indonesia after the Japanese capitulation. Van Huystee did discover many drawings made by women or girls, complete with captions. “Of the horrors, but also the fun they had. The drawings match the stories of the women. They sometimes literally tell the same story.”
2024-03-29 08:52:50
#Women #speak #documentary #Japanese #camps
