Such a horizontal orientation allowed Meijer’s team to construct a uniquely nuanced documentary that achieves what 25 years of extensive speculation on the supposed failure of the multicultural state never could: putting the real subjects and subsequent victims of Fortuyn’s incendiary rhetoric back in the frame.
“That explains why the process was so intense for us,” recalls Meijer. “Sure, you have a clear chronology in the form of Fortuyn’s biography, but that doesn’t give you the real subtext of what is happening on the ground.” She points to the episode that delves into the events of September 11, 2001, to illustrate the complex puzzle they were laying. In the Islamophobic response to the terrorist attacks, Fortuyn saw the opportune moment to mainstream his own extremist ideology.
“Cutting away from all that noise, we also want to show how a bicultural mother picks her child up from school and witnesses the [World Trade Center] attacks on television,” Meijer explains about bringing to the fore the blowback that brown and black people endured shortly afterward.
This tendency to prioritize ordinary people erased from the annals of recent history reveals the organizing principle of Fortuyn: On-Hollands: “to give you the feeling that everything is rooted in daily life,” Meijer states.
Festus Toll was tasked with finding such a throughline within the abundance of material Meijer and supervising editor Joost Seelen supplied him with. He explains that with every episode they “wanted to start from the streets, to show the neighborhoods and communities actually affected by the political developments.” He continues, “I was in the penultimate year of elementary school when Fortuyn’s murder happened. I don’t have a strong recollection of the collective impact of that event, which is why I was drawn to the innocence of those children, who are just trying to live in the present moment and are suddenly turned into political subjects.”
“At some point,” Meijer jokes about Toll’s editing, “we almost got sick of seeing all those kids popping up on screen. But it’s because of Festus’s sensibility that we realized what kind of montage film we were actually making. Because of him, the imagery starts to float, creating a meandering context from which the narrative emerges. It’s his sensibility that’s felt in every episode.”
Ultimately, it leads to the most critical questions this otherwise nuanced and carefully balanced documentary poses. Meijer continues: “Who has ownership of the Netherlands? Who does a territory belong to? To whom do the streets belong? For us, it’s simple: the streets belong to the kids. And that was Festus’s starting point, which I thought was incredibly moving. They make up the fabric of daily life at that moment. Back then, they were the owners of the future. Now they’re the adults of today.”
At 34, Toll is a prodigious filmmaker and editor in the Netherlands, whose graduation film, We Will Maintain (2017), is widely regarded as one of the country’s best recent documentary shorts. Flexing an incredible mastery of editing, the eclectic film employs Toll’s Dutch-Kenyan background as a critical tool for an incendiary dissection of the Netherlands’ supposed multicultural crisis. Anxiously jumping between a vast range of source material—voice messages, archival home footage, and strobing textual overlays—the propulsive film steers toward an uncanny scene in which Toll takes a selfie video right next to the current face of Dutch xenophobia: the infamous right-wing politician Geert Wilders. Looking back at his graduation work, Toll remembers, “We Will Maintain stemmed from frustrations with the specter of Wilders. I used that short to vent directly about him. While working on Fortuyn: On-Hollands, I realized that my autobiographical graduation film planted the seed for how I processed all the footage for Menna’s film. Now I see that my initial frustrations were also a product of Fortuyn’s political project.”
Meijer can vividly recollect the moment of seeing We Will Maintain for the first time alongside a scout of IDFA and saying to him, “This is the one. This is the film.” She adds, “It was the most interesting graduation film in a long time, which had everything to do with the ways politics were woven into an intimate story, all through a unique editing process and film language. It was a massive eye-opener.”
Years later, Meijer brought Toll into the mint film office. It was an immediate match, as, just like Toll, Meijer is an iconoclastic director with a bicultural background. Although white-passing, the daughter of an Indonesian father and Dutch mother identifies as a person of color. “So the unchecked racism of Fortuyn,” she shares, “is closely tied to my own memories of growing up in the Netherlands, especially when I looked at my father.”