Such a horizontal orientation allowed Meijer\u2019s 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\u2019s incendiary rhetoric back in the frame.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat explains why the process was so intense for us,\u201d recalls Meijer. \u201cSure, you have a clear chronology in the form of Fortuyn\u2019s biography, but that doesn\u2019t give you the real subtext of what is happening on the ground.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCutting 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,\u201d Meijer explains about bringing to the fore the blowback that brown and black people endured shortly afterward.\u200b<\/p>\n
This tendency to prioritize ordinary people erased from the annals of recent history reveals the organizing principle of\u00a0Fortuyn: On-Hollands: \u201cto give you the feeling that everything is rooted in daily life,\u201d Meijer states.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwanted to start from the streets, to show the neighborhoods and communities actually affected by the political developments.\u201d He continues, \u201cI was in the penultimate year of elementary school when Fortuyn\u2019s murder happened. I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt some point,\u201d Meijer jokes about Toll\u2019s editing, \u201cwe almost got sick of seeing all those kids popping up on screen. But it\u2019s because of Festus\u2019s 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\u2019s his sensibility that\u2019s felt in every episode.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, it leads to the most critical questions this otherwise nuanced and carefully balanced documentary poses. Meijer continues: \u201cWho has ownership of the Netherlands? Who does a territory belong to? To whom do the streets belong? For us, it\u2019s simple: the streets belong to the kids. And that was Festus\u2019s 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\u2019re the adults of today.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 34, Toll is a prodigious filmmaker and editor in the Netherlands, whose graduation film,\u00a0We Will Maintain (2017), is widely regarded as one of the country\u2019s best recent documentary shorts. Flexing an incredible mastery of editing, the eclectic film employs Toll\u2019s Dutch-Kenyan background as a critical tool for an incendiary dissection of the Netherlands\u2019 supposed multicultural crisis. Anxiously jumping between a vast range of source material\u2014voice messages, archival home footage, and strobing textual overlays\u2014the 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, \u201cWe Will Maintain stemmed from frustrations with the specter of Wilders. I used that short to vent directly about him. While working on\u00a0Fortuyn: On-Hollands, I realized that my autobiographical graduation film planted the seed for how I processed all the footage for Menna\u2019s film. Now I see that my initial frustrations were also a product of Fortuyn\u2019s political project.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n
Meijer can vividly recollect the moment of seeing\u00a0We Will Maintain for the first time alongside a scout of IDFA and saying to him, \u201cThis is the one. This is the film.\u201d She adds, \u201cIt 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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. \u201cSo the unchecked racism of Fortuyn,\u201d she shares, \u201cis closely tied to my own memories of growing up in the Netherlands, especially when I looked at my father.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Such a horizontal orientation allowed Meijer\u2019s team to construct a uniquely nuanced documentary that achieves what 25 years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7065,7068,7066,7063,7067,7064,1192,6],"class_list":["post-8352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-netherlands","tag-documentary","tag-documentary-film","tag-documentary-magazine","tag-ida","tag-independent-film","tag-international-documentary-association","tag-magazine","tag-netherlands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}