It is only within the last 15 years that the Dutch have made films set in their former colony of Indonesia. Nations have a way of dealing with their traumatic past through psychological patterns such as denial, sublimation and suppression. When the famous Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens completed Indonesia Calling in 1946, in which he criticized Dutch colonial politics, his film was banned in Holland. Ivens was regarded almost as a traitor and he only returned to Holland in the eighties. Of course, by then, a different generation was in power than the one responsible for colonialism. Since then several documentaries and also feature films have been made situated in colonial Indonesia.

The film Mother Dao the Tortoiselike by Vincent Monnikendam (Holland, 1991) is neither documentary nor feature film. It is composed of archival material from 200 documentaries about Indonesia made during Dutch rule.

One of the opening titles reads: ‘A cinematographic imagination of the Dutch-Indonesian colonies 1912-1933’. Thus it acknowledges that subjectivity and interpretation are intrinsic to any filmic construction. That it does so in a work made entirely of archival imagery - or found footage if you like - is even more remarkable since such films often claim to reveal ‘reality’ or ‘truth’...

Barbara Meter