Monique Verhoeckx

They were expecting a nice hotel, but instead arrived at the barracks of WW II transit camp Westerbork in 1950. After gaining independence in 1949, Indonesian Dutchmen had the choice: become Indonesian or remain Dutch and leave for Holland. Along with two Dutch-Indonesian families, including her mother, filmmaker Monique Verhoeckx revisits the former transit camp.

Father and son, Senior and Junior, try coming to terms with their war trauma by flatly denying reality in Flat Earth by Monique Verhoeckx. The character of Senior, played by Joris Smit, was inspired by the filmmaker’s grandfather who was a POW in one of the Japanese internment camps during WWII, where he was forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. He died from the effects a few years later. In this personal film, young veteran Senior lives on in a surreal monitoring space. On his monitors, he observes his now elderly Indonesian son Junior, and looks back in in time. When images from the war involuntarily return to him, Senior finds himself in contemporary Thailand while he re-experiences the war. Strong, contradictory emotions arise in him in relation to his son. Gradually, a hidden history is revealed.