Offscreen we hear a man’s gentle voice talking. It is the late 1980s, the young art student Tan has just moved to Amsterdam. Approximately once a fortnight, her father in Australia writes to her. In parallel Tan combines her father’s letters with documentary film images from the silent era in an evocative soundscape. In a voice-over spoken by actor Ian Henderson, we get to know him, his life, his relationship with his daughter, and increasingly, the times he lives in. Effortlessly he switches from the minutiae of domestic life or local politics to momentous historical events of the time: the Tiananmen Square massacre, the end the communism in Eastern Europe, Mandela’s election in South Africa. Events which, to this day, cast long shadows.
As the film unfolds we see rare and little known images of daily life in The Netherlands from 100 years ago, selected from the archives of the Netherlands Eye Filmmuseum. Unforgettable scenes – often tinted, sometimes even painstakingly coloured by hand – which offer entry into a world both familiar and unknown. The juxtaposition between word and image is striking. Embracing both small and large – the personal and the universal – it is as if the letter-writer discovers these images together with us, the viewer. Windmills, clogs, fishing boats, cows and tulips, they are all there. But mainly we see people at work. The resulting film is a hypnotic montage – an unexpectedly emotional voyage through time and place, questioning the current status quo while hovering somewhere between dream and reality.
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