A father watches his son through screens while his own war refuses to end.
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.
Direction
Verhoeckx turns personal family archive into devastating fiction.
Cinematography
The monitor frames create suffocating distance between father and son.
Acting
Smit's silence screams louder than any dialogue could.
Director
Monique Verhoeckx
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Thai-Burma Railway killed over 100,000 forced laborers; Dutch colonial troops were among the forgotten dead, their trauma suppressed in postwar Netherlands.
Verhoeckx cast her own father as Junior—making this not just autofiction but a family exorcism performed by the wounded themselves.
NL
