Mrs. Boon is taken to a nursing home. She can no longer live by herself and her war memories of the Japanese POW camp increasingly determine her life; she is clearly suffering from a concentration-camp syndrome. The young and largely immigrant nursing home staff does not really see what is the matter or know much about the history Mrs. Boon lives in, which elicits some unadulterated racist statements from her. Things grow worse when the new resident Mrs. Cohen arrives, a Jew who survived Auschwitz. And they are not the only ones in the home with a 'war past'.
Acting
Ann Hasekamp and Annet Nieuwenhuyzen deliver performances that refuse easy sympathy.
Writing
Script dares to make victims perpetrators of their own prejudice.
Director
Doesjka van Hoogdalem
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Dutch cinema rarely confronts its colonial past in Indonesia; this film quietly indicts that silence through Mrs. Boon's unexamined victimhood.
Director Doesjka van Hoogdalem reportedly cast actual nursing home residents as extras, blurring fiction with the real isolation of elderly survivors.
NL
