Als een vlieg naar de vlam

Like a fly to a flame, the young and well-to-do Alexandrine Tinne is drawn to the African continent. It is an instinct, she writes in one of her approximately one hundred surviving letters. Through quotations from these, the adventurer who died in 1869 gets a voice. Her story is told from the perspective of the stay-behind who tries to form an image of Africa on the basis of her letters (that sometimes arrived in the Netherlands only months later) and various items that are available in Holland: pictures, paintings, drawings and stuffed animals. It is clear from the start that Tinne is consciously taking great risks. She writes back home that a group of Africans is provoked by European and Arab slave traders to such a degree that they instantly kill every Caucasian crossing their path. Besides being a thrilling reconstruction of the adventures of a fearless woman, the film also rediscovers the Africa of those days, which was registered in pictures for the first time.