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.
Credits
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Production company
Purple Earth Productions
Distributor NL
De Filmbank
NFF Archive
You are now in the NFF Archive. The archive contains contains information on film, TV and interactive productions that were screened at past festival editions. The NFF does not dispose of this material. For this, please contact the producer, distributor or broadcaster. Sometimes, older films can also be found at the Eye Film Museum or the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.