De man die zich opblies

Bohumil Sole, the Czech inventor of the semtex explosive, committed suicide in 1997 by blowing himself up. Director Rikkert Boonstra reconstructs Sole's life on the basis of interviews with acquaintances and former colleagues. However, many people who were involved at the time refuse to talk about it. Others condemn his party machinations, but praise his skills. In archival footage, we see Sole experimenting with explosives, happy as a child. He considered himself a victim of the communist regime that first honoured and later arrested him. Sole thinks because he knew too much about experiments with semtex, which became especially known in the West as a terrorist weapon - for example in the attack on the PanAm plane above the Scottish town of Lockerbie. Bit by bit, Boonstra explains the complex relationships between the personal, professional and political life in Czechoslovakia.