Go to content
Soon after WW II, some 30,000 Dutch soldiers left for the Netherlands East Indies to restore the colonial rule. There, they met exotic women with whom some boys had an affair and others - often in vain - made wedding plans. An estimated one thousand children were born from these contacts. Half-breeds without fathers who later, in the independent country of Indonesia, were considered occupiers' children. Who were threatened and often ended up in orphanages because there was no money to feed them. Some sixty years later, Annegriet Wietsma portrays Dutch war veterans, Indonesian women and children who were born from the mix. These are harrowing stories. One of the children, who has meanwhile emigrated to the Netherlands: 'My father hasn't accepted me. Not a single state accepted us. We're in fact... well, by accident.' Apart from the interviews, pictures of modern Indonesia, special archive footage, extracts from the Polygoon newsreel and private photographs complement the stories of these 'war love babies'.

Title: Tuan Papa
Year: 2010
Duration : 1 hour, 20 minutes
Category: Long Documentary
Edition: NFF 2010

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.

Stills

Still