Schuld en boete

Joppe dreams of love, marriage and children. Being born a boy only complicates things slightly.

In the early eighties, the tough trucker Harm married the shy, country girl Siepie. Thirty years later Harm tells her that he wants to become a woman. That is difficult to hear for Siepie. Not only because she will lose her husband, but also because she is afraid of gossip in their small, Frisian village. Yet she gives Harm the space to openly live as Harriette.

“Job is 2 meters tall and has been my baby for 58 years. I will continue to care for him as long as I can,” says 91-year-old Tineke about her severely disabled adult son. But how long can she keep that up and who needs who: Job Tineke or Tineke Job? A documentary about the limits of motherhood.

We think we know what ethnic profiling is, but what does it feel like? Dutch citizens report on at times bizarre and disconcerting experiences with police checks, where their skin colour routinely makes them suspicious. For years, the police has been aiming to proactively execute security checks in order to arrest more riff-raff. But practise shows that Dutch people with a migration background are regularly stopped without any suspicion of criminal offences. Poignantly, the teacher, the soldier, the lawyer, the rapper, the fellow police officer and other coloured Dutchmen talk about helplessness, frustration, humiliation, alienation, anger and what it feels like to be a suspect from the start. Wry, but insightful indictment of ethnic profiling.

Filmmaker Joey Benistant started filming his life at the age of 17, when his parents gave him a camera for his birthday. He started making jackass style video's with his friend from high school. In the beginning they have a lot of fun, but Joey sees his best friend Matthijs slipping away in excessive drinking and drug use in the years that follow. As Joey and his friends navigate their way through education or work, things are going the other way with Matthijs. This does not scare Joey away, he continues to visit his friend and he continues filming, even in the darkest moments of his existence. Joey tries to get Matthijs to join in his enthusiasm for life. The film shows you how difficult this is when someone is determined not to live past 30.