Voices

According to one of the texts that open this experimental film essay, "That one is able to speak does not mean that one has a voice." Following the idea that gaps in the collective memory could be compared to images missing from an archive, Miguel Peres dos Santos went in search of material on the theme of migration in the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s TV collection. shows footage of the uprising by the black community in Curacao on May 30, 1969, and the arrival of 150 Dutch marines, followed by a protest demonstration in The Hague. Shortly afterwards, the largely white island of Aruba was granted a “separate status,” as unemployment spread among the black working class. Another scene shows newly recruited Antillean nursing auxiliaries arriving at Amsterdam Airport. Then we see painful footage from a Dutch TV show alongside attempts to deny the existence of racism in the Netherlands.One intriguing aspect is the manipulation of images in such a way that black and white can no longer be told apart.