Piet Is Gone

Piet Beentjes was last seen in late April 1987 on the Dutch island of Texel. Two men who claim they had never met Piet before came home to discover him on their couch, his clothes in the wash and a meal warming up in the oven. They gave him dry clothes and sent him on his way. After that, Piet was never seen again. Did he have an accident? Did he commit suicide? Was he murdered? Piet’s sister Toos has been searching for answers ever since. But mistakes in the investigation—lazy police work, witnesses left uninterviewed and bureaucratic errors—generate more questions than answers. In understated frontal shots, old friends and acquaintances, housemates and family members talk about the disappearance, which is reconstructed in detail from the accounts of the last people to see him, interviews with police officers and a new, private investigation. Against the backdrop of the island’s desolate sand dune landscape, the small community living on Texel and the still unanswered questions, Piet Is Gone tellingly evokes the Kafkaesque world into which Toos Beentjes entered on that day in April.