When I Close My Eyes: Living with the Japanese Camps

• Date: 21 December
• Location: Theater aan het Spui

Pieter van Huystee (Director)

What did the women and children in the Japanese camps in the Dutch East Indies experience? What wounds and traumas were left behind and how did they deal with them during their lives? The camps left great scars. Many of them have not yet healed or disappeared.

When I Close My Eyes: Living with the Japanese Camps is a film about the women and girls who survived the Japanese camps. The survivors' stories were not heard or acknowledged in the Netherlands after the war. For the survivors, it is difficult to accept that many people know little about this period. This evokes feelings of anger once again causes intense pain.

When the women close their eyes, these "forgotten" stories resurface. We as viewers thus crawl into the minds of the women who survived the camps. There are few photographs of the camps and almost no film material. However, the women and children in the camps made hundreds of drawings. Director Pieter van Huystee himself has a personal connection with this history: both his mother and grandmother survived camp Tjideng. With his late mother, he hardly ever spoke about her experiences. In the film he asks the questions he can no longer ask her.

Sunday 24 until Saturday 30 March

For times and tickets go to this link.

This film showing falls under the Movies that Matter Festival programming.

Show on map