It’s Too Cold for the Spirits to Live Here

In my research project It’s Too Cold for the Spirits to Live Here, I adopt a mode of spiritual searching as a means to find the spirits my father lost when he fled from Indonesia to The Netherlands in 1958. It is an attempt to illuminate and unfold the complexities of a colonial family history that has long remained hidden, literally stowed away in biscuit tins in the attic. By unveiling the family archive – the passports, the letters, the negatives – ancestral stories become tangible again: vivid, immediate, and alive in the present. This archival material is interwoven with footage from my recent journey to Indonesia, creating a layered narrative that bridges personal experience with historical displacement. 

A recurring element in the work-in-progress cut of my new film is the M.S. Sibajak – the ship that carried my family from Indonesia to The Netherlands. Reimagined as both a portal and a vessel, the ship sails not only across oceans but through time itself, where past, present, and future collapse into one another. Within this expanded spatial-temporal state, the lingering presence of the spirits haunt the peripheries, suggesting the persistence of colonial memory in both embodied and spectral forms. 

As a filmmaker, the research has profoundly shaped the development of new lenses through which to view and represent my subject as I cultivate a deeply embodied approach, closely aligned with method acting. Through a metamorphic process of self-transformation, I consciously moved beyond my inherited Dutch framework. This introspective and embodied methodology became a gesture towards decolonising the narrative and expanding the frame of reference to other worldviews. 

Jaar

2025