Netherlands
66′12″, 2022.
DIRECTED BY
Dorna van Rouveroy
PRODUCED BY
Stichting Filmproject
SCRIPTWRITER
Dorna van Rouveroy
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Agung Rizqy, Dave Edhard
EDITED BY
Dorna van Rouveroy
In 1911 in the Dutch Indies, Emile van Rouveroy, a young Dutch planter, fathered a daughter with his housekeeper Enok, a local Sundanese girl of 15 years old. He legitimized her and raised Nelly, as she was called, in his (white) family. Nelly and her mother never saw each other again. 110 years later, two of his grandchildren, Dorna van Rouveroy and Maurice Boyer, are looking for traces of Enok, her fellow sufferers and descendants. They focus on what color and origin then and now mean, what it is to be an Indo, partly colored, in modern Indonesian and Dutch society. What it means being from a colonial family and also bi-racial.
Dorna van Rouveroy is a filmmaker born in Jakarta. Her Canadian father Robert instilled in her a love for film, and after graduating from the Dutch Film and TV Academy, she did another postgraduate year at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. She directed many documentaries, especially on colonial subjects, two feature films, authored and co-authored film scripts, and produced animated short films that regularly won awards.