A sincere ego document from a descendant from a wrong family ★★★★☆

The gravestone of filmmaker Marieke van der Winden’s mother only bears a first name. It is a self-chosen name: Lieke. She was born Ali in 1940 and died young 48 years later. At the funeral, Van der Winden heard for the first time about a family secret that had never been talked about in all that time: Lieke’s parents were NSB members. Her last name was contaminated.

For more than thirty years she did not dare to dive into the family history, says Van der Winden in her documentary the silence. Too painful, too embarrassing. Even now that she is making a film about it after all this time, the doubt remains. Does she, as a descendant of a wrong family, have the right to speak?

the silence discusses the difficult relationship between Van der Winden and her mother. To the outside world Lieke seemed happy, but she struggled with depression and sometimes abandoned her children just like that. She found something to hold on to in a strict form of anthroposophy, which caused Van der Winden to flee from home as a teenager. She always wondered if her mother actually loved her.

Van der Winden does have good memories of her grandfather and grandmother. They took her on vacation and treated her like a princess. But the same grandfather who took her to a cozy German riverside village in the 1970s had volunteered to work in a similar village in a V2 missile factory during World War II.

Blackening her few positive childhood memories is one of the issues the director openly struggles with in the silence. She also shares the fear that her search for explanations will be interpreted as an attempt to relativize or even excuse her family’s bad past. When she discovers that not only her grandparents, but dozens of relatives collaborated with the Nazis, Van der Winden has a harder time.

Yet she finishes the film, knowing she is not alone. In addition to a sincere and admirable ego document, the silence also an interesting attempt to break a taboo. Van der Winden grew up with the idea that the Netherlands had more resistance heroes than Nazi sympathizers during the war. The number of collaborators turns out to be much larger than she thought. Being stubborn about it doesn’t solve anything, as her family history proves.