Loving documentary about a janitor who wants to be underestimated

Henk Shakison is the caretaker of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In the short documentary 2Doc Short: Henk (Tuesday, NPO2) you can see him walking around like a sociable loubas among the art students, to turn off the lights, or to end a noisy party in the auditorium in a friendly way. Sweet man, crazy about his children. Smiling good-naturedly, he lets the young documentary makers Sarah Blok and Lisa Konno dress him up in eccentric, colorful creations. He doesn’t quite understand, but oh well, let those girls go.

Initially, it is also not clear to the viewers why the concierge should be dressed in this way; at least it gives the film a pleasant, artistic tinge. And we’re in art school, after all. But then something happens to Shakison. The women give him a pair of white roller skates and ask him to ride them around the school. No, Shakison really isn’t going to do that. Not in front of the students. He seems taken aback. What’s happening over there?

Henk Shakison appears to have had a rich stage life, as a roller skating champion, dancer, theater maker, and bassist of the hip-hop group .nuClarity. But he has no assertiveness, he doesn’t want to show it off. Now he just wants to be the janitor, he wants to be “underrated”. That’s why he won’t talk about it any further. The fact that he was taken from the Surinamese paradise to the Netherlands as a small boy, that his father beat him, that he gave up his dance career for his first child – he does not want to dwell on that too much.

To show everything that Shakison doesn’t say, that’s what the couture designed by Lisa Konno is for. She depicts Shakison’s background. You see him in such a creation roller skating through the dark school, when the students have already gone home. A loving portrait in a special form.

In the interspace

The Flemish actor Rashif El Kaoui casts his life story in a theater performance. For The Hour of the Wolf: I’m a Bastard (NPO2) he is going to do something he has postponed for years: in search of his Moroccan roots. El Kaoui grew up in a Flemish family. He does not speak Arabic or Berber, has never been to Morocco. Yet he is treated as Moroccan by the outside world.

The actor feels like a “mongrel”, “born in the interspace”. He thinks that he can never “respond to what is expected of him.” How does he get out of here? The key lies with his absent Moroccan father. Who drank. The Flemish grandmother calls him “unkempt, a streetwalker”. At the age of eleven, El Kaoui told his father that he should not come by anymore. ouch. That’s a lot for such a little boy. El Kaoui: “If you kill your father, you also kill the child in yourself.” The father drowns.

In Morocco, El Kaoui finds his grandmother and aunt, who explain to him why the father was damaged, could not be a good father. The sorrow of the uprooted, of the torn families.

This first documentary by photographer Ahmet Polat contains many fragments from the theater performance The Bastard, which El Kaoui made with him last year at the Southern Theater. The music from it, by Michelle Samba, and the theater poetry by El Kaoui lift the documentary above the average roots travel story. Made in the space between theater and film, like Henk is between film and fashion.

This column will be written by various authors until April 25.