It may depend on the season – falling leaves – or choosing, but for the second day in a row, the television plunged us into a vale of tears. The Tuesday evening started in minor, with the disappearance of Hebe (10) and her supervisor Sanne (26), both missing for 24 hours. The NOS News was at Waspik, where a car may have hit the water, possibly the Kia Picanto of supervisor Sanne. Edwin van den Berg stood in a pitch dark industrial area to report that the divers had found nothing in the canal during the day. There was still a search going on with a sonar boat. I’m not sure yet whether I’m very alert and newsy of the NOS think they were on top of it, or at least sensational. What are you looking for there, and what if something is found, do you broadcast it live?
Then I saw mock student (BNNVARA). The three sisters, the parents, the college friends and the roommates of Dianne Tonies have all had their doubts at some point, but never so much that they questioned her whether she was actually studying. She studied medicine in Leiden and after six years she announced her graduation. But that’s not how it went. She passed away on January 17, 2020, at least that’s the day she was found.
In this documentary, her sister Rachel searches for answers to all the questions that start with why. She knows the phenomenon pretend student, pretending that you are studying, studying for exams, passing courses. But that something like this can also happen in a ‘normal family’ and can remain hidden for so long is incomprehensible to her and everyone else. What makes it extra difficult is that Dianne has completely erased herself, including all digital traces of her existence. Phones, laptop, everything is factory reset. At the request of the family, a specialized company helps them find the ‘digital legacy’. Codes have to be cracked for this, privacy rules stretched and the risk that something pops up deep in the data that they would rather not have known.
Photo in doctor’s coat
The tragedy of mock student is that so terribly little is revealed about this girl. The four friends with whom she started the first year of study knew that she did not take enough courses to be allowed to continue studying. They didn’t know her family didn’t know. Her sisters occasionally saw her in the family home with a textbook. She also sometimes sent a picture of herself in a doctor’s coat. And when her mother asked about it, she told me in which hospital she did which internships and how far it was by bike from home. The search history on her laptop shows that she googled those answers beforehand.
So what was she doing all those six years? Nobody really knows. The roommate she lived with for four years says Dianne was sweet and quiet and that she was never sure whether she was in her room or out the door. And when they met in the house she said she got out of the night shift and went to sleep quickly. Perhaps, Dianne’s sister says, she had trained herself to be super quiet in those six years.
I don’t know about you, but I just called the student who lives away from home. Then you don’t know anything yet, it turns out, but then it is in any case asked.
After mock student came Mourning, also a documentary. Not a word is spoken in it and there is no person in it, because it is an ‘essayist film about transience’, a natural impression of mourning. Dry plain. Felled trees, roots in the air. Swirling waves. It rains constantly. Whether it snows. dodgy. Might as well look outside.