LYRICAL VENGEANCE

feature film by Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Even in our best efforts to decolonize our gaze, we Dutch typically isolate our relationship with Indonesia from the power relations in the Asian region and maintain a national lens regarding this ex-colony. The film Lyrical Vengeance (working title) draws on three female writers from the Netherlands, Japan and Indonesia, who were active in Indonesia in the turbulent first half of the 20th century, when Indonesia gained independent from Dutch colonization while enduring Japanese occupation. The film reveals links and contradictions in the lives and work of these women that often go unnoticed in their individual historizations and in the larger narratives of their time.

By reflecting on complex emancipatory processes in times of major political power shifts with an intergenerational and multilingual cast of non-professional actors, the film aims to articulate new forms of solidarity. Themes of intersectional feminism, gender variability, (inter)nationalism and sovereignty emerge, which play a major role today in a rapidly changing world.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh is a visual artist who is known for film works reflecting on the present through the lens of historical processes, events or figures. Lyrical Vengeance is her first feature-length film specifically created to be watched in a cinema.

The project is selected to be realized within the framework of De Verbeelding, a collaboration between Netherlands Film Fund and Mondriaan Fund.