The Past Ended on Mango Street (52')
THE PAST ENDED ON MANGO STREET (52')
INFORMATION
FR / 2024 / 52’ / HD / Dutch, English
L'Infinie Comedie / Angry Docs / Directed by Jean-Baptiste Brelière
Featuring Thomas Watson
Worldwide rights available
TAGS
WWII, war crimes, Indonesia, Japan, The Netherlands, Australia
SYNOPSIS
My late grandmother, Yvonne Holman, survived a Japanese-run female concentration camp in Indonesia during WWII. When she was alive, my grandmother never discussed her experiences in the camps with me or my family. The reason for her silence was never made known to us, but we feared she may have been abducted to be a sex slave for the Japanese Imperial Army. However, we never asked her to confirm our suspicions, because we were always afraid of crossing the invisible barrier between us and her past. We could tell the War was a period of her life that was too painful for her to speak about. My grandmother's inability to discuss her past meant I was not able to develop a regular relationship with her, yet because of my interest in her life in Indonesia, she trusted me. I only became aware of how much suffering the silence surrounding the camps had caused us after I met the filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Brelière. Before, WWII seemed to be a remote part of history that had no influence on my or my family's life.
As an outsider, Jean-Baptiste was able to point out how much the story was weighing on me and my family and encouraged me to investigate my grandmother's life in the former Dutch East Indies.
Though it was nearly impossible to discuss my grandmother's WWII experiences with her, she was sometimes willing to speak about her life before the War. The glimpses she gave into her youth, as the daughter of a very well-to-do and powerful family, were endlessly fascinating to me. It provided an escape from the bland and intolerant world I lived in, in regional Australia. Through these brief anecdotes I was able to connect with my grandmother and find out things that made me very proud to be her grandson, like that she wanted to study law and work for the League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations). I desperately wanted to find out even more about her life.
Over 6 years, Jean-Baptiste and I searched across Indonesia, The Netherlands, and Australia looking for the remnants of my grandmother's former life to answer the question my family desperately needed to know...