Meneer L.
An Asian tourist is visiting the Netherlands to see the tourist attractions with his own eyes. However, he falls asleep at a windmill and when he wakes up, not only has his travel group left, but all his belongings, including his passport, have disappeared. Lost, he wanders through Groningen, where he is mistaken for an asylum seeker. Due to the language barrier, he is unable to explain his situation and is taken to an asylum seekers' centre, located in a former cruise ship in Amsterdam. While he is stuck in the bureaucracy of his “asylum application”, and despite the fact that all communication is necessarily non-verbal, he befriends other residents of the ship.
This first feature film by Thomas Stokmans, for which he wrote the screenplay himself, is a mix of documentary and fiction. Although based on true events, the events are fictional, but the (non-professional) actors we see are mostly refugees themselves, who also live on the cruise ship in real life.
