De Indische tafel, jongens van de Japanse kampen

The men are now in their nineties, but they still get together every week for an Indonesian lunch. While eating, they look back on their youth in the Dutch East Indies, as the Netherlands called its colony at the time. Their youth, the past, was something that was rarely talked about, if only because the memories were too painful. During the Second World War, some of them were imprisoned in Japanese internment camps, places where terrible things happened. Based on memories and diary entries from their parents, as well as previously unseen footage from Japanese propaganda films, the men return to their youth, to the Japanese occupation, the liberation by the atomic bomb and the subsequent Indonesian struggle for freedom.

In 2024, director Pieter van Huystee made Als ik mijn ogen sluit, a personal documentary in which he recounts how women in the Dutch East Indies fared during the Japanese occupation. It seemed inevitable to him that the men's story also had to be told. He has now done so.