Beautifully restored archive footage of dredging, fishing, oyster catching, farming, weaving and factory work fill the screen. The images show us Dutch working life as it was a century ago. At the same time, a voice-over off-screen reads letters written in the late 1980s from a father in Australia to his teenage daughter, who is far away, studying in the Netherlands.
This is the starting point for artist and filmmaker Fiona Tan’s new film Dearest Fiona, a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum. The letters on the soundtrack were written by Tan’s father, Tan Soen Houw, when she was a student.
“Basically, it was our only contact,” Tan says of her father’s letters. She had moved to Europe when she was 17. The rest of her immediate family stayed in Melbourne, Australia. “For the first five to ten years that I lived in Europe, there was this weekly rhythm. I always wrote on Thursdays, I would write a letter once a week to my parents. They would also reply very faithfully.”
It took around a week for the letters to get from Australia to Europe. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive. Tan’s father didn’t like talking on the telephone anyway but would make exceptions twice a year, for her birthday and for Christmas. The father was a geologist, working for the state government in Victoria. As the letters read in the film reveal, he had a very wide breadth of interests in everything from politics to socio-economic issues to the well-being of the family’s pets.
Tan’s father died six years ago. “Letters are not really something we throw out,” she says of his correspondence which she re-discovered in the back of a drawer when she was cleaning up at home during the Covid lockdown. She put the hand-written letters in order and then re-read them. “That for me was a complete eye-opener because I had forgotten a great deal of what was going on at that time, both with him and with me and with the whole world.”
Originally, Tan planned to do the voice-over for the film as she had done for her earlier feature Ascent (2016). Instead, she asked Scottish actor and RADA teacher Ian Henderson to read the letters. He had been helping to coach her but she remembers listening to him in the sound recording studio and thinking “this is very good.” She also thought her father would have been “rather tickled” to have his words read by a Scot.
Dearest Fiona is the cinema version of ‘Footsteps,’ an installation Tan created using old material in the Eye Collection. As she was working during the Covid period, she was allowed to access the archives from her own studios. “That meant I could do it any time of night or day, whenever I felt like it.” She didn’t know in advance precisely what she was looking for. “I just was looking very broadly, wherever the wind blew me.”
The director came across some exquisite hand-coloured footage of young Dutch women. There is also film of villagers relaxing on a Sunday. Most of the footage, though, shows people working. This, Tan suggests, reflects the nature of Dutch society at the time. “I think, on the whole, the Dutch were very hard working. What also really struck me in the material I saw, was how physical the labour was…and how much life was lived communally. The steady industrialisation of labour also becomes clear – men, women, children increasingly engaged in tedious work, they are all merely servants of machines.”
The Dutch were neutral in the First World War. Some of the footage in Dearest Fiona comes from that period but there’s hardly a hint of the bloodshed and destruction across the border in Flanders. “It’s quite a specific Dutch situation, even if, at the same time, the fragments have a certain universality,” Tan notes. What’s more, her father’s letters contain references to tumultuous events in the late 80s – Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
How do the letters from the 1980s and the archive footage from 60 years before relate to each other? Don’t expect a glib answer from Tan. “The film is trying to do something you can’t actually catch in words. As the film unfolds you become increasingly aware of the unstoppable force of time itself. And as the narrative develops,” she suggests of the unlikely juxtaposition of word and image, “the end result is surprisingly emotional. You, the viewer, are making the film in your head, or in your body…”
This article was originally published in See NL, a collaboration between Eye Filmmuseum and The Netherlands Film Fund.
