What makes a nice, young middle-class Dutch woman want to join a revolutionary struggle thousands of miles from home? That is one of the questions asked in Marcel Mettelsiefen’s probing new feature documentary, Tanja: Up In Arms, world-premiering at DOK.fest Munich.
The film tells the story of Tanja Nijmeijer, the former teacher who became a member of the Colombian FARC rebel group. When footage emerged of captured CIA officers being interrogated deep in the jungle, she was the interpreter for the guerrillas. Her diaries, discovered by Colombian troops after a raid against the FARC in 2007, suggested she had become miserable about her life in the jungle, but in subsequent interviews she remained defiant, expressing very few regrets at joining the revolutionary cause.
“It was a very, very tough one on so many levels,” director Mettelsiefen sighs as he contemplates the making of the documentary.
Mettelsiefen is an Emmy-winning filmmaker whose recent films like Children Of The Taliban (2022) and In Her Hands(2022) have been made in the Middle East. His mother is Ecuadorean and so he has links with Latin America. Around a decade ago, he had been covering the FARC peace talks in Havana for German weekly Der Spiegel and met Tanja for the first time. He also came across Jorge Botero, a Colombian journalist acknowledged as one of the leading experts on the FARC. Botero had written a definitive biography of Nijmeijer. Mettelsiefen immediately felt this could be the basis for a film.
“[But] very quickly, when I made contact with her, I realised she is much more complicated than I thought,” the director reflects on his subject.
It was hard to get access to Tanja in Havana. She was deeply suspicious of the media who had harmed her in the past. “She didn’t trust me at all at the beginning,” the director acknowledges.
A few years later, in 2019, Mettelsiefen got backing from BBC Storyville and NDR, among others, for the project. “The story obviously is juicy – the ups and downs, the twists and turns…there is this strong bit of archive,” the director states. He wanted to look behind “the facade” that Tanja presented to the outer world. “I could see she had completely closed [behind] huge, high walls. It was difficult to break through, to understand a bit who is the person behind.”
The diaries were promising. In these very personal documents, which she never intended to be published, she revealed a vulnerability and sensitivity which wasn’t at all apparent in her public appearances. There was “something emotional” here which he wanted to reach in the film. “But I struggled. I really struggled.”
Mettelsiefen’s initial idea was to tantalise viewers by “hiding” Tanja during the first part of the documentary. Everyone else would talk about her story before she was eventually shown on camera herself midway through. Unfortunately, the commissioning editors didn’t like the concept. He therefore ended up taking a more linear approach and spending time making the long running Colombian conflict understandable to international viewers.
“It is still a film which gives a voice to a conflict in a country which is divided, a country stuck in 50 years of violence…it is told through the emotional story of Tanja,” the director reflects on what he now calls a “hybrid” movie.
The documentary features some striking new interview material with its main protagonist. “I talked to her in three different languages. I did a couple of master interviews. I needed to understand which language is the one where she feels more comfortable, which is the one in which she opens up a little bit more. Documentary filmmaking is always about trust. It is about giving in order to receive. This film was especially interesting and challenging because she, actually being a daughter of a Dutch mother and a Dutch father, she was talking the whole time about ‘us Colombians.’”
Half-German and half Ecuadorean himself, Mettelsiefen remembered as an adolescent having a debate with himself about where he was actually from, before deciding “it was stupid to say that I am either [one] or [the other]. I am just a mix. But Tanja was quite stuck in this identity crisis.” She clearly identified far more closely with the Colombians than the Dutch. She also regarded the director as one of those self-appointed European experts who wanted to “explain” Colombia’s problems to the rest of the world.
Gradually, the director gained his subject’s confidence. However, Tanja still wasn’t ready to talk about guilt or regret.
Tanja is still living in Colombia, not able to leave because she is on an Interpol list and would risk arrest if she travelled abroad.
In Colombia, retired FARC fighters are being re-integrated into society. Tanja is one of them. She recently married. She lives quietly, though. There is still strong bitterness against the ex-guerrillas and she therefore keeps a “low profile.”
“She got into what she was always trying to escape, a little structure of being married to a guy, having a dog and trying to be happy!” Mettelsiefen notes of her current routine.
Opinions about the Dutch FARC member still vary. To some, she is the “poor naive girl” who made a bad decision when she was young, while others regarded her as a hardened terrorist. Mettelsiefen points out, though, that FARC is very different from an organisation like, say, Isis. Her actions were provoked by idealism.
One point the director makes is that Tanja is a victim of chauvinism and would almost certainly have been treated differently by the western media if she had been a male. In his recent Netflix-backed documentary In Her Hands, he portrayed Zarifa Ghafari, then the youngest female mayor in Afghanistan. She was a “strong woman but not really a likeable woman.”
“The question was, why do female heroes always need to be likeable? Why are not we able to deal with strong, unlikeable women? An asshole being a man would never be a problem,” the director observes the gender discrimination that applies to characters like both Zarifa and Tanja.“Tanja is not a likeable woman,” he notes. “This is actually the interesting part of the film, to try to understand this mix of arrogance and perhaps this bit of naivety. That was what I was trying to get out of her, to say ‘fuck yeah, we did [make] mistakes but at least we tried.’”
