Through extensive archival research and by following multiple lines of inquiry, The Clearing uncovers the condition of women within the system of violence that operated on Sumatra’s rubber plantations in the early twentieth century. Among the many threads of your investigation, which one do you consider the starting point that ultimately gave rise to the film?
One of the moments that stands out is when I first saw a photograph of my maternal great-grandmother when I was in my late twenties for the first time. Until then, I hadn’t known that she was Indo (the term for mixed Indonesian and Dutch ancestry). But looking at the photograph, her Javanese features were unmistakable.
In my previous film I looked at Dutch capitalist racism and the narratives, images, and fantasies that sustained it by going into its historical material origins. In my films I always move between temporalities, mixing past present future, using science fiction elements to understand the structures that continue to shape where we are.
The silence surrounding the women in my own maternal line felt pressing. Their absence didn’t feel passive; it felt active, as if they were demanding to be acknowledged. At some point I stumbled on another disappearance: I discovered the curious fact that an Indo actress had been removed from a Dutch film from 1936. Her features resembled my great-grandmother’s. I became obsessed with her. Following that trail led me to something much larger: a collective missing women’s history, actively erased through euphemisms, kept out of historical narratives, classified reports, erased from historical materials and buried through silences in family histories.
One of the film’s central narrative pillars is the testimony of a woman, constructed from numerous primary and secondary sources, which offers what might be considered a representative experience of that historical reality. How did you arrive at this narrative approach?
While following these threads doing research, what emerged was a history that had been intentionally and systematically obscured: a regime of sexual exploitation embedded within indentured labour. Covered up and dismissed as private, domestic, or illegitimate and therefore excluded from official histories. Yet this violence was not incidental to the system—it was central to its functioning. It facilitated an early capitalist project, enabled by euphemistically framed colonial legislation and systems of human trafficking that expanded in the aftermath of slavery’s formal abolition.
The research led me through many archives, including corporate film archives of rubber plantations, private home videos shot by plantation owners, declassified colonial state archives, memoirs, colonial and other newspapers, pamphlets and other protest writings. The work of anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler gave an entry into the structural nature of the way private plantation companies functioned with state power and intentionally organised the sexual exploitation of indentured women. The accessibility and availability of records relevant to the history of women in indentured labour structures under Dutch colonial rule is shaped both by colonial erasure and the continued repression of the left after independence. Thanks to essential work done by Indonesian feminists, I was able to find traces of women’s experiences. Thanks to the assistance of anthropologist Vita Anggraeni, I was able to engage with first-person testimonies by women who lived through recruitment and exploitation on the plantations, preserved in rare writing and documented oral histories.
The voice you refer to is not a biographical reconstruction of a single woman. It is assembled from many slivers of lives that surface when the archive is read against itself and infused with other traces. The film asks what silences (collective, archival, narrative) were built to protect, and confronts what Dutch colonial industries meticulously recorded with what they systematically erased.
At several key moments in the film, a voice emerges that speaks in Láadan, the feminist language created by Suzette Haden Elgin. What motivated this choice, and what role did you envision it playing within the film?
Struggling with language was an important part of the process of making this film. At some point in the writing/editing process I knew I wanted to introduce a collective voice of women from a future perspective that could speak across time. But the question was: which language would they speak? None of the languages available made sense to me. Each one would take an identity position that didn’t fit or felt inappropriate in terms of my own positioning. It seemed like an unsolvable puzzle. I was lying on an acupuncture table when I wondered: has anyone ever tried to invent a feminist language? Back home I started researching, and it turned out someone did! I was astonished to learn about Láadan. Suzette Haden Elgin was a linguist and a science fiction writer. Her book Native Tongue is set in the dystopian future where women have lost all their rights. In an underground movement they create a secret language to resist their oppression. Elgin wanted to test her linguistic hypothesis that existing languages were inadequate to express women’s experiences because they evolved within male-dominated societies. Therefore, creating a language specifically designed to encode women’s perceptions and experiences could help women communicate differently and potentially foster social change. Elgin didn’t only write the science fiction book; she created the entire language, including the grammatical structure and vocabulary. I was deeply touched by the language and the way it insisted on expressing erased realities. There are, for example, five different words for “pregnant,” with variations according to the experience. Elgin left building blocks for the language to be expanded and experimented with, and we did so for the film. It was important that the film was not only bearing witness to historical injustice, but also contained elements of proposal, power, resistance.
Another recurring element is your own presence in the film: discreet yet constant, conducting archival research and reflecting on your findings. Could you talk about your decision to place yourself within the narrative in this way?
I always wanted to have an investigative, forensic thread in the film, to approach the historical omissions and the plantations as a crime scene with actors and witnesses. At first I didn’t imagine it would go beyond that. With the editor Diana Toucedo we started to work more intentionally around the idea of a narrative unfolding around someone disappearing and someone looking. She encouraged me to introduce more personal reflections. It was always clear to us that this element had to be discreet and not central. The order and volume of each character’s appearance became a crucial balancing act.
In this exploration of the traces and presences of the past, archival footage alternates—and often blends—with contemporary images of the same locations. Could you tell us more about this choice?
Unlike preceding forms of slavery, the film camera was present during the indentured labour regimes on early 20th-century Dutch plantations. The film material was originally produced to conceal exploitation, to project an image of order and progress, recruit men, hide crimes and to suppress the struggles, solidarities, and forms of resistance that existed at the time.
Placing these images in dialogue with contemporary footage is a way to understand not just how the past shapes the present, but how the current conditions are an extension of that. The archival images begin to function less as documents of a distant past and more as evidence of blueprints and structures that persist. The movement between archival and contemporary footage therefore becomes a way of making visible these continuities. Rather than separating past from present, the film seeks to show how they inhabit one another, and how colonial capitalist violence shapes the present world we live in.
Beyond the images, the film’s soundscape contributes greatly to its haunting and spectral atmosphere. Could you talk about the process of creating the soundtrack and how you approached the film’s sonic dimension?
The composer and sound designer Malu Peeters was involved from a very early stage, long before the film reached its final form. Her compositional practice is rooted in long-term conceptual engagement. She joined while I was still sketching, writing, and searching through the material, so the sonic language developed alongside the narrative structure rather than being added after picture lock. We began with conversations about the film’s central themes and how to approach the off-screen world. It was clear we never wanted to illustrate or neutralise the originally silent archive images through direct foley or historical reconstruction. Working against the original intention of the footage, we approached sound as a form of refraction: traces arriving from another temporality, resonances that exceed the frame, textures that somehow belonged to the image appear to return as if to haunt them, presences that were never meant to be recorded in the first place.
The aim was to create an off-screen world that acts upon the images. Sound becomes a way of opening the archive and creating space for the blending you mentioned, allowing other histories, affects, and temporalities to enter the frame. The work with Láadan became part of the composition. This required a deeply collaborative and evolving process. Throughout the edit she continually reworked and recalibrated the sound as the film itself changed shape and the soundtrack emerged through this sustained dialogue.
The film concludes with footage shot in present-day Sumatra, showing young people performing traditional cultural practices. In your view, how does this history and its legacy resonate in contemporary Sumatra?
Kuda Lumping is a traditional Javanese dance and spirit possession ceremony. In colonial secret service records of the 1920s, I found reports of increasing concern that such ceremonies and theatre performances on plantations could serve as vehicles for dissent, solidarity, and the circulation of political ideas among Javanese workers. It is carried on by Javanese descendants of plantation workers in Sumatra today.
What stood out in conversations was how the Dutch colonial structures have functioned as a blueprint for the present. The many overlapping silences continue to shape what can be remembered and what remains inaccessible; there is great difficulty in accessing stories and documents. And there is a crucial struggle of memory activism ongoing, particularly concerning the experiences of women. Community collectives, archivists, researchers, and labour organisers are actively connecting present-day plantation conditions to their historical origins. The legacy of this history is not only one of past erasure, but very much of ongoing struggles.
Interviewed by Marco Cipollini
