You have won several awards with your documentary, including the Tegel Prize. What does this journalism award mean to you?

“I’m very proud of that. I also think it’s great that I won an award in the research category. It’s the first time a film has won in this category.”

How did the idea for your documentary come about?

“Years ago I saw a video project by the (Indian) producer of the film, where she interviewed nine war veterans and a conscientious objector. I noticed that these people all used the same terms. ‘Police action’, ‘humanitarian mission’, ‘establishing order and peace’. Apart from the conscientious objectors, they had no idea that they would end up in the War of Independence. I had been thinking about that for a while. And suddenly I thought: How do you actually do that, as a government, and how do you ensure that everyone is sent with the same idea? So the premise of the film came up very quickly.

How to proceed?

“I began reading everything I could find about the war in the Dutch East Indies. The first paper I came across was Controlled War By Louis Zweers, one of the historians in the film, about the system the Dutch government created to frame that war. Obviously propaganda happens during war, but how it happens, no matter how systematic, I found it interesting. It’s just marketing, PR to sell the war. The government is trying hard to sweep certain facts under the carpet. In Zweers’ thesis, it became clear to me for the first time how big and global this war was. I had never experienced foreign perspectives before. Ultimately, I researched for more than four years in national and international archives, audiovisuals.

This has been a great job.

“Yes, you could say that. It was constant torture for four years. In the last six months we were editing 18 hours a day. I must say that it was also an attack on my private life. I didn’t go on vacation, and when I was home, I was absent. They were happy at home because it was finally finished.

What did you want to show in your documentary?

“How Dutch politics tried to promote the colonial war in Indonesia through propaganda and censorship, and how powerful the power of photography was. I wanted to depict the context in which the war took place, without turning it into a hard-hitting historical film. India lost “For me, it is primarily a film about framing, propaganda, image-making, and how politics and media influence each other in the narrative. I will explain this on the basis of the decolonization war. Most of the facts in the film are basically known, but not among the general public. While it is an important part of our history.”

What impact did your documentary have?

I think this will only become clear in the long run. But from the feedback I have noticed how much more accessible journalism and scholarship is needed about this history. I often hear from people who are so grateful that I made this film, whether from Indian or royal angles or from descendants of veterans. They say that they now suddenly understand things that they had previously been taught but could not put right.

Why are such studies important?

“In this case, you could say that the Dutch colonial past has been a one-sided story for a long time. What the Indian community and veterans of the Dutch East Indies experienced continues to this day as a trauma that is passed down through generations. For this reason alone it is important to uncover the real history.”

In a sense, it is also a current topic.

“Precisely. The mechanisms discussed in the film can also be seen in current major wars and conflicts. In the film, former minister Ben Bot compares Dutch propaganda to Putin’s propaganda during the war in Ukraine. In this regard, it is important to know what happened in the past. Not with the aim of identifying the guilty party – I really wanted to get away from that in the film – but to provide insight into something incredibly complex. It is not black and white. But it is important to look at it and talk about it from all sorts of perspectives.

Award-winning documentary

Watch the trailer here by The Indies were lost, and sold in colonial war. Which In-Soo Radstake won the Tegel Prize in the research category.

“A well-crafted historical and journalistic document that makes you think,” the jury said.

With its annual journalism awards, De Tegel is a tribute to high-quality journalism in the Netherlands. The nominees and winners are selected annually by a (professional) jury from hundreds of entries from almost all journalistic organisations in the Netherlands. De Tegel is an initiative of NDP Nieuwsmedia, the Dutch Association of Journalists, the Dutch Association of Editors-in-Chief, NOS and RTL Netherlands, which are united in the annual journalism awards. In spring 2024, a total of ten awards will be given in the categories News, Frontline Reporting, Background, Research, Interviews, Regional/Local, International, Data, Stockists and Pioneer Court. In this series of interviews, you can read more about the winners and their motivations.