Season 1
3 episodes
0 min. per episode
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A passionate writer uncovers haunting truths as he connects with the last voices of Indonesia’s turbulent fight for freedom.
Episodes
Episode 1 focuses on the question of what role the Japanese occupation had in feeding the revolutionary fire in the Indonesians. Van Reybrouck starts his fieldwork in Indonesia and speaks to witnesses in Java and the Moluccas. He travels to Japan, in search of the last remaining Japanese soldiers who were there between '42 and '45. This leads to unexpected Tinder contacts and an enthusiastic account by a soldier who remembers Java as paradise on Earth.
Episode 2 explores the chaotic period after August 1945. Japan capitulates, Indonesia immediately declares its independence and the Indonesian youth seizes all the weapons of the defeated Japanese. But to their great outrage, a new army of occupiers arrives. Van Reybrouck finds a freedom fighter who suddenly stood face to face with the Gurkhas of the British-Indian Army. All the more reason to travel to Nepal and look for the last surviving soldiers who were there in 1945-46. Will he manage to find any?
In episode 3, Van Reybrouck examines the question: why did it take so long for the conflict between the self-declared Indonesian Republic and the old Dutch colonizer to be resolved diplomatically? Why did it have to take months of warfare and hundreds of thousands of deaths? He comes face to face with the death mask of the first prime minister of Indonesia, Sutan Sjahrir, who advocated for a peaceful solution. He listens to the gripping accounts of war on both sides of the conflict. Finally, he asks what happened to the hope for a new world order that was created when the newly liberated world gathered in Bandung in 1955.
In this three-part documentary series, Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck goes in search of the last remaining witnesses of the Indonesian decolonization.