The loose ends with which the NOS had left me a bit on Monday after the live broadcast of the funeral of the British Queen were tied together quite satisfactorily at Khalid & Sophie. There was Suse van Kleef, former United Kingdom correspondent for the NOS; Simon Smits, former ambassador to London and yes, a theologian. Someone had to be able to say something about what the Queen’s deeply religious belief had been in. Joost Röselaers is pastor, now of Vrijburg in Amsterdam, until 2017 at the Dutch Church in London. He had “enjoyed” the service.
Also read: If you wanted to understand the Queen’s funeral, you had to google a lot
Insightful was his observation alone that the service, from biblical texts to psalms, not about the long life of the queen, but from beginning to end about the afterlife. Former court and television director Rudolf Spoor told about the technically clever registration of the bagpiper, who first played into the church, turned around, and then walked out of the church in front of the coffin. “To the light”, Suse van Kleef saw. “To God” was what the preacher observed.
After that, in Slava Ukraine, a look at the pale faces of the people who have been away from home for weeks. In the first episode of Monday evening we are introduced to the refugees, but also to those who receive them. The family from Urk that has taken in a family with three children, including their fifteen poodles. Now their household consists of nine men and 33 dogs. The lady of the house summarizes how coexistence works. “They can’t wash the dishes,” and “they’re raising them very differently.” It is clearly not easy, and cannot be sustained for more than ‘two or three years’. But they do.
Carol from Zoetermeer offers shelter to Valeria and her daughter. Mothers with children are cared for in Bloemendaal, in a social housing project with resident caretakers. Housemistress Franka, in one of the first house meetings, lists the “challenges” of a living group—power, money, sex and cleaning. She means: if there is a fight, then about this. Living there voluntarily seems to me to be quite a challenge. In half a year we will see in the second part of Slava Ukraine how these lives go.
love for the car
In The DS Keyzer we see the dismantling of David Kostelijk’s garage. Forty years ago he came to the Amsterdam building as a squatter and started a recovery center for Citroëns. The garage is no longer in operation when filmmaker Doret van der Sloot comes to film there, she is capturing the fragments of what once was. Love for the car and tinkering with it. Love for the people who worked there. Love for and from the customer who brought his car there. Nostalgia, but for something that we as viewers have not known. We have to make do with the parts that are handed to us, but as we glue them together, the image turns a quarter turn.
David Kostelijk, originally a nurse, has something fatherly and absent-minded. His former employee speaks of him warmly. Everything was possible, everything was allowed and nothing was too crazy. Meanwhile, forty years worth of parts, tools and engine oil are dug out of the garage. As a viewer, you soon find yourself in the atmosphere of a community center, a “crazy little company” where anyone with a blemish could dock. But that seems too romantic. Precious, it also says itself: “My work is professional, the presentation amateurish.” We hear him say something about all the money that went over his dismantled desk. And at the end of the film, he sighs that he regrets selling it. “Then you have a few million. But what good is that to you?”