Still: Alreadymade - Tessa Leuwsha

Tessa Leuwsha’s Mother Suriname - Mama Sranan**, a world premiere in IDFA’s Luminous section, uses unique colorised archive footage to bring to life the world of women such as the director’s own grandmother, a Surinamese washerwoman who led a very tough existence in her homeland before eventually moving to the Netherlands.

Leuwsha isn’t just a filmmaker. She is a literary novelist and non-fiction writer. Her new film is inspired by her earlier book, ‘Fansi’s silence,’ about how her grandmother’s life was overshadowed by the grim legacy of slavery (only abolished in Suriname a short time before her birth). 

The documentary was kick-started after Leuwsha was approached by veteran Dutch producer, Pieter van Huystee, who was responsible for the distribution of her first documentary, Doculab Suriname (2019). 

“He [van Huystee] phoned me and said he would really love to make a film on the history of Suriname. I said ‘well, that’s really a very broad subject!’” 

Leuwsha encouraged the producer to read her books. Van Huystee saw the potential in ‘Fansi’s silence.’ This could be a chance to look at the country’s history through the experiences of a single, emblematic individual.

The director’s challenge was to “change the perspective” on archive film that was originally shot by Dutch colonialists from their own point of view. She was determined to re-contextualise the material so it reflected the experiences of the local people. 

Archive footage kept in the Dutch vaults tended to focus on rice and sugar production that benefitted the Dutch economy. There are also films showing Dutch missionaries trying to convert the locals to Christianity. Suriname remained a colony until 1975 and the Dutch held the leading positions in the society. “We worked and they watched,” is how the director sums up the local people’s perspective on their colonial overlords. 

“When I was trying to bring life to my grandmother by using this material, it was very hard to find images that expressed happiness or people who are in love with each other,” Leuwsha notes.

In the 1960s and 70s, many Surinamese people moved to the Netherlands because they had few prospects at home. The director talks of them “arriving there, being Dutch but feeling very lost in the country that was not waiting for immigrants.”

Leuwsha was born in the Netherlands and grew up there. Her father is from Suriname and her mother is Dutch. She visited Suriname for the first time in 1993, “an incredible experience to me. A lot of things I knew from my father…all fell into place.” For example, she began to understand just how her grandmother could express Christian beliefs while continuing to perform rituals invoking ancestors and the spirit of Mother Earth that originated in Africa. “When I visited for the first time, I was stunned by how these rituals were still part of daily life.”

The director remembers as a child meeting her grandmother for the first time in the Netherlands and being struck by how strange the old lady seemed. She was “wearing her traditional clothes with this thing she wrapped around her head. Now I know it is called an angisa. She woke up very early in the morning, at 5 o’clock because she was used to the tropics.”

Leuwsha didn’t have the chance to get close to her grandmother (who died in 1979) but has a vivid memory of this “severe looking woman” with a swollen leg, an accent that was strange to her, and an unusual way of dressing. 

When she herself moved to Suriname and ended up writing a book about her grandma, she tried to bring her to life by speaking to people who had known her. Now, in the film, she is giving her grandmother her own voice (through narrator Denise Jannah) and providing an intimate, inside view of her experiences, and that of working class women like her. “I really wanted to have her talk about her life, show her life, not in black and white but in colour,” Leuwsha ends.

IDFA takes place on November 8 - 19. For more information, click here. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive