Sabine Groenewegen

The removal of a character played by an Indo-European actress in the 1936 film “Rubber” reveals the extent of women’s subjugation and leads to the unravelling of the Dutch plantocracy in Sumatra.

Material from various archives come together in a speculative fiction in which trees and other witnesses open up a trail through time. The film explores the intimate realities of profit models on colonial rubber plantations which were governed under a legal system which was critizised as de facto slavery. Tracing the story of a missing fictional female character, the reality of a silenced history of women also becomes evident.