When he was a young child growing up in the Netherlands, Tom Fassaert believed that his father “didn’t have any parents.” They were never talked about. Fassaert was therefore surprised when his father started making tape recordings and videos to send to an old lady living far away in South Africa. This was Tom’s grandmother, the woman who had put Tom’s father into an orphanage and now the subject of Fassaert’s new film A Family Affair.

Tom’s father felt deeply ambivalent about the way he had been abandoned but still yearned to bring the family back together. That was why he decided to visit his mother in South Africa and eventually to go and live there. “We said goodbye to all our family in Holland and we tried to build a new life there,” Fassaert recalls of events when he was 10 years old.

Almost immediately, his father and grandmother argued again. The dream of the family reunion was quickly shattered. “The fact was that she was gone again and we were there (in South Africa) by ourselves.” What’s more, Fassaert’s mother was deeply homesick and yearned to go back to Holland. “This put a huge stress on my parents’ relationship which eventually led them to break up.”

In his documentary, Fassaert sets out to explore the strange dynamics of his own family and behaviour by his grandmother that, at least to outside eyes, was very hard to understand. She was a complicated and glamorous woman - a kind of femme fatale. When Fassaert met her as a child, he had an immediate impression of “this grand lady who had control of everything and everyone.” He didn’t feel the “warmth or cosiness” that you would expect from a grandmother. She was a former model who had had many lovers and several husbands, now living a grand lifestyle.

While making his documentary, Fasseart was able to discover more and more about his mysterious relative who caused so much discord in his family. And yes, Fassaert acknowledges, his film underlines the truth in that famous opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Throughout the course of the film, the director began to understand his grandmother’s behaviour. Her seeming cruelty to her own children was partly prompted by what she had endured as a child at the hands of her own father. Fassaert’s intention in the film wasn’t to “judge” her, rather to try and understand how and why she suppressed her maternal feelings for so long.

“Of course, she wasn’t a perfect mother,” the director declares. The grandmother always made decisions in her own interests, not those of her kids. Even so, as he spent time with her, Fassaert felt sympathy for her. He began to see her as someone with her own problems, not as a Cruella De Ville-like archetype.

In the doc, whose post-production was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, the director makes use of the recordings, videos, old 16mm films and photographs that his family made over several generations. This includes material shot by his great-grandfather in the 1920s.

Fassaert can’t hide his delight that his second feature has been chosen to open arguably the most prestigious documentary festival in the world. “It is nerve-wracking,” he admits. “I am pretty nervous because I am still working on it right now. It is not just sound mixing. I’m still editing it…I am very proud but also extremely nervous because the film is so very close to myself.”

A Family Affair, Tom Fassaert, Production: Conijn Film, www.conijnfilm.nl