For a Lost Soldier

Early in 1945, in the occupied Netherlands, twelve-year-old Jeroen is sent from Amsterdam to the countryside to escape the famine and placed with a fishing family. As the country is liberated, Canadian soldiers arrive in the village. Jeroen meets a soldier named Walt, and a sexual relationship takes place between them. The film presents this as the adult Jeroen's recollection. Roeland Kerbosch adapted the 1986 autobiographical novel by the ballet dancer and choreographer Rudi van Dantzig. The account therefore comes from the vantage of the person it happened to, and that vantage frames it as the memory of a loss. That framing is the most contested thing about the film. What is on screen is a relationship between a child and an adult, and by any current measure that is child sexual abuse. The film treats it in a nostalgic, lyrical register and never once names it as a crime. Who it's for: Viewers studying contested works in film history and autobiographical adaptation, and anyone approaching it knowing what it contains. Who it's not for: Most viewers. The film presents child sexual abuse as a romantic memory and never questions that frame.