This Is Your Captain Speaking

Idriss Nabil (Directing Fiction), Hannah van Helden, Patou ten Cate and Myrthe Laarakker (Production) are graduating with the film This is your captain speaking. Watch the film on NPO Start. 

This is your captain speaking is a short fiction film about the 10-year-old Asare. To prevent his music teacher Seydou being deported from the country, he tries to adopt him. After all, Asare is adopted himself and he is allowed to stay, so that will surely apply to Seydou, won’t it?  
When Asare’s plan comes up against the harsh light of adult reality, he risks losing not only Seydou, but also his innocent outlook.

Idriss Nabil: 'I myself am fortunate enough to be both Cameroonian and Dutch. However, I can enter 127 countries with my Dutch passport, but with my Cameroonian passport, I would only be welcome in 16 countries. How do you explain that? To a child of 10, for example? This was the starting point for the film This is your captain speaking. 
A child's unsullied eye sees much more than we adults realise. Nothing escapes a child. They are marked, both rationally and emotionally, by what happens around them at an early stage. At the same time, the outlook of a child or teenager is pure and uninhibited. They are not yet stained by the norms and values that we have acquired as adults, without questioning them often enough.  
I think that you can always find reasons (fortunately) why a movie should be made. However, I notice now more than ever that we are living in a time of division. Everyone shouts each other down, and core values like empathy and equality seem to be the exception rather than the norm. That's why I think it's especially important now to use the child's voice as a guiding factor in stories and to address problematic themes in a humorous way through the youthful eye.  

This film came about in cooperation with VPRO.  

Loes Komen, producer 
'With This is your captain speaking, this group of students addresses an urgent social issue, namely the question: why is someone welcome (or not) within a country's borders? The film contains a heavy theme told from the eyes of a child, which lends the subject matter a certain lightness, and which makes the impact, when it turns out that Asare cannot adopt his music teacher Seydou, all the greater.'
 Stories such as This is your captain speaking, in which great inequality is made open to discussion, are of great importance. That is especially the case if those stories can also be discussed with young viewers, and they can start a dialogue between parent and child or in classrooms.  

Anita Smit, head of Productions, Netherlands Film Academy 
'Idriss has tackled a major theme in a playful manner with his graduation film, making the viewer feel that same incomprehension; it's not fair. Not only does the film deal with a very important theme, but it was also made during the coronavirus pandemic, under extremely difficult conditions, which is not evident from the film.  
Thanks in part to this film, director Idriss Nabil received a so-called ‘Wildcard’ (one of two awarded by the Netherlands Film Fund in the fiction category) at the most recent edition of the Netherlands Film Festival.'