Miel-Emile + Q&A Peter van Houten
Poetic and loving film essay about Emile, who is almost 80 years old, and looks back on his life in the French Pyrenees.
After the Second World War, Dutch artist Pierre Raaijmakers took his family to France, promising them paradise on earth in the Pyrenees. This documentary reveals that his twelve children had a very difficult time in their new mountain home. Raaijmakers may have been a visionary painter and sculptor but he was also a dictatorial father who expected absolute obedience from his wife and kids. His now 80-year-old son Emile (nicknamed Miel) still has to come to terms with his father’s behaviour. Emile knows one thing for sure: without his mother, his youth would have been hell on earth. His mother’s letters, read out in the film by a granddaughter, give an insight into a horribly poor, emotionally cold existence.