Indisch Zwijgen (2022) documentary
Indisch Zwijgen, Dutch for ”Indo’s Silence”, is a documentary by Sven Peetoom and Juliette Dominicus, where they follow three Dutch-Indonesian artists of the third generation who delve into their family history in an attempt to look for answers and to break generations of silence.
The Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia, were colonised by the Netherlands in the early 19th century. The descendants from the Dutch and the Indonesians were nicknamed ‘Indo’. They became a separate class between the coloniser and the colonised. After centuries of colonisation, the Japanese occupation and the war for independence, around 300,000 Indos fled to the Netherlands. Currently there are between 1.5 to 2 million Dutch people with Indonesian roots, but most of them know next to nothing about their family history back in the former Dutch East Indies.
While working on this documentary by and for Dutch-Indos as a Dutch graphic designer, I chose to only use typefaces designed by Indonesian type foundries, to support, involve and give space for Indonesian design within the documentary. Considering my own social relation to this documentary, the subject at hand, and of course the quality of typefaces that the Global South can produce, it wouldn’t make sense not to.
Eventually we chose to use Tokotype's Frasa, a contemporary and formal serif combined with Stroma as a more elegant and vulnerable display typeface for the title.
