Director: Luuk Bouwman. Netherlands. 2024. 112 min

In the early 1940s, pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen became an enthusiastic producer of propaganda material for the Nazi occupiers of his homeland. While this slow-burn documentary about Teunissen may have more immediate local appeal, it’s also timely viewing for anyone interested in how brutality and repression is justified by its perpetrators, and how short memories and the desire not to dwell on the traumatic past. it can sow poisonous seeds.

It simmers with contemporary relevance

Consisting largely of excerpts from a lengthy 1960s audio interview with a thoroughly unrepentant Teunissen, propagandist follows on from Andres Veitel’s recent documentary Riefenstahlwho delved into the archives of the controversial German director to challenge her post-war suppression of her Nazi narrative. Premiering in IDFA competition, Bouwman’s step-by-step unraveling of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” will be a film of niche interest, but its advocacy of patient research as a corrective to historical amnesia gives it a wider appeal. attraction than the subject of the World War footnotes might suggest.

Two Dutch academics become the modest heroes of propagandist. One, Rolf Schuursma, is the historian who in 1964 and 1965 interviewed Teunissen (who died in 1975), the surprisingly relatable former “film czar” of Nazi-occupied Holland, and came away with hours of audio footage . The other, Egbert Barten, meticulously traced Dutch film production during the war years and tried – not always successfully – to question the cinema professionals who lent their services to the national film department aligned to the Teunissen regime.

Passages showing the 93-year-old Schuursma listening to tapes he recorded decades earlier are interspersed as chapter separators and a reality check: we see the historian grimace as Teunissen spins his story narcissistic about how he joined the Dutch fascist party NSB. and its SS wing out of a burning desire “to get the Dutch film industry back on its feet”. Occasionally, Schuursma removes his headphones to issue a quiet but impassioned correction, as when Teunissen objects to the Holocaust on the grounds that it was not “elegantly done,” before commenting that, however, if the Jews continued to stand ostentatiously outside the cafes of Amsterdam, even after the Nazi occupation, what did they expect?

Mostly, however, propagandist consists of the self-righteous realm of the Dutch Nazi film czar, layered over footage from his own pre-war films and home movies, and scenes from the propaganda films he helped make, as well as archival photographs and celluloid footage of Teunissen went about his business. . He appears as a frustrated director with grudges who reinvents himself as a chief bureaucrat; one who uses his new role, among other things, to get revenge on the critics who snubbed his one and only film, the 1933 national epic. William of Orange – the first feature-length sound film from the Netherlands and a resounding, much-derided flop.

With his ruddy complexion and easy, clubbable manner, Teunissen comes across as a small, vindictive man with big ambitions – one who was ready to use anyone in power to further them. His lack of passion for the Nazi cause becomes one of the hidden messages of a film seething with contemporary relevance, applicable as it is to anyone who suppresses their reservations about jumping on the bandwagon of loathsome autocrats.

Building gradually – sometimes a little too gradually – from the careful setting of the scene to the unmasking of an everyday monster, Bouwman’s documentary answers the “how could anyone do this?” question, showing how little it disturbed his subject – who was in many ways a typical, privileged and casually racist Dutchman of his generation. Effectively paired with a soundtrack of austere recent works by contemporary Dutch classical composer Mathilde Wantenaar, propagandist emphasizes the dark twist of its central character.