“A child in Amsterdam’s communes of the 70s”
As a child, Dorothée van den Berghe witnessed the liberating, remarkable experiment that put Amsterdam in the center of attention in the 1970s. Houses were squatted en masse and communes tried to put free love and left-wing ideals into practice. With the intimate My queen Karo, the Brussels director now sketches that turbulent period based on the Impressions of a ten-year-old girl. “If you want to portray that time in all its naturalness, you must also show that people walked around naked quickly and easily.”
Hopping around naked is one thing. It is something else to be a child who cannot sleep because there are couples making out here and there and mommy is watching in tears as daddy makes love to someone else. Do we know the consequences of that?
Van den Berghe: I don't know. The film starts from the child. A child's experience is different from that of an adult. What we consider small can make a big impression on a child. A child usually finds the situation in which it grows up normal and safe. Now you see Karo distancing herself a bit and not feeling completely at ease. The adults try out all sorts of things and experience a rush that means they don't always notice what the other is going through. A bit like a person in love doesn't see how the partner who stays behind is suffering. You can't call that selfishness, it happens in a rush. Some scenes are heavy, but here too we see something more open and extreme that is common: how many children don't see their father or mother kissing a new boyfriend or girlfriend? I think all forms of parenting are complicated. We probably also do things that will later turn out to have a major impact on children. Constantly putting children away in the crib to work hard is also a form of doing your thing as an adult without knowing the effect on children. In My Queen Karo it goes a bit too far, of course, but you can argue that it is good that children participate in all kinds of complexities or that it is at least better than keeping them away from everything. (BRUZZ)
