Still: White Flash

Euthanasia has been a highly volatile and divisive subject in The Netherlands since its legalisation in 2001. In her debut feature White Flash, which opens the 2024 Netherlands Film Festival, Laura Hermanides seeks to humanise the debate which continues to rage within political and medical circles. “I felt the need for something that resonates more with the soul than the mind, offering a new perspective on this discussion,” Hermanides stresses of her film.
 
White Flash is based on the true story of Agnes who, together with her husband, watched her adult son for years trying to overcome severe depression. He decided eventually to undergo euthanasia to relieve his suffering.
 
In the film Aagje (65, played by Renée Soutendijk) and Toon (67, Raymond Thiry) visit their increasingly desperate son Rick (42, Sanne den Hartogh), who is in a secure psychiatric facility. Rick is a loving man who cannot take his own life because of the pain it would cause his parents and siblings, and so he pursues a legal path, and one that he implores his mother and father both to understand and to accompany him along.
 
The story on which the film is based actually occurred in 2012. In 2013, Hermanides tried to broach the subject in documentary form but the public broadcaster got cold feet amidst a storm of “sensationalist” reporting on the organization that made decisions on euthanasia in cases of unbearable psychological suffering. But the director remained in contact with Agnes, who became a close friend and who agreed to participate fully in a semi-fictionalised account of her story. Agnes’ spoken testimonies accompanied 700 pages of written notes that her late husband had taken after their twice weekly visits to their son, on the advice of a psychologist.
 
“Agnes trusted me and decided to participate because her son had asked her to fight for people like him,” says Hermanides.
 
The film is an emotional rollercoaster, at times heart-rending. At other times, it is strangely life-affirming as parents Aagje and Toon find new meaning in their lives after their son’s departure. It is also steeped in dark humour throughout, such as when Rick has a last cigarette in the clinic. “From now in, I’ll quit,” he comforts his family.
 
“It's a working-class family with beautiful humour that enables you to survive the things that are unsurvivable in a way,” comments Hermanides, even if the sense of loss and regret is something Agnes, and the onscreen Aagje, will always have to bear. “She still, every day, wonders, ‘did I do the right thing in letting him go?’ And she knows she will reflect on that every day, which I find beautiful - her willingness to be vulnerable and ask herself that question. But of course, of all evils, this was what her son chose as the best option.”
 
How does Hermanides feel (more than a decade after she first encountered Agnes and her story) now that the film is about to be unveiled to the general public.

“I have been working on this subject behind the scenes for years and years in order to make something that hopefully communicates with people - and now is the moment that it has become its own organism,” she answers, acknowledging that euthanasia is likely to remain a divisive topic among the viewing public. “But it's an opening to a conversation that I think is very important to have. We have this possibility [of euthanasia] in the Netherlands, so I think we should speak very openly about it.”

“The biggest tension is now to sit in a cinema at the premiere with all these people to see if the film touches them,” Hermanides ends.

___

White Flash is directed by Laura Hermanides, written by Laura Hermanides & Roelof Jan Minneboo, produced by Family Affair Films and supported by The Netherlands Film Fund. 

To find out more about The Netherlands Film Festival, click here.