SELLING A COLONIAL WAR

Who gets to decide how a nation remembers its past?

When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the Netherlands responded with a brutal military campaign that the Dutch government described not as a war, but as “police actions” intended to restore order. For decades, that language helped shape how the conflict was understood at home, obscuring both the violence of the colonial war and questions of responsibility.

Using extraordinary archival footage—much of it created or controlled by the Dutch authorities—filmmaker In-Soo Radstake examines how a government constructed and sold its version of events to the public. International experts place the conflict within the broader history of colonialism, Indonesian independence, and postwar geopolitics, while the images themselves reveal the distance between the official narrative and the reality on the ground.

At a moment when questions about how national history is taught, preserved, and presented have taken on renewed urgency, Selling a Colonial War is a powerful examination of propaganda, historical memory, and the struggle over who gets to tell a nation’s story.

Netherlands, 2024, 105 min.
Documentary | English, Indonesian and Dutch with English subtitles
Directed by In-Soo Radstake

"Selling a Colonial War looks to encourage the Dutch government and society to accept responsibility for their actions as a colonial power in Indonesia – and especially their actions when fighting a war in Indonesia after the country declared independence in 1945. The Dutch government still refrains from using the term “war crimes” to describe their actions as this would have great impact on calls for reparation." ~ Leo Barraclough, Variety