The Case of Telefilm De Punt’s Online Discussion Forum

Abstract

The Dutch direct-to-TV feature film De Punt (2009) was aimed at instigating public discussions about the collective memory of a train hijacking in the village De Punt, which was carried out by second generation Dutch-Moluccans, a postcolonial migrant community in the Netherlands. The filmmakers created an online discussion forum as an accompaniment to the film, in which viewers were invited to participate directly in discussions about the hijacking itself, as well as the role of the state in ending it, and the larger postcolonial context of the action. This chapter is aimed at contributing to this volume's central questions concerning online violence, by providing a comparative analysis between the film itself and the debate culture on the online forum, in which the latter will be critically assessed in terms of its intrinsic, polarizing structure.