De Amerikaan die ik nooit geweest ben

DE AMERIKAAN DIE IK NOOIT GEWEEST BEN shows the discovery of New Jersey, as told by a man who comes home to where he never lived. As the son of a Dutch development-aid worker, he grew up in distant cities like Baghdad and Jakarta, where he attended American schools. When he was eleven, he was a little American patriot – but then he had to return to Amersfoort. Now, he finally arrives in New Jersey, the state that in his imagination he really comes from. In reality, it consists of non-places: endless shopping malls, industrial waste land, polluted swamps, seedy bathing resorts, labyrinthian highways, lush but dead suburbia, the Arabic neighbourhoods in Jersey City, the black ghetto of Newark. In an associative sequence of photographs, sometimes moving images and a soundscape of travel reports, interviews, radio excerpts and music, narrator Chris Keulemans and photographer Rob Smits try to discover the beauty, the sense of coming home, under the ashen surface of New Jersey – a state that trembles with paranoia since it was revealed that the perpetrators of September 11 had lodged here for months. The documentary is released simultaneously with the novel of the same name. Both are preceded by an extensive website, www.deamerikaan.nl, and a radio documentary. ‘De Amerikaan die ik nooit geweest ben’ is a multimedia project about the creation of the image of America via pop culture.