Honger

If one film has become the example of the visualisation of the ‘1944-‘45 winter of starvation, it is Rudi Hornecker’s HONGER. Images of people braving the bitter cold looking for firewood in Holland’s biggest cities. Images of children with spoons scraping out empty barrels in the soup kitchens. Of adults rummaging through garbage searching for anything, just anything, edible. The sequences are short, but impressive, and they are now stamped on our collective memory. Film stock was very scarce in these times, and this, combined with the filmmaker’s reluctance to capture this graphic human destitution, explains why many scenes last only a few seconds. This is an unforgettable time document about a black page in the Netherlands history. Never before, the voice-over concludes, had people been so happy as they were upon liberation, but never did they forget it so quickly…