WAT WAS HIE?
Luke and Julia-Beth in conversation about WAT WAS HIE?
A film screening followed by a conversation with Luke and Julia-Beth exploring WAT WAS HIE? a film that traces the entangled histories of Dutch colonialism, Indigenous erasure, resistance, and slavery across the landscapes of the Cape.
Together, they will reflect on the film’s questions around land, memory, embodiment, and the ways colonial histories continue to live on in both landscape and body.
WAT WAS HIE? unfolds across the landscapes of the Cape, where land, water, and memory bear witness to what history has tried to bury. Retracing entangled histories of Dutch colonialism, Indigenous erasure, resistance, and slavery, the film moves through sites once inhabited and stewarded by San and Khoe communities, revealing how these histories remain inscribed in the terrain.
Through embodied re-enactment, movement, and poetic reflection, and drawing from stories of Krotoa, slave registers, and the lingering traces of the dop system, suppressed histories resurface as living presence.
WAT WAS HIE? asks a searing question: What was here?—inviting a reckoning with memory, healing, and the persistence of colonial violence in both land and body.
The project has earned international recognition with two distinguished honours in 2026. It received the Storytelling Award at the imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival in Canada, one of the leading international platforms celebrating Indigenous cinema, media, and arts.
The project was also honoured with the Encounters Youth Experience (EYE) Award for Best African Short Film at the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, further cementing its impact and resonance within the African and international documentary filmmaking landscape.
Luke De Kock is the founder of Camissa Create, a multidisciplinary creative collective that develops performance, film and educational experiences rooted in South African heritage, memory and social justice. Through collaborative and site-specific works, the organisation seeks to reconnect audiences with histories that have been silenced or forgotten.
[Fotocredit: Haneem Christian]
Julia-Beth Harris is an author, poet and performer from South Africa, now based in Amsterdam. With a background in design and creative writing, she brings a distinctly visual and multi-layered quality to her texts. Her work moves between continents, reflecting her position between the global North and South. Writing as an act of unification, she builds bridges between cultures and communities. [Fotocredit: Daniel Milton]
Met in dit programma Luke De Kock Director & choreographer Julia-Beth Harris author, poet and performer