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De rode jaren

Documentary, 2005, 75 min.

Were the members of the Marxist-Leninist Red Youth, later Red Help, terrorists? Former member Mirjam reacts giggly when she hears her (now dead) comrade and husband Lucien van Hoesel accept acts of violence on archive footage. In a chronological reconstruction packed with archive footage, director De Boer shows the hardening of the climate in the seventies, when the Red Youth started carrying out bomb attacks - in which not a single person was killed. De Boer has former members react to the images. He shows newspaper articles, propaganda material and interview excerpts with founder Willem Oskam, and he talks to co-founder Joost van Steenis and other ex-members. He pays a visit to the former international training camp of the Palestinian terrorist organisation PFLP in Yemen, in the presence of former RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock, who used to train there with Red Youth members. The young Lidwien Janssen's subsequent apprehension and jail sentence in Israel heralded the voluntary end of the Dutch movement. Van Steenis today: `We threatened to take the direction of the RAF.'

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