In this nearly four-hour film, Van der Keuken sketches a portrait of Amsterdam and its inhabitants. Van der Keuken goes on a world tour in his own city and meets people from every corner of the world. Amsterdam as a multicultural village. The hero of the film is Khalid, a young moped courier who leads the viewer through the entire city while delivering his packages. We see a diversity of cultural expressions, such as the house scene, the entry of St Nicholas and a Ghanaian mourning ritual. The binding force of the film is the notion of ‘travelling’, which itself actually stands for detachment and is an essential feature of modern life. In search of the stories behind that detachment, Van der Keuken travels with a Chechen man living in Amsterdam to war-torn Chechnya for a visit to the man’s family. He also travels to Bolivia with a Bolivian man to visit his native village. Van der Keuken uses a loose cinematic style for this film. In the Vrij Nederland magazine in 1996, he said: ‘I want to be naive again. That’s why in this film, in keeping with cinema verité, I wanted to let myself be carried along by the camera, to let myself be surprised by what would happen there.’
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