Oeroeg

This is the story of the confusion experienced by a young man caught between two warring worlds. Yohan (Rik Launspach), the owner of a Teak Plantation, has bee friends with Oeroeg (Martin Schwab), the son of one of his father’s native plantation employees, even though Yohan knows his father does not approve. The story jumps to a few years later when Yohan is undergoing military training in Holland and gets word that he will be assigned back to Indonesia. Yohan misses his father, his childhood friend Oeroeg, and the land he grew up in and remembers fondly. When he returns, he finds that the country has changed. His father has been found dead and Yohan suspects that Oeroeg killed him. Yohan’s obsession with finding Oeroeg dominates the rest of the film.  The story then shifts back and forth between Yohan’s current reality and his fixation on memories from the past that stand out clearly in his mind. These flashbacks lend a contemplative mood to the film. The differences between white-skinned Dutch Yohan and the dark complexioned indigenous Indonesian  Oeroeg had been clear since their childhood together. Yohan had wanted to erase those differences and he had succeeded in doing so in his mind until they reached adolescence and it became clear that the cultural gap had never really disappeared.  Oeroeg himself felt trapped in the same confusion of where his loyalties should lie, but in the end decided to side with the Republic of Indonesia and to create as much distance as possible between himself and Yohan, who could not accept what he perceived as changes in his friend. Yohan’s divided sympathies motivated him to treat the Indonesian prisoners captured by the Dutch differently than the other Dutch soldiers did, and eventually he was told he would be transferred back to Holland. Yohan then deserted his military post to accept Oeroeg’s invitation to meet him at the lake where they had played as children. There he is captured by Republic of Indonesia troops and meets up with Lida (Ivon Pelasula), one of his former teachers, who sympathizes with the republic. Lida explains that Oeroeg’s father, Deppo (Joze Rizal Manua), had not died saving Yohan from drowning in the lake as Yohan had believed, but was killed for stealing a watch from Yohan’s father, who also died around that time. Lida also clarified that Oeroeg could not have killed Yohan’s father because he was imprisoned by the Dutch at that time. The two friends finally meet during an exchange of prisoners. The director takes no sides in telling this story of conflict between the two nations. He points the brutality of war resorted to by both sides. His main focus is the friendship between the two men whose lives were destroyed because of the differences in their destinies.

• The film, adapted from a novel of the same name, used both the Dutch and Indonesian languages, and was a collaborative effort among Dutch, Belgian and German filmmakers. George Kamarullah, Iri Supit, Eddy G. Baker of Indonesia also worked on this film. The title of the film was changed to "Going Home" and it was dubbed into English for screening in Europe.