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The dozens of Dutch women who emigrated to New Zealand in 1953 - many of them to marry - may not recognise themselves in a new movie about the most famous "bride flight", says the film's director.
"There are, of course, circumstances that they will recognise," Ben Sombogaart
told Radio Netherlands.
As part of her research for the film's screenplay, writer Marieke van der Pol toured New Zealand and met women who had been on board the 1953 KLM flight for which the film Bride Flight is named.
She used their stories to create her characters, but Sombogaart said: "These women won't recognise themselves because Marieke also used her imagination."
But there would be things they would recognise: one woman talked of living in a bunker for the first 10 years she was in New Zealand.
"We actually found it when we were searching for locations. It was empty and it was a cold, damp, horrible place," the director said. "It was easy to imagine how unhappy and miserable she felt living there."
In Bride Flight, Sombogaart used historic footage from a 1953 KLM flight involved in an air race to New Zealand.
The film tells the story of three women - Marjorie, Ada and Esther - and one man, Frank, emigrating to become a farmer.
It also tells of the Dutch airline entering the London-to-Christchurch air race, billed as the "last great air race", and winning the transport handicap section.
The modified KLM DC-6A made the journey in 37 hours 30 minutes, in a repeat of the 1934 MacRobertson air race from London to Christchurch.
Many Dutch immigrants wanted to get away from the traumas of World War II, the devastating floods in Europe of February 1953, the chronic housing shortage and the narrow-minded parochialism of the Dutch. "They dreamed of space, luxury and freedom," said Sombogaart. "And the women dreamed of love."
In 1953, emigration meant saying goodbye to your family and friends - a leap into the dark that is difficult for modern audiences to imagine, he said.
A number of elderly women made regular visits to the set when the film was shot in New Zealand last year, some of them carrying the blue suitcases they had been given by KLM.
"Many of them were actually on that flight that we used in the film," the director said. "My film is about those women. But the tragic aspect of the story is that the things they were escaping from eventually caught up with them.
"Lots of the older emigrants feel an enormous sense of nostalgia when they think back to their birthplace, to the Netherlands."
- NZPA
