How Holland Welcomes.
The Dutch government likes words that disguise something by naming it. The customer journey is such a word. It describes the integration process as a municipality offers it to status holders, and it contains two assumptions that no one speaks aloud. The first: that you are a customer. The second: that it is a journey, with a beginning, an itinerary and a destination. Neither is true.
Franz Kafka wrote Das Schloss, published posthumously in 1926, a novel about a man, K., who arrives in a village and tries to gain access to the castle that controls everything. He is received, referred to, spoken to by officials who are all helpful and all powerless. Everyone is doing their job. No one is responsible. K. never arrives. In Dutch, the book was long called Het slot, a word that covers both the castle and the lock on the door, and which Oxford Kafka expert Meindert Peters also defends as a third reading: the end. The translator ended up choosing The Castle. I'll stick with the lock. One hundred years later, the municipality of Breda has designed the integration process for status holders as a customer journey, complete with case managers, directors and route plans, and the resemblance is so exact that one wonders if there is someone at city hall who used Kafka as a blueprint.
Documentary filmmaker Ton van Zantvoort gained access to this system. For two years he followed newcomers through all layers of the integration process. His camera records without commentary. No interviews, no voice-over, no interpretation. You sit in when professionals, with the best of intentions, divide the lives of others into cases and steps. You are there when an adult woman who has crossed a continent to get here is spoken to in the tone you use to compliment a four-year-old on a drawing. You sit in when a bus driver explains with angelic patience how to get on a bus, and the audience in the room laughs, and that laughter dies halfway through because you realize that this is the reality of someone who is going to have to get up tomorrow and understand again how this country works.
Language lesson, culture lesson, financial relief, forms, housing, ice skating, licorice tasting. All at once, all equally important, all instantaneous. You get lost along as a viewer. You feel what it is like to run after the facts of your own life while twenty agencies all need something from you and none of them are aligned. What Kafka understood a hundred years ago is that the cruelty of bureaucracy is rarely in the intention. It is in the architecture. Everyone in this film acts out of commitment. And yet the whole produces a system that makes cases out of families and trajectories of lives, and that at every step increases the distance between the help being offered and the human being who is to receive it.
The film follows a Syrian family seeking safety for their children, and two Somali sisters who, for the first time in their lives, dare to say out loud that they love women. They do so in front of a buddy, someone outside the system, who goes ice skating with them, then drinks coffee with treacle waffle, and has a human-to-human conversation. Just someone who sits across from you and listens. In that moment, everything that preceded it becomes visible as a construction that simulates movement and organizes stasis. The castle disappears. Just a human being sits there.
I recognize that moment. I do buddy work at De Regenboog in Amsterdam, and there I learned that sometimes the difference between the emptiness of someone's week and the best day someone has had in ages is a game. An hour at a table. Something that costs me little and that I enjoy doing, and that changes everything for someone else. When the sisters in the film dared to say who they are for the first time, I felt the relief of someone who knows what it takes to utter that phrase, and how long it can take you before you dare. You don't dwell on that until you actively seek that connection.
Later in the film, you see where the customer journey ends. The images are the kind where part of the Netherlands has exactly the reaction ready to go that it had before the film began. But Van Zantvoort then spent 85 minutes showing you the letters you need to understand, how quickly the system that would guide you becomes the system that corrects you. The film deprives you of the ease of that judgment. Kafka left his novel unfinished. K. never reached the castle. The customer journey also has no end. There is always the next instance, the next form, the next counter. The journey ends only when the customer ceases to exist.
I live in the center of a city where the bus to the emergency shelter on a cruise boat has already become a political stance. Where you can sit on a terrace and have an opinion on integration without ever having spoken to anyone it affects. I know that ease, because I've been in it a long time. The buddy work at De Regenboog taught me that sometimes the distance between an opinion and a person is exactly one conversation, and that conversation only begins when you are willing to take your own discomfort for granted. Customer Journey gave me the courage to take on the next one after my current one. The film also gave me something else. The assurance that I am glad I never have to go through those three customer journeys myself. Because frankly, I had long given up hope.
Customer Journey runs in more than sixty movie theaters starting April 23. Kijk op customtravelfilm.comfor screenings in the region.
Text: Jeroen Panders | Jeroenschrijft.com
Sources
.- KLANTREIS (2026, 85 min.), directed by Ton van Zantvoort, production NEWTON film: https://klantreisfilm.nl
- Franz Kafka, Das Schloss (published posthumously 1926). Dutch translation: The Castle, translated by Willem van Toorn, Athenaeum 2018.
- Meindert Peters, Kafka in Oxford - part 4 , Bazarow Magazine / Book Newspaper, 2023:
- Inburgering 2021 Act, which made municipalities responsible for implementing the integration program: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0044772
- Foundation De Regenboog Groep, Amsterdam: https://www.deregenboog.org
- Buddy to Buddy, foundation that pairs newcomers with fellow townspeople on an equal basis: https://www.buddytobuddy.nl