Documentary | 01 March 2005

At the beginning of the documentary, fine artist Jan Montyn is lying in bed, stripped to the waist. The blades of a fan are spinning; war footage is projected across. In 1944, Montyn enrolled in the German navy and ended up on the eastern front. He shows drawings he made in the trenches with charcoal and toothpaste. Back in Holland, he was hospitalised with 'shell shock'. Nevertheless, later on he would fight the communists in Korea and work as a relief worker in Vietnam and Cambodia. The film crew follows him back to Vietnam, a country where he first arrived in the early seventies: 'Sometimes, I try to convert the horror to paradise.' And now he is sailing on a river, surrounded by dancing young women. But we also see him at work and breathe down his neck when he is etching and engraving. He looks back on his life without a guilty conscience or shame. 'Many wars, many women, many etches', could be his epitaph, the voice-over says.