Na de mooiste dag - After the Most Beautiful Day
short doc. - 29min. - 2011
Hands play a piano. The main character comes into the picture. He says: 'I was wearing
a construction helmet, instead of a bike helmet. It scraped along the ground.' While his
voice further explains what happened to him, we see two images side by side. The man
wakes up on a mattress on the floor (filmed in ’night shot’), he climbs into a wheelchair,
washes his long blond hair. Meanwhile, he is occasionally seen in the complementary
image. He tells of Lucie, a French speaking Canadian girl with whom he shortly before
the accident had married. They had spent the night before his fall in an abandoned orchard,
where she had stated that this was the best time of her life. He then talks about the
divorce thereafter. And about the treatment by outsiders. He gives examples. His piano
playing comes in violently, and when the anger has cooled down and the sound dies away,
he confesses: "I did it myself too." He behaved in the same way toward people with other
disabilities. He talks energetically and with self-reflection. Near the end of the film he
tells about a scientific study. It proved that the level of happiness of someone who has
had such an accident will, after a couple of years, be exactly the same as before. For the
spectator it's obvious that he himself is a striking example.
Split screen editing in which certain scenes slide in slowly and disappear again. The
movement of the images is reflecting the way the user of a wheelchair rolls around and
looks at the world.
After the Most Beautiful Day is Jaap de Ruig’s second mid-length creative documentary.
