This was the opening of the Rotterdam film festival 2015 (IFFR). I admit being a bit prejudiced prior to the screening, due to the synopsis describing a typical meeting room as the main playground. I envisioned a long and boring 95 minutes of talking heads, but I was proved wrong. The "stage" is occupied by two handful's of people thrown together from various ministries, with very different backgrounds and all imaginable sorts of attitudes. Add to the mix some unresolved personal problems left over from past encounters, plus some family problems unrelated to the issues at hand. Finally, it became clear that several participants had a hidden agenda and dirty politics behind their sleeves to achieve their goals. We are not confirmed in the naive theory that civil servants lead unimaginative lives, and are clearly not used to hide their own opinions in favor of the current political line.
After all, it proved to be a very useful format to create some thought provoking situations and dilemma's, for which there are no easy answers. A varied collection of civil servants meet to prepare plans to cope with all sorts of disasters, especially those that become more prevalent lately, like various types of terrorism. A daunting task indeed, when considering the spectrum of possibilities. Yet, the decisions passed by in a very fast pace, thereby expressly ignoring the fine details and statistical (im)possibilities. Some were of the obvious category, always suggested by The Powers That Be (TPTB), like "close all airports". A positive element in the script was that we heard some rebuttals during the meeting, thereby making clear that not all decisions were made in the autopilot mode. Luckily, participants seemed very well documented on prevailing issues, supported by lists and underlying plans prepared earlier. Also, they showcased an abundance of personal expertise on the matters at hand.
Of course, given the situation at hand, there is no alternative than to make some hard choices within a limited time period. All in all, we saw a well constructed script and the writers for this film did a fine job. It all looked very realistic, albeit somewhat frightening that some of the decisions took only 1 or 2 minutes, regardless of their potential impact and possible consequences when it would become real in some unwanted future. We can expect that many present at the meeting have some form of professional deformation, and are easily inclined to drastic measures that ignore the people who it is all about. Would we have made other decisions in their place??
The realistic impression left with us viewers was much improved by mixing in personal problems and mutual differences in attitude, these also being prevalent in reality when decisions are being made. Such external aspects may cloud the real issues at hand and even lead to incorrect decisions, but that happens in the real world too. That is the discouraging part of this movie, leaving us with an ambivalent feeling about aforementioned TPTB. Nevertheless, it provides for an inside view in the way our government and civil service will think and act as of today, when the need arises. We can only hope that these plans will be covered with dust, and never need to be used in practice.
