Backlighting shows Rotterdam as an idyllic mix of minorities

On television, Rotterdam is usually a well organized city. It starts well, but in the five minutes that follow, we see a red card … No worries, this piece is not about football. A few hours after Feyenoord left Amsterdam-Zuidoost without any chance, VPRO Tegenlicht sent the documentary My city is my heart .

The film is about Rotterdam. But not Rotterdam, which looks like a bite, which seems to be composed of humorous residents and critics of old neighborhoods who say they do not recognize their city anymore. Not even in Rotterdam, where political parties fought out of the tent for the municipal elections in a very uplifting way and where Liveable Rotterdam has become by far the biggest party.

"My city is my heart" tells a different story – or in fact the other side of the same story. Director Halil Özpamuk begins with a statistic that could come from an alarmist tweet from the Forum for Democracy: 70% of the young people at the Rotterdam School have a multicultural background. In Rotterdam, everyone is a member of a minority.

Also read: NRC columnist Lotfi El Hamidi about Rotterdam and a spot on the PVV

This is not bad news here. Özpamuk shows a booming city, where a new Rotterdammer has developed organically. "Stadmaker" Malique Mohamud will serve as a guide
. He points out that when he addresses people on the street, they mostly feel like citizens of Rotterdam – although I think you get related answers in many big cities.

Rotterdamers like Rotterdam a lot, that's for sure. A poet from Sierra Leone five years ago, his city sings: "You are a mixture of colors, that's why you seem without color."

Colorless is the Rotterdam that Mohamud does not show. He guides the people of Rotterdam who work in their city from the bottom up. Boys playing music in a garage, a woman driving a café, local residents trying to save the playgrounds from their street, the hip hop house. Many people who strive every day to live together in peace – hope that Minister Blok has also looked into the matter

We must recognize the pain of the other

L & # 39; image of Rotterdam in My city is my heart is idyllic. with urban renewal as a jammer. It leaves behind a trail of improved but also very expensive homes, through which people are driven out of their neighborhoods. Mohamud sees gentrification as a major threat to urban culture. It indicates a café located on a renovated plaza, whose municipalities have put pressure on their owners for that they are also serving alcohol. Given the large number of Muslims made up of Muslims, this is not done, which Mohamud presents as a triumph. This should not be an issue of integration, but of inclusion.

The guiding ideas of are very diverse. the city is my heart . It is time for the "mainstream culture" to begin to integrate, according to Mohamud, as if the group of people indicated was a homogeneous enterprise. The electoral victory of Leefbaar Rotterdam is called "a last convulsion of the good old days", which seems to me an underestimation of the power of this movement.

"We must recognize and acknowledge the sufferings of everyone," said Mohamud after he, with mixed success, tried to make sure that neighbors of different origins aligned with each other. that's a real Rotterdammer. True words in a documentary that does not tell the whole story of Rotterdam, but that is a relief from the nostalgic filling exercises that many reporters limit themselves to when they end up at the Maas.