I grew up not knowing my father.
He was not part of my upbringing, and for a long time I knew very little about him. Only later did I begin to understand that one half of my story came from somewhere else, from another country, another family, another history.
What surprised me was that learning more about him did not only teach me about why he disappeared. It taught me more about myself.
Perhaps that is where my fascination with stories began.
He was a filmmaker, actor, writer and narrator, just like his parents. Just like me. He always told me to ‘never grow up’. So I guess I inherited that from him as well: a refusal to stop looking at the world with the curiosity of a child.
Children ask the questions adults learn to stop asking. Why? Why not? What happened? What does that feel like? What if it were me?
I have tried to hold on to that.
We often think we listen to stories to understand other people. But sometimes the opposite happens too. The more deeply we understand another person, the more clearly we begin to see ourselves.
That idea has followed me through more than twenty years of work in television, journalism, education, live events and storytelling.
I have always been drawn to the moment when something stops being abstract.
A war is almost impossible to comprehend. One frightened child is not.
Climate change can feel distant. The disappearance of a place you love does not.
A political issue can seem theoretical until you meet the person whose life is shaped by it.
That is where stories matter to me.
In programs such as Het Klokhuis, Vroege Vogels, 13 in de Oorlog and De Slavernij Junior, I kept returning to the same question: how do you make something that feels far away become close enough to matter?
Not by simplifying it.
By staying curious long enough to find the human experience inside it.
I believe the shortest distance between two people is not information. It is recognition.
The moment you recognise something of yourself in someone else, distance begins to disappear. Curiosity replaces judgement. A story about “them” becomes a story that also says something about you.
That is the thread through my work.
I am drawn to subjects such as freedom, human rights, nature, identity, grief, belonging, behaviour and the way we live alongside one another. But I am just as interested in the form that allows those subjects to come alive.
Sometimes that is a television program.
Sometimes an interview.
Sometimes a live event, a talk, a workshop, a ceremony or a story that does not yet know what shape it wants to take.
I like to be involved early. To ask questions. To find the heart of an idea. To understand the people involved. To discover what the story is really about before deciding how it should be told.
Because the form can change.
The deeper question rarely does.
How do you make another person care enough to make space for something that had never mattered to them before?