The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family – Interactive Book Presentation

Saturday 7 November | 14:30 | Filmhuis Den Haag | Zaal 6 | Free admission

Eliane Esther Bots (1986) is a Dutch artist whose careful research has focused on Eastern Europe for many years. Her non-fiction art book The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family (2026) forms the basis for several presentations of the work. The book consists of transcriptions, poems, dreams, drawings and paintings, conveying conflict-related experiences and memories from three perspectives: second-generation Dutch-Bosnian women; interpreters who worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; and a family who fled the wars in Chechnya. The texts are based on conversations and interviews that Bots edited for publication in close collaboration with those involved. These conversations took place as part of various film projects, including the European Film Award-nominated In Flow of Words (2022), which previously screened at ENFF. The multimedia presentation translates the recently published art book into an interactive experience in which testimonies become sensorially tangible in time and space.

ENFF will present the work in two ways. In the cinema, a collective listening session will be created, with shared experience at its centre. It mirrors the form of the book itself, in which fragments of many voices come together to create a collective memory. Listening and interaction are both central here, as visitors are encouraged to reflect on the fragments in Bots’s presence.

Alongside this, a 45-minute audio installation will allow visitors to listen to an accompanying track of the book through headphones. Guided non-linearly through its different fragments, listeners are invited to move through the work associatively – much like memory itself – and weave the individual voices together in their own way.

Admission to the collective listening session is free, but requires registration.