Youth 9-12: The Invisible Ones

Filmmaker Martijn Blekendaal thinks there should be a superhero for invisible children: kids who need to be invisible because otherwise their lives are in danger. In The Invisible Ones he tells the stories of four children – some of whom are now 85 years old – who learned to master the art of going unnoticed. This is something he learned to do in his own life.

Among the children is a woman who stayed silent as a mouse during the war (but no longer) and a man who surrounds himself with hundreds of colored lights and plastic flowers since the darkness of his time spent in hiding. And there's a boy who would like to tell his story, but has to stay invisible. And yet appears on screen.

This is the starting point for an exploration of the ways in which attempts have been made to portray the invisible in the history of film, photography and television. The Invisible Ones thus becomes a playful media experiment, an attempt to create a superhero and a tribute to invisible children and to the superpowers in ordinary people.