AMSTERDAM — When Dutch-Iranian filmmaker Maarten de Schutter opened the boxes of his family photographs and VHS tapes that had sat untouched for years, he had no intention of making a film out of them.
But what began as an attempt to preserve his family archive would become “My Sweet Child,” a documentary reconstructing the life of his mother, the Dutch AIDS activist and feminist anthropologist Martine de Schutter.
Martine de Schutter was killed in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, when Maarten was 15. For nearly a decade afterward, he rarely spoke about his mother or the disaster that killed all 298 people on board, including 196 Dutch citizens.
International investigators concluded that MH17 was downed by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile launched from territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The attack became one of the defining moments of Russia's war against Ukraine years before the full-scale invasion in 2022 and was described as a moment when “the war in Ukraine suddenly reached the Netherlands.” In November 2022, a Dutch court convicted in absentia two Russians and one Ukrainian for their roles in the attack.
