The Security Guards (2018)

Directed by: Anneloek Sollart | 70 minutes | documentary

The opening scene of ‘The Security Guards’ contains the field of view of a security guard as he oversees a crowd. It’s a beautiful image; There is something threatening about the patiently waiting crowd: something can just happen that causes this group of apparently average Dutch people to explode. Then we switch to the Canal Pride in Amsterdam, a summer party that causes a packed city center. There is also something ominous about that in ‘The Security Guards’, when the makers again choose the protagonists’ perspective: it is not the disco stompers who dominate, they are the muted background of a task: screening a diverse audience.

Is it necessary to secure an egalitarian folk festival? Isn’t there a bit of a mood being created? The security guards pick up a lost loner with a backpack from the sea of ​​​​people before something seems to be wrong. If that turns out not to be the case, the threatening background music has already done its job. You can always consider someone in a crowd to be suspicious based on appearance and behavior. Perhaps not much goes wrong in the Netherlands of ‘The security guards’, in which, among others, the guards of Wilders, the AH and the Borssele nuclear power plant are followed. You could also say that they are doing necessary work, because only something serious will happen.

The makers have not been ‘granted’ that moment, according to the devil’s advocate. It becomes clear under what tension the security professionals are, if, for example, someone with a goat’s head walks next to them. Perhaps it is precisely the pleasant slowness of our little country that sets the contrast so strongly. The fact is, in ‘The Security Guards’ we look at the paranoia of the protagonists, not the reality of the general public. All the security guards in this documentary have experienced a different reality, such as the attacks in Brussels. We know that in such a case, persecution madness quickly spreads to the immediate environment. And that is also possible in the Netherlands.