Before the world learned their names, there was a girl who wrote and a girl who burned. One hid behind walls, teaching fear to speak in ink. The other stood before the sea, letting anger taste like freedom. They never met, yet somehow the wind carried their stories toward each other, across oceans, across centuries, until history, quiet and stubborn, let them touch.
Let’s say their names: Anne Frank and Martha Christina Tiahahu. Two girls who refused to vanish. Two heartbeats that kept blooming in the dark. Director Noah Berhitu was raised between two worlds: the Netherlands, where Anne’s name is a whisper of reverence, and Maluku, where Martha’s story still trembles beneath the waves. Between those memories, she finds a quiet shore where both can rest, both can belong.
In Statues Rule the Waves (2024), Berhitu lets them meet in spirit. The documentary doesn’t tell their stories, yet it listens to them. It breathes with them. It feels like opening a window after years of silence, or finding a seashell that hums someone’s name. It drifts the way remembrance does: slowly, softly, like sunlight moving through water. Anne’s diary and Martha’s defiance become two ways of saying the same prayer: I am still here.
For a fleeting moment, you can almost feel them both alive and shimmering. And after 40 minutes, the documentary fades, but their light doesn’t. It lingers like salt on skin, like a story you can’t stop hearing. Maybe that’s what memory is: the sea, forever returning. And if the sea never stops returning, do they ever truly leave? (Tirza Kanya) (Ed. Vanis)
Film Details
Statues Rule the Waves
Noah Berhitu | 35 min | 2024 | Belgium, Indonesia, Netherlands
Official Selection for Docs Docs: Short!
Festival Film Dokumenter 2025
