De Stem des Bloeds

De Stem des Bloeds (The Voice of Blood), also known as Njai Siti, is a 1930 film from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

Carli and starred Annie Krohn, Sylvain Boekebinder, Vally Lank, and Jan Kruyt.

One day, van Kempen returns to the Netherlands, leaving Siti and their young mixed-race children behind.

Siti, meanwhile, lives with her uncle in a hut in the forest and prays fervently for van Kempen's return, even asking for help from the local shaman (dukun).

Unbeknownst to van Kempen, his children have been raised as natives and wear the traditional clothes, although they have also received a Western education.

[2] He targeted the film at Dutch audiences, which may account for the focus on native customs and farming; such coverage was unusual for contemporary works of fiction, although documentaries had handled the subject before.

[6] Like all contemporary films produced in the Indies, De Stem des Bloeds had low production values.

[8] The intertitles were in Dutch, which the Indonesian film historian Misbach Yusa Biran notes that most viewers – those who were native or ethnic Chinese – were unable to read.

[9] De Stem des Bloeds was released in 1930, seeing its Batavia (now Jakarta) premiere on 22 March of that year.

He found the colouring one extension of this lack of logic, writing that a violet tinge indicated that the farmers were harvesting rice at sunset – something that never happened.

Karina's Zelfopoffering was a commercial failure and Carli left the Indies not long afterwards,[5] moving to the Netherlands.

He notes with interest that, although in real life mixed-race children were faced with a sense of disgust, in De Stem des Bloeds an Indo man is heroic enough to rescue a pure Dutch woman and fight with a Dutchman.