Decennium

The first ten years of the new millennium felt as a breakthrough to a new era in the Netherlands, accompanied with enormous emotional events; the firework explosion in Enschede, the murder on Pim Fortuyn and later on Theo van Gogh but also the rise of populism.
Besides the Netherlands other enormous emotional events in the world happened, to name a few  9/11, the tsunami, the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan but also the credit crisis. In the last ten years the Netherlands has changed a lot, politically, but also mentality. We are not that innocent sleepy country  anymore where everything was possible. Did we lost our innocence? Did the Netherlands changed into a country that is afraid? Old values such as equality, openness and tolerance, the ideal of the welfare, the willing to share with each other, the multicultural society and terminology as mutual respect are on a tricky edge because of strong currents such as populism, pragmatism, xenophobia and distrust. We identify that we have less respect for each other , the individual is coming first, rights are being claimed in the picture of ‘freedom’ , it seems like everything has and can be said in a way that is much harsher than ten years ago.
The rise of social media makes people copy each other. Nothing is going on with the world economy and our environment is in danger… The Netherlands seems less safe. But is it really that bad? Did our world actually become worse the last ten years? And if so, what happened with the people who lived in this world? We were part of it, right? This intruding and excitatory question is the starting point of the drama serie ‘Decennium’, in which we follow a Dutch family with all their trials and tribulations in the period of 2000 until 2010.