Building a lasting relationship
Monique Nolte: I met Kees Momma and his family in 1997, when I had the opportunity to participate in a series of documentaries for young directors. This series was themed ‘Youngsters and friendship’.
I was curious if someone with autism would be able to bond, to maintain relationships or friendships, so I started researching the topic. My research led me to Kees, who had written a book about his life.
When I met Kees – 32 years old at the time – I was immediately struck by his personality, and understood that he was the character I was looking for. He is pure and natural, and very intelligent. Kees is fully aware of what he misses out on in life due to his disability. That’s tragic, but it also makes him even more interesting to me.
The mini-documentary ‘Trainman’ came out in 1998, and this was the beginning of our friendship that still lasts until today, for 26 years. In that film, you see how Kees manages to survive in a world that’s threatening to him thanks to the support of his mother.
After the film aired we stayed in touch. As the years went by and his parents grew older, the fear of losing his parents and especially his mother got stronger. Kees wrote me about it more and more in his letters. Ten years after ‘Trainman’, I decided to make a new documentary and started filming ‘Only the best for our son’.
The reason was his father’s plan to create a prospect for his son’s future by starting a housing project where Kees could live together with other people with autism. Kees longed for such a future, but was afraid of a life without his mother. She didn’t want to let go of her son, so Kees’s father found himself obstructed by his wife, creating a dilemma. We worked on the film for seven years, and it became an unprecedented hit once it was released in 2014.
The spark for ‘A Place Like Home’ came when friends of Kees’s parents suddenly bought a house for Kees across the street, so that Kees could have a place of his own. This was a proposal for Kees to move in by himself and transfer to an independent life. His parents were already over 80 and the mother was beginning to suffer from dementia. Kees needed someone else to help take care of him.
However, Kees himself suffers from many neuroses, insecurities and obsessions, and building relationships with others is not easy for him. In the film, I sought to depict how he could become more independent despite these difficulties.
‘A Place Like Home’ was released in the Netherlands in April 2023. Although it presents a cohesive story and offers some closure, I’ve continued filming Kees’s efforts to live on his own. The sequel, scheduled for release next year, will depict Kees finally achieving independence.
