In 2005, in a jam-packed cinema in Tunis, I saw the Dutch movie Simon (2004) by Eddy Terstall. The movie was part of a film festival organised by the European embassies, at which each country showcased their best movie from the past year. Terstall was present at the screening, and introduced the film in fluent Arabic and French. He warned the audience that the film – which is about the universal themes of friendship, love and death – may appear rather exotic to many of the Arabic and European audience members, as in Simon these topics are explored within the city boundaries of a liberal Amsterdam, where there is a tolerant attitude to sexuality and soft drugs, gay marriage is a commonly accepted fact and assisted dying is a legal option enabling someone who is facing the prospect of unbearable suffering to terminate their life in a dignified way. It just so happened that the Spanish offering at the same festival was the movie The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro, dir. Alejandro Amenabar, 2004), based on the true story of a quadriplegic who loses his battle with the Spanish legal system and the Catholic church for the right to terminate his life.

Spinoza's heir

The contrast between the different approaches to the same problem could not have been displayed more clearly. These films show that, even within the European Union, there are still major cultural differences when it comes to morality (including sexual morality) and ethical dilemmas. Simon addresses a range of different taboo topics, and is a movie which perhaps could not have been made anywhere but in 20th-century Amsterdam. With the emphasis he places on freedom of speech and lifestyle, Terstall could be considered an heir to the ideas of Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher born in 17th-century Amsterdam, who considered freedom to be an important prerequisite for ethics and politics. Although Terstall never explicitly invokes his fellow townsman, he states in his book Ik loop of ik vlieg (‘I Walk or I Fly’, published in Dutch) that he wants to show through his movies that free thought and action is a hallmark of civilisation that is worth drawing attention to. In that sense, his films can be considered Spinozan treatises in defence of freedom. Below you will find some observations on the natural affinity that exists between these two free-state thinkers.