Nieuwe gronden

… Before breaking with Holland, I had a film to finish, or more precisely, to transform : Zuiderzee ; this film, on the construction and drainage of the great dyke at Zuiderzee, which I had begun in 1930 and continued to work on as and when work advanced, began to take real shape after are and a half hours of editing which related the struggle of Man and the See… But in ten years the world had changed… It was panic in 1934… Zuiderzee became Nouvelle Terre, a shorter, more dramatic film charged with a political significance which derived from history itself.