Many survivors of the 1953 North Sea flood in Zeeland province had no wish to see the premiere of The Storm, director Ben Sombogaart's movie version of the biggest natural disaster in Dutch history. "I didn't want to go through all that again," said one women who was a rescue worker in 1953. "But when I heard that it was movie and not a documentary with real news footage, I decided to go anyway."

On the night of 31 January – 1 February 1953 many dykes in the south of the Netherlands failed to resist the combination of spring tide and a northwesterly storm. The resulting floods put large parts of the provinces South-Holland, Zeeland and North-Brabant under water, killing 1,835 people and forcing the evacuation of 70,000 more. The storm also affected England, Belgium, Denmark and France, and left another 700 people dead there.

A metaphor

The Film by the Sea festival in the seaside town of Vlissingen on Sunday organised a special screening of De Storm (The Storm) for all those born before 1953. Within a few hours more than 4,000 people registered; four-hundred ended up seeing the film.

The Storm tells the fictional story of Julia, a young mother who loses her five-weeks old baby during the flood. Director Sombogaart introduced the film by saying that it was made "with the utmost respect for the suffering that many people experienced". Screenwriter Rik Launspach emphasised that Julia's story is "a metaphor for grief and loss".

Although it has been more than fifty years, the disaster is still very much alive in the southwestern Netherlands. Now that there is talk of returning a piece of reclaimed land, the Hedwige polder, to the sea - to compensate for the environmental damage from dredging the shipping lane to the port of Antwerp - history, cinema and political reality seem to have come together.

During the screening the theatre was very quiet. There were no violent emotions, no tears, nobody left the theatre in anger or grief. The audience seemed to watch the movie with detachment and acceptance. Only once, near the end of the movie, did the spectators react with light, mocking laughter: when Julia's deeply religious father lets out a resounding 'Godverdomme!' (Goddammit, a common curse).

Inaccurate

There was no applause at the end of the movie. Most people left quietly, and only a few people stayed behind to discuss what they had seen.

The former rescue worker requested anonymity, but she did offer that "the film had little in common with reality". "It was much more gruesome. The water especially was stone cold. It is quite impossible that Julia would dive into the water again and again to find her baby. What I experienced, no film can express," she said.

The film emphasises many people's selfishness when it comes to self-preservation. "That is entirely correct," she said. "That shocked me too at the time."

Writer Kees Slager, who made a painstaking reconstruction of the flood in his book The disaster (2003), confirmed that the seawater in February 1953 had a temperature of just above zero degrees. "To swim in the water, as Julia does, was tantamount to suicide," he said.

Ria Geluk, who works at the Flood Museum in Ouwerkerk, was six when the storm engulfed Capelle, the hamlet where she lived.

"It's a pity that the film gives the impression that the disaster concerned only Zeeland", she said. "That's historically inaccurate. Of the 1,835 deaths more than half came from South-Holland and West-Brabant. In our museum we try to remember all the survivors."

"A beautiful film, but I never really got involved," Ria Geluk summed up the reaction of most people at the screening. "But if the film makes people think twice about the disaster we went through, then it will have been more than successful," she added.