Oh, I was disappointed in this. I’d expected it to be a dive into what apologies mean, how they differ across countries and languages, some sort of anthropology.

Instead, we get an awful lot of Belgian handwringing. It’s all very well-meaning, but to my mind it fell down on two pretty major points.

First, it seems massively reluctant to draw a line between a personal apology and a representative one. It’s just silly. It treats the idea of apologising for something you have done as the same as apologising for something your people or ancestors have done. And they’re not remotely similar. But the film seems disinclined to distinguish between them.

Secondly, it doesn’t want to criticise the absolute emptiness of the political apology. We watch the progress of some Belgian subcommittee for apologising for their horrendous deeds: it runs for nearly three years and interviews hundreds of people before writing a report that’s buried forever. It’s an absolutely abhorrent waste of time and money. The film seems keen for us to see the eventual acrimonious end as being the real problem. But it’s not. The whole exercise was doomed from the start! We never find out how much was spent on this charade.

As ever, I’m massively glad this was made, I’m glad of the chance to see it, and I’m grateful the director came to the screening. It didn’t hit the mark for me, but I’d take it over a hundred Netflix-produced documentaries in a box any day.