Documentaire compositie van fragmenten uit oude nitraatfilms over het voormalige Nederlands-Indië. De film spitst zich toe op de wijze waarop Nederland in de periode 1912 - 1933 haar kolonie bestierde, hoe zij haar als koloniale onderneming zag en hoe de machtsverhoudingen destijds waren.

In a span of ninety minutes the film aims to show how the Netherlands administered its colony as a colonial enterprise and what the relations were like at the time. The usual commentary has been omitted and in its place poems and songs in Bahasa Indonesia have been included in a digital sound composition. In Mother Dao the Turtlelike, the viewer sees how the colonial machinery in the 1920s was implanted in a world so different from Western Europe.