De Regels Van Matthijs

Award winning film, De regels van Matthijs (Matthew’s laws) takes the viewers through an emotional rollercoaster ride as the director, Marc Schmidt tells the story of his friend, Matthijs, who is an Asperger’s syndrome sufferer.

Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder. The sufferer has significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interest. Matthijs, like any other sufferer, lives in a drastically different world and has his own standard of procedures. In the heart-wrenching film, we see how Matthijs struggles with frustration and helplessness when nobody seems to understand his behavior or when things do not go his way.

This kind of storytelling

In De regels van Matthijs, there is a drama – Matthijs’ row with his neighbours due to his insistence on finishing his toilet work despite his neighbours’ opposition and unhappiness – and that particular drama is captured adequately without overdoing it. But for Super Size Me, there is not one – although the scene whereby Spurlock’s physician advised him to stop the experiment due to his unexpected deteriorating health does create suspense. The “realness” of the film is one of the main advantages of participatory storytelling.

Participatory storytelling is also better than other modes of storytelling at evoking empathy and aiding learning and development. Research shows that memories rooted in personal experience are easier to retrieve. The fact that personal stories are grounded in real-life events makes them easier to identity with and locate in memory.

With advantages come disadvantages of direct involvement. Ironic as it may sound, the main disadvantage of this kind of storytelling revolves around the issue of content distortion. Participatory storytelling is essentially a way of telling a story from the protagonist’s point of view, rendering it a subjective interpretation of the topic of the