
Mom, Why Did You Circumcise Me?
Dutch journalist Michael Schaap turns the camera on his own body, asking his mother why she had him circumcised as an infant in the Netherlands, where the procedure is done mainly for religious reasons rather than routine hospital practice. Her answers open onto a wider set of interviews: rabbis and imams who explain the religious weight behind the practice for Jews and Muslims, circumcisers who perform it, politicians weighing whether to regulate or ban it, American activists campaigning against infant circumcision, and a British man who has undergone foreskin restoration and describes what he says he lost. Schaap uses his own European perspective, one where circumcision reads as unusual rather than default, to press each subject on consent, medical necessity, and cultural inheritance. The film is shot in English and Dutch with English subtitles, moving between countries and religious traditions rather than settling on one setting or one argument. It stays with the question underneath all the interviews: whether a decision made on a newborn's body, for reasons ranging from covenant to convention, belongs to the parents or should wait for the person it happens to.