Victor’s special career, from Dom, Lomp and Famous to Mocro Mafia

The long-awaited fifth season of the tough ‘drug series’ Mocro Maffia can be seen on Videoland from tomorrow. After so much success, Metro once joined a man ‘from behind the scenes’. Victor D. Ponten is a man with a remarkable career.

Sometimes you see a fact and you think: that’s a fun fact. Take actress and cabaret artist Sanne Wallis, who was Dutch champion in solving the Rubik’s cube at the age of 11, just to name a few. Film and series maker Victor D. Ponten also has such a fact. For three years he directed Mocro Maffia (seasons 2 to 4). For the series that now starts on Videoland, he once took a place in the writing team. Moreover, he was the so-called showrunner, ultimately responsible for ‘everything’ and therefore boss of the entire Mocro Moffia stuff. But do you remember that Dom, Lomp and Famous video? From The Opposites in 2007, featuring Willie Wartaal and Dio? So it came from Ponten (together with Jim Taihuttu)…

Victor D. Ponten with a view of Amsterdam

We are now years later and find ourselves in Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam-Noord, where a ‘chat morning’ with the makers and actors of Mocro Maffia 5 is held. We are talking about that Victor D. Ponten with a view of the IJ and the Central Station skyline of the capital in which most of the coke war takes place.

Because that’s how Mocro Maffia can be summarized, of course: a coke war, between cartel Pope (Achmed Akkabi) and cartel Romano (Mandela Wee Wee), two ruthless gentlemen who once formed the absolute top coke duo of Amsterdam. Roman died in Mocro Maffia 4. What now?

The Story of Mocro Mafia 5

After Pope has decided to leave the Netherlands, Tatta (Robert de Hoog, you could already read about this in Metro’s Blik op de Buis) column rips his 2000 kilos of coke from Antwerp. In the Netherlands, Pope’s sister Samira (Zineb Fallouk) is empty-handed, but we will also see a lot of ‘abroad’. As Pope’s deputy in Amsterdam, she has to deal with all the headaches that stem from the aforementioned coke theft. And as a newcomer, this makes her extra dependent on her right-hand man Tonnano (Khalid ‘ICE’ Altherch), who hunts Tatta for revenge. On top of that comes the fact that Samira’s husband Taxi (Iliass Ojja) has defected to the judiciary and is working on a key witness deal. With this he adds fuel to the fire in the fight that public prosecutor Gerben van Jaren (Pierre Bokma) is waging against Pope’s organization. Taxi feeds Van Jars with insights and confessions, which could well mean the end of Pope’s organization. So the real news is the star witness… why is Mocro Maffia often about real life?

Mocro Mafia success paralleled the hip-hop giants

Mocro Maffia was an instant success in 2018 and has remained so ever since. Victor D. Ponten, who as a maker was good for well-known commercials and the film Rabat, was not yet there for the first season. “But,” he explains the popularity, “the series immediately managed to capture the good spirit of the times. Also in terms of music and language use. Six years ago, all hip-hop artists also broke through via the streaming model, no longer via the radio. I think Mocro Maffia was kind of the equivalent of that success. Subsequently, more and more other audiences started to watch, because they realized that there was something special.”

Ponten thus missed a year of the series and then was a director for three years. If you sit down with your writing colleagues Randy Oost, Kevin Boitelle, Achmed Akkabi, Ashar Medina and Sergej Groenhart for season 5, how do you start? “I set up the long line of the new series with Achmed. Then we say to each other ‘what are we going to come up with next?’ Actually, we also work quite practically. Like ‘where did we end up and where are we going?’ And less practical in the sense of ‘what are crazy things we can do, what haven’t we done yet and what areas haven’t been touched yet?’ From there you will continue to build and lay out storylines, with all the characters and a number of events, so to speak.”

Important characters disappear, but with pain

Although Victor D. Ponten has a nice resume, Mocro Maffia is all he has been doing for the past four years. “I actually always walk with the characters.” Was he a fan of that first season where he wasn’t involved? Without thinking: “Yes. I saw something that had a lot in it and on which words could build. The potential was clear and I saw common ground with what I would like to make myself. It seemed like a glove that would fit me well.” Thus happened…

As writers we now said to each other that we miss old characters who are no longer there (sometimes an important character dies, ed.). That says a lot. It’s always one thing to decide that now is the right time for a character to go. Sacrificing roles must hurt. If it doesn’t, it’s usually too late.”

Mocro Mafia is sometimes ahead…

Is it important that Mocro Maffia rubs against the truth at least somewhat? Ponten: “When I was approached for season 2, I wondered what the strength of the series is. And for me the answer is ‘unpolished realism’. Mocro Maffia is fiction and dramatized, but what you see must have happened in real life. That should at least be conceivable. And the funny thing is, I’ve been experiencing that for four seasons now, that when we come up with things we sometimes even get ahead of the truth. We are not exclusive in this in the series world, you know. But we always look at the global crime scene and things like that happen. Then we’ll be happy. Furthermore, we are always ‘inspired by’ and not ‘based on’. For game and location choices, we then look for whether something is conceivable. If you as a viewer walk somewhere you should be able to imagine that the events from Mocro Mafia could happen there. In that respect it is authentic.

The goal for this season was also to be very faithful to the crime genre, that was what it should be about. In Season 4, we had interesting forays into social drama, social realism, and thus the impact of crime. I thought that was important to do, but now we had to focus again on the characters we have. In the end, despite their humanity and their own history, they are all criminals.”

And Victor D. Ponten, will he make a major career switch again? Unfortunately… he, cliffhanger creator by profession, cannot release anything about that yet.