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Bto be rn WILD Presenting the new class of VAF Wildcard laureates

Pim Algoed J Moon Blaisse J Jason Boënne J Wouter Bongaerts J Bram Claus J Bram Conjaerts J Gilles Coulier J Jean Counet J Tim De Keersmaecker J Jean-Baptiste Dumont J Elias Grootaers J Sahim Omar Kalifa J Eva Küpper J Jef Otte J Olivia Rochette | Gerard-Jan Claes J Gregor Steemans J Nathalie Teirlinck J Steve Thielemans J Tom Van Avermaet J Gust Van den Berghe J Lise Van den Briel J Hans Van Nuffel J Annabel Verbeke J Mathias Verleyen J Barend Weyens J David Williamson J Joost Wynant J VAF Wildcards 2005-2010

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www.flandersimage.com | we’re long on shorts

Take a

walk on the WILD side A few years ago, Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) CEO Pierre Drouot called upon all filmmakers in the territory to ‘dare to be daring’.

The Fund also launched a €260,000 Wildcards* competition which allows its winners to immediately embark on their first project in the real world.

Six years later, the VAF Wildcards have proven to be a success.

Young filmmaking talents such as Hans Van Nuffel, Eva Küpper, Gilles Coulier, Nathalie Teirlinck, Tim De Keersmaecker, Gust Van den Berghe, Sahim Omar Kalifa, and Elias Grootaers, to name just a few, are among the past winners.

Discover this year’s class of VAF Wilcard laureates.

Text: Ian Mundell

* There are five VAF Wildcards each year: two for fiction and one for animation (€60,000 each), as well as two for documentary (€40,000 each). The winners are chosen on the basis of their graduation film, and this by a jury. The laureates also get guidance from an individual coach who will accompany them on their first assignment in the real world.

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NOW/HERE

David Williamson I 25 mins David Williamson started out studying theatre, film and television from an academic point of view, a position he found increasingly unsatisfactory.

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‘You’re confronted by the fact that you’re always talking about things, but you never really get to do anything,’ he recalls. ‘For me that was very frustrating.’

He changed schools, from Utrecht University to the Sint-Lukas Film Academy in Brussels.

Once on set, he felt at home. ‘In the second year, when you get to work with actors, I really started to enjoy it. I felt that I was doing something, actually learning things that weren’t theoretical.’

The inspiration for his graduation project, Now/here, came from literature and theatre rather than cinema. He was impressed by reading ‘Imperial Bedrooms’, Brett Easton Ellis’ return to the characters in his first novel ‘Less Than Zero’, and by seeing a revival of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Homecoming’.

‘They got me thinking about what returning involves, what it means for me, returning to the past,’ he says. And after these ideas came archetypal narratives, such as that of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman. ‘For me, that’s the underlying story.’

Film inspirations were more distant, at least in this case. ‘I’m inspired by the usual suspects - Gus Van Sant, Fassbinder, Bela Tarr, Kieslowski - and it depends a lot on the project. For this one I didn’t have many cinematic references.’

He built the story around actor Pieter Genard. ‘I’d worked with Pieter before, and I knew how that would be. He wants to know a lot about the character, and once he knows everything you don’t really have to say a lot any more.’

contact: biteme@lampost.be

Sometime Later Moon Blaisse I 24 mins 50 secs

In a world with no time to spare, human encounters become awkward, disturbing and sometimes even violent.

It is usually impractical for a student film to have a large cast, but this is central to the ideas of speed and disorientation that Moon Blaisse explores in Sometime Later. There are 16 characters in the 25-minute film, which plunges the viewer into a catalogue of trivial problems and major dramas, entering without warning and leaving before they are resolved.

The theme only emerged as Blaisse developed the characters. ‘I see situations that I find very interesting and I start writing,’ she explains. ‘It’s only afterwards that I find that they all have the same feeling, without necessarily having a very concrete link.’

The feeling here is a tension between the characters and the situations they are in. For example, a naked man and woman in a large shower have a banal conversation, or a busy mother tries to convince her daughter, dressed for a party, that it isn’t her birthday.

Having so many characters made shooting a challenge. ‘It was great to work with all these actors, but every five hours I had a new set-up, a new character,’ Blaisse recalls. ‘With many of the actors we just met on the set and saw each other for half a day. But I felt comfortable with them and they gave me a lot of trust.’

The cast includes well-known faces from Flemish and Dutch cinema, along with some nonprofessionals. This confusion of accents, plus a decision to be vague about the film’s timing and location (it was shot in Ghent, Brussels and Maastricht), all contribute to the feeling of dislocation.

This approach worried her teachers at the RITS film school in Brussels. ‘I decided not to use “film time”: the viewer doesn’t know when it is, where it is, how much time passes between scenes,’ she says. ‘They said this wasn’t possible, but afterwards they were OK with it.’ contact: jules@pain-perdu.be

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Mouse for Sale Wouter Bongaerts I 5 mins A lonely mouse with big ears, and only a sarcastic woodlouse for company, tries his best to attract the attention of customers in a shop.

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Wouter Bongaerts came to animation almost by chance. Taking a break from studying at Leuven University, he joined a drawing class in his home town of Genk, just to pass the time.

This led him to investigate the local art school, the Media & Design Academy of Genk, which offered a four-year programme in film and animation.

‘I went there for an open day, and the moment I was in the animation section I realised that this was what I wanted to do,’ he recalls. ‘It happened really quickly and I’ve never regretted it.’

Initially he was only interested in drawing and 2D animation, but during his fourth year he took internships with two Brussels companies which specialise in 3D computer animation.

‘I saw the possibilities of 3D animation and understood how I could use the medium to make the films I wanted to make.’

This meant adapting his style. In Mouse for Sale, for example, he translated drawings of the mouse to the computer by way of a clay model. ‘In a drawing, it can be nice when the mouse’s tail pops up behind his head, but if you make a sculpture of it in that way and turn it around you see that it looks really odd,’ he explains. ‘Everything really has to function as a model, and as a character.’

Since he did the animation alone, he also had to streamline the story to fit the time available.

‘That made the movie better, I think, because I got to the character of the mouse himself and the core of the situation.’

Festival programmers agreed, and Mouse for Sale went on to win a prize from broadcaster Canvas as well as the first animation VAF Wildcard for animation. ‘I thought festivals would be looking for more experimental, non-narrative stories, so I’m really happy that people appreciate this simple story so much.’ he says. wallysketches.wordpress.com

Because We Are Visual

Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes I 47 mins 12 secs A poetic exploration of the video images people post on-line, revealing not so much a social network as a place for confession, desire and loneliness.

Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes still recall the sequence that inspired their journey into on-line video. ‘It’s a clip that Olivia found,’ Claes explains, ‘and which is still in the film, of a girl in pink underwear. We found it intriguing because there is something abstract about it.

You can’t see her face. It is also very intimate, because she is half-naked, yet she is making it public. And there is something poetic about it.’

From this starting point they began collecting material, editing as they went along. Studying at KASK, the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts, they were encouraged to approach film making with an open mind, so they let the search shape the film. Rather than a fixed narrative, they kept in mind certain tensions, for example between public and private, between the body and the virtual.

The question of ownership was not a concern. ‘We saw it as found footage,’ says Rochette.

At the same time, they were careful to respect the more confessional sequences. ‘Every cut feels like a comment, with us as filmmakers deciding that until this point it is interesting, but not beyond,’ Claes explains.

The volume of material was a challenge, as was the banality of much of what they had to watch. Finally, they had to give their film a sense of unity. ‘The edit that we had after the first year felt like an exhibition of the clips,’ Claes recalls. ‘After talking with our teachers, we felt that we had to evoke something more cinematographic.’

They set it aside for five months and then reworked it. The result collected a VAF Wildcard, and was selected for both IDFA and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. www.claes-rochette.be

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Children

of The Sea Annabel Verbeke I 27 mins

Impressions from a school in the port city of Ostend, where young boys from difficult family backgrounds are prepared for careers connected with the sea.

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In her second year at the RITS film school in Brussels, Annabel Verbeke and her classmates were told to find a project in Ostend. She was immediately drawn to the Ibis school, established a century before to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds. ‘My uncle is director of the school, and I always wanted to know more about it,’ she recalls. ‘It has a bizarre atmosphere, and I thought I would like to make a film about it.’

The story she chose concerned an old man who had passed through the school as child, gone on to work as a fisherman, travelled the world and then returned to teach in his later years. ‘He had a lot of stories to tell,’ she says. ‘In his time the school was even stricter, and he had some good as well as bad memories. Because of this he understood what was going on in the minds of these kids, much better than any of his colleagues. It earned him lots of respect. Even after his retirement he kept on visiting the school regularly.’

Verbeke thought there was more to say about the school, and so returned for her graduation project. Beginning in September, when the smallest boys were moving in, she visited at least once a week for six months. ‘The children started to recognise me and they were very natural in front of the camera,’ she says. ‘After a while they would even come up to me when I was there without my camera and tell me stories.’

Fears that she was overshooting vanished as her patience was rewarded. ‘I filmed the same things over and over, but that’s why I got some good scenes.’ Her images of everyday life in the school are mixed with portraits of the boys, and inter-cut with archive footage that shows how little things have changed.

Children of the Sea won a student film prize from Flemish broadcaster Lichtpunt and was selected for IDFA. contact: annabel.verbeke@hotmail.com

Two film talents received a special mention from the VAF Wildcard jury.

Injury Time

Robin Pront (fiction) I 14 mins

Three Antwerp football supporters get into a fight with competing supporters in the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium. After receiving a fair beating, Sid prefers to return home as fast as he can. But he does not share this feeling with his mate Van Dessel, an uncontrollable missile when something upsets him. contact: a team productions , hendrik@ateamproductions.be

Leopold II

Thomas Hofman (doc) I 17 min. - 2010 Hundred years after his death, Belgian king Leopold II returns to ‘his’ Brussels. Haunted by his conscience he gets confronted with his own past and today’s metropolitan Brussels, a city of which he was once the visionary architect. contact: thomashofman001@gmail.com

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