Shorts

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Back by 6 in Berlin Peter Connely’s short selected for the Berlinale

Provost’s Double Whammy Two shorts compete in Clermont-Ferrand

Land of the Heroes

Berlinale’s Generation K+ presents Sahim Omar Kalifa’s new short

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Shortissimo 27

Nicolas Daenens I 14 mins A 27-year old walks through a busy shopping street. He is clearly fed up with people harassing him in the street... He leaves his home. He just broke up with his girlfriend because he didn’t like the way she made French fries. He realizes that the older he gets, the less tolerant he becomes. 27 is a dangerous age. All of his favourite musical heroes died at that age: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison… As he walks through a busy shopping street to run errands, he is constantly harassed by people who want something from him. Each time he responds in a very unpredictable way… contact: bart@savagefilm.be

A Gentle Push

Philippe Verkinderen I 15 mins Nine-year-old Robbie is looking forward to the last day of school, that will keep him safe from his bullies for two months.

Unfortunately Robbie will have to say goodbye to a lot more this day. In a whirlwind of events, he becomes a totally new person. contact: i.was@createdbyconception.be

Paroles

Gilles Coulier I 23 mins Nocturnal encounters imply a return. From the maker of the 2010 Cannes Cinéfondation selected Ijsland. contact: Coulier.gilles@gmail.com

Swimsuit 46

Wannes Destoop I 15mins

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Chantal, a chubby 12-year-old, doesn’t have a lot of friends, and at home she can only turn to her stepfather for support as she doesn’t get along with her mother or stepbrother. Only in the local pool, where she is training intensively for an upcoming swimming competition, does she truly feel at home. But when she needs a new pair of goggles, things don’t go as smoothly as planned and she takes everything to get hold of them. contact: wannesdestoop@hotmail.com

Dancing with Travolta It is no coincidence that Lenny Van Wesemael’s short films are full of dancing. ‘I dance a lot, and I try to combine that with movies,’ she says. ‘I want people to feel what I feel when I’m dancing with Text Ian Mundell somebody.’

This can be dancing at social occasions, for example the wedding reception in Dance With Me, or dancing for more serious reasons, as in the competition at the heart of her new short film, Dancing With Travolta. ‘There’s a magical thing between people who dance, and that’s what I’m obsessed with.’

It was taking part in a competition that gave her the idea for Dancing With Travolta. ‘It was an amazing environment, there were all sorts of styles of dancing in one contest - hip-hop, tango, lindy hop - and it was really inspiring,’ she says. After that it was a matter of thinking what the best possible prize would be. ‘I’m a big fan of John Travolta. If I could win dancing with John Travolta, that would be great!’

She worked on the script with Geert Verbanck, who wrote the Oscar-nominated Flemish short film Tanghi Argentini, also with a dance theme. They came up with the story of Heleen, a 25-year-old woman who works in a 1950s-style diner with her boyfriend. He doesn’t dance, so she will need to find a partner if she wants to enter the John Travolta dancing competition. There seems to be no other choice but John, her ex-lover and the man who used to move her on the dance floor.

Working with a dance theme means a much bigger commitment compared to conventional short films. ‘For a dance scene of three minutes you rehearse for five weeks. It’s totally different.’ The music was specially prepared for the film by Flemish pop star Lien De Greef (aka Lady Linn), for whom Van Wesemael had previously made music videos.

At the same time it’s important not to lose the connection between the dancing and the plot.

‘You have to feel the drama in the dance,’ Van Wesemael says. This is not something that can be created in the edit. It has to be there in the performance. ‘For me it’s really important that the feeling is there on set,’ she says. ‘That’s why we worked a lot on the dance.’ contact: info@menuet.be

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CLERMONT-FERRAND 2010

Viva Las Vegas

Nicolas Provost always knew that he wanted to be an artist.

Even at the age of 12 he was making ‘installations’ around the house and photographing them for friends and family to look at. ‘I thought it was normal that I should make art,’ he says, ‘and they should take time to look at it!’ This creative drive combined with a love of cinema to produce a prestigious career in the visual arts, and soon a first feature film, The Invader. But first there’s Clermont-Ferrand where two of his shorts, Stardust and Storyteller, are presented in the Lab competition.

Text Ian Mundell

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Provost grew up in Ronse, a small town in Flanders close to the frontier with French-speaking Wallonia. ‘It was on French TV that I learned to love cinema,’ he recalls. ‘That’s where I saw the whole history of cinema pass by, from American classics and westerns to the Italians, the Nouvelle Vague. I’ve always had a fascination for cinema. But when David Lynch came along with Blue Velvet I was the right age to be blown away by this new way of making cinema. I knew that I was going to be a filmmaker. I didn’t know when. I knew that I had to learn, to mature and have a vision.’

Rather than studying cinema, he studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.

‘I didn’t want to go to film school at 18, because I knew that I was too young and didn’t

have anything to say. I was afraid of being disappointed by film school, that it would be too conservative. So I went to the art academy so that I could try things out.’

This coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution, and Provost started to explore the possibilities for manipulating sound and moving images. He spent the last two years of his studies as an exchange student in Bergen, Norway, and on graduation in 1994 returned there to live and work.

His work from this period creates haunting new images by splitting and doubling scenes from films by directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Alain Resnais. ‘A lot of it happens just through working with the material, like a sculptor,’ Provost explains. ‘You try to double a whole movie, and suddenly it’s there.’ He describes this as a way of making poetry with the world’s common memory.

He moved back to Belgium in 2003, and it was here that his career took off. As well as gallery shows, his short films appeared at film festivals such as Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno and San Francisco. His work also diversified. Exoticore, his farewell to Norway, was made with actors, while Plot Point built a narrative from clandestine images shot on Times Square.

Today the two filmmakers who have the most influence on Provost are Stanley Kubrick and, still, David Lynch. ‘For me Lynch is the last master alive who clearly questions the phenomenon of cinema,’ he explains. ‘We don’t do that any more. There are good directors and great films, but here is someone who is still trying to see how moving image and sounds can develop.’ 

Stardust 20 mins

The second part of a trilogy where Nicolas Provost investigates the boundaries of fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden camera and turning the cinematic images into a fiction film by using cinematographic and narrative codes from the Hollywood film language. This time he uses the glorious and ambiguous power of Las Vegas to turn everyday life into an exciting crime story.

Storyteller 7 mins 30 secs

In Storyteller Provost recomposes the Las Vegas strip into a slick artificiality reminiscent of science fiction. Provost manoeuvres and influences the interpretation of images, carefully balancing between the figurative and the abstract. He manipulates time, codes and form, twisting and shaping an experimental sensation that tightly bind visual art and cinematography. www.nicolasprovost.com

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Back by 6

BERLINALE 2010

Since graduating from New York University’s film production pro­ gramme in 1993, Peter Connelly has worked in the film sector as a set recordist and post-production sound designer, collaborating repeatedly with such Flemish filmmakers as Felix van Groeningen, Sarah Vanagt, Pieter De Buysser and Alexis Destoop. His first short, Framing and Unframing, got selected for the Locarno International Film Festival. His new one, Back by 6, is selected for the Berlinale Shorts competition.

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Back by 6 brings us through a day’s journey of two young men who have to be ‘back by six’.

As viewers, we are invited to see through the wondrous eyes of the characters, discovering intrigue in each moment and each encounter, taking nothing for granted.

From the physical movement of their own bodies to the bones of a tram, to the range of characters they meet throughout the afternoon and the effect of those exchanges, these two young men offer a glimpse of the extraordinary details that make up the magic and loss of everyday life.

‘There is a clock, ticking, that most hear and adhere to, but that doesn’t really belong to any of us,’ explains the director. ‘It is as present as weather, and as visible as cellular phone waves. For some that clock is a bow to their arrow, inner and outer lands are conquered by it. For some, its effect is as the moon is upon seas, direction in influenced, yet no threat comes upon their substance.’

‘This film is about William, who’d like to marry his own, very special clock to that evasively grandiose one in efforts to dispel his loneliness, somehow, anyhow.’ contact: pwc@coditel.net

BERLINALE 2010

Land of the Heroes

‘I have too much to tell,’ says Sahim Omar Kalifa. ‘That’s not a good thing when it comes to shorts .’ His new short Land of the Heroes, made with VAF Wildcard prize money, is presented in this year’s Berlinale Generation K+ prog ramme.

Text Ian Mundell

For his graduation movie, he had to choose, however, and decided to film the story of an Iraqi family living illegally in the Flemish city of Leuven, whose younger members get involved in crime and other dark deeds. Called Nan, it won a VAF Wildcard award in 2008. Kalifa himself is from Iraqi Kurdistan. Born in 1980, he stayed behind to finish his studies when his parents and younger siblings left Iraq in 1996.

He left Iraq in 2001 to join his family in Brussels. Once there he began to study accountancy, until a chance encounter with Sint-Lukas prompted him to change direction. Winning the VAF Wildcard was an important encouragement. Without it I might not have been able to continue making films. So it was a big opportunity for me.’

Land of the Heroes draws on his experience growing up during the war between Iraq and Iran. ‘We had no choice about what we could watch on TV,’ he recalls. ‘It was always reports about victories by the Iraqi army, and we would have to wait four or five hours in order to watch a cartoon,’ he explains. Not only were they deprived of entertainment, but they were exposed to brutal images of the war. ‘There was no-one to say that certain things shouldn’t be shown to children. So we saw everything.’

His film is about three children who are playing at ‘Saddam’ while waiting for the cartoons to come on. Their mothers are busy cleaning weapons that the children have collected from near-by battlefields. There is also a vein of irony in his film. ‘We chose a big theme, but we didn’t want it to be too heavy for the public, so we decided to make it with children and make it in an ironic way. Our lives in Iraq were full of irony.’ contact: hendrik@ateamproductions.be

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