#19 - Spring 2011

flanders #19 | Spring 2011 | e 3.99

TOP Cats Pieter Samyn and Pascal Vermeersch were a key part in the team that brought A Cat in Paris to life

BRAVO Bavo

Bavo Defurne and the long journey toward his first feature

Born to be WILD

Presenting the new class of VAF Wildcard laureates

Jan Rubens Paul Demeyer Kaat Beels Frédéric Boyer

The FULL Matthias Top Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts goes all the way in Michaël R. Roskam’s Bullhead

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More content Less carbon At Flanders Image we’re fully committed to our films and our filmmaking talent.

But we’re also committed to reducing our carbon footprint.

That’s why we’re launching a number of new features this year, starting with an all new and expanded website and a brand new mobile web application, as well as a new iPad version of the magazine featuring extras such as trailers and slideshows. So make the switch today and start following us digitally*.

You’ll get more out of it, and much faster. * Launch scheduled for February 2011. Get the iPad app for free from the iTunes app store. Don’t have an iPad yet? Read the magazine on issuu.com.

Cover: Matthias Schoenaerts shot by Bart Dewaele

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C NTENT | Take 19 It’s the number of tins of tuna that actor Matthias Schoenaerts ate to transform himself into the bulky and brooding figure we see on screen in Michaël R. Roskam’s debut film, Bullhead. page 10

‘At 27 and 28, I was a big mess,’

says Bullhead director Michaël R. Roskam. It was a very dark period. I thought I would never find my feet. I lost discipline. I couldn't finish work.’ Today he’s got a film at the Berlinale. page 14

‘Animation is concentration,’

declares Pascal Vermeersch who together with Michael Samyn worked on Berlinale Generation K+ entry A Cat in Paris. ‘Once you've started a scene, you have to dive in’ page 20

VMMa is looking closely at its environmental impact. page 24 Flemish commercial broadcaster

‘I wouldn't consider myself the gay filmmaker from Flanders,’ says Northsea, Texas director Bavo Defurne. page 28 'If people are getting pressured, I decompress,’ says steadicam specialist and DP Jan Rubens. page 32

Wild Bunch!

Presenting the new class of VAF Wildcard laureates. page 36

'We had no choice about what we could watch on TV,' explains Sahim Omar Kalifa

about his childhood years in Iraq. It’s where he found the inspiration for his new short, Land of the Heroes. page 42

‘As a child I wanted to become like Walt Disney,’ recalls animation director Paul Demeyer. page 46

4 i-Opener The Co(te)lette Film | 6 i-Opener Grande Hotel | 9 50 influence Kaat Beels | 52 i-Cons | 54 Fans Frédéric Boyer

i-Catcher Blue Bird |

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The Co(Te)Lette

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Film Oscar-winning director Mike Figgis signed for The Co(Te)Lette Film, a cinematographic adaptation of Ann Van den Broek’s dance performance.

In the film, three female dancers are shown in a rather intimate atmosphere, in a chicken-and-egg situation between desire and satisfaction. Women and flesh, beauty and perishableness, raw and fragile. A delirious desire overwhelms the dancers. A desire for physical and mental satisfaction. The dancers go from appeal to sensuality, over lust, fleshness, fame, success, reflection and control, to silence. They are slaves of their own desires while trying to get in control of them. Female bodies in a frenzy. There is no confrontation, nor rivalry. No storytelling, no solution and no ending. Co(te)lette's story is restless and... empty. ď Š

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GRANDE HOTEL

The Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, once was one of the grandest and most luxurious hotels in the world. Today, you enter the building ‘at your own risk’ and are confronted with the circumstances its current inhabitants live in. More than 3,500 have taken possession of the building and manipulated not only the stones but also the dreams. It’s a journey through present and past of a city in a city. The Director of Photography is Joao Ribeiro, while Lula Pena, Red Gjeci and Tom Vanhecke signed for most of the music.

Produced by Ellen Dewaele for Serendipity Films, Grande Hotel is a story about colonial megalomania and revolutionary vanity. 

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Rotterdam.

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Lotte Stoop’s feature-length documentary Grande Hotel received its world première at this year’s International Film Festival

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Submit your film now! th 38

Ghent International Film Festival

(11-22 October 2011)

Send a screener (multi-region DVD) along with some publicity material (press book, some stills, CD with the soundtrack if available and an entry form) before August 1st, 2011 to Wim De Witte.

Download the entry form here: www.filmfestival.be/pdf/entry_form.pdf Ghent International Film Festival • The place to be for film music concerts • Prizes in cash to local distributors who release the winning films • Competition for European Shorts in cooperation with the European Film Academy (European director - produced in 2011) • National & international media coverage • More than 125,000 visitors • Instigator of the World Soundtrack Awards (11th edition: 22 October 2011) More info (incl. festival regulations) on www.filmfestival.be Subscribe to our newsletter!

Ghent International Film Festival I Leeuwstraat 40b, 9000 Ghent I Belgium I tel +32 (0)9 242 80 60 wim.dewitte@filmfestival.be www.filmfestival.be www.worldsoundtrackacademy.com

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Blue Bird

Little Baby Jesus of Flandr helmer Gust Van den Berghe and his DP, Hans Bruch Jr (pictured), recently returned from Togo, Africa, where they completed principal photography on new feature, Blue Bird. Producer is Tomas Leyers for Minds Meet.

Inspired by L’Oiseau bleu, the 1908 play by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Maurice Maeterlinck, the film tells the story of two boys, Mytyl and Tytyl, and their search for a mysterious blue bird, which they manage to capture after a long journey through the weirdest of worlds and experiences. And then lose.

The story, the director explains, dates from an era when symbolism was in full bloom. ‘It’s filled with fantasy and the most impossible scenes. Everything is in ecstasy: nature and humans, everything is pure and flourishing. It’s quite a task to translate this to film as it’s about “magic”, which can too easily become “wizardry” on film. And that’s a huge and essential difference. It’s my intention to create a surreal painting in which we can maintain the magic of the original work.’ 

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Beefing Up Take 3000 tins of tuna, several hundred chickens, plenty of oats, rice and pasta.

Combine them with days spent pumping iron and long nights of uninterrupted sleep.

This is the regime that enabled the slender Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts to transform himself into the bulky and brooding figure we see on screen in Michaël R. Roskam’s debut film, Bullhead. It’s a remarkable piece of character acting in the vein of Robert De Niro’s celebrated turn as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Schoenaerts spent two years preparing for Bullhead. Now the film is over, he has a lot of weight to lose.

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Text Geoffrey Macnab

Portrait Bart Dewaele

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The Matthias Schoenaerts who walks into the interview room is big... but not as big as the hulk-like character he plays on screen. He is still on a programme to lose some of the weight and muscle he piled on for his role as the illegal growth hormone dealer in Bullhead. ‘By nature, I am a very skinny person,’ he observes. When director Roskam first mentioned the project to him, he told Schoenaerts: ‘you’re gonna have to grow enormously!’ The actor shrugged and said, ‘oh, OK,’ as if this was an easy and straightforward request. Schoenaerts began work on his transformation ‘right away’, more than two years before production began. ‘I started working out so that the body gets used to this kind of exercise,’ he recalls. He gained a little weight which he managed to maintain even as he took on other roles which didn’t require him to look quite so... hulk-like. Then, about a year before the start of shooting, he accelerated the process. He finished work on Alex Stockman’s Pulsar and then devoted himself full time to Bullhead. ‘I had a personal trainer. He had a very strong programme for me.’ Eat, work out, sleep - eat, work out, sleep. This was his routine. He’d drink gallons of water. ‘Your organs have to work at 300%. They’re absorbing the food. They have to process it.’

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‘Even without words, you can express a lot of what is going on with yourself. That was a challenge but at a certain point, it all came naturally.

I had so much time to grow into this part... all of a sudden you get into the zone.’

David Cronenberg Some tantalising offers came his way in the months leading up to shooting. For example, he auditioned for a part in David Cronenberg’s Freud/Jung film, A Dangerous Method. The audition went well and the casting agents wanted to call him back. However, he had pledged his commitment to Bullhead and so had to let the opportunity slip.

Friends and family were startled by the changes in Schoenaerts’ appearance in the run-up to Bullhead. ‘There were a couple of people that I hadn’t seen for a couple of months. They saw me and were like - what has happened to you!’ The actor’s mother was especially startled. She suspected that he was ‘messing with some nasty products’. That, the actor insists, was never the case. His metamorphosis was done ‘clean’.

And, yes, after a while, the whole punishing process became strangely enjoyable. ‘I had this goal and I started enjoying it because I saw the physical transformation was happening.’

Jacky, his character in Bullhead, is emotionally repressed. There is a terrible secret in his past which the audience learns about in a flashback sequence.

‘He is not the most likeable person but he is the victim of an enormous emotional and chemical imbalance in his body,’ the actor muses of the troubled young man he plays. ‘That makes him a very vulnerable person. Of course, he has a lot of aggression but there are a lot of things that he is not able to experience in his life... he doesn’t know what it is to get love or to give love. There is a fundamental lack of love in his life which completely messes him up.’

Jerzy Grotowski The role comes with limited amounts of dialogue. ‘Body language also speaks,’ Schoenaerts states.

‘Even without words, you can express a lot of what is going on with yourself. That was a challenge but at a certain point, it all came naturally. I had so much time to grow into this part... all of a sudden you get into the zone.’

One of Schoenaerts’ inspirations was the celebrated Polish director and acting theorist Jerzy Grotowski, who espoused the theory that ‘a certain physical state involves a certain state of mind and emotional being’. In other words, if you develop the outer side of the character first, then the inner life will follow. This, Schoenaerts notes, is the antithesis of the Stanislavski approach, in which you build the character from the ‘inside out’. Taking on the role entailed Schoenaerts to make a big leap of faith in his director. It helped that he had worked with Roskam before, on a short. The other key factor was the script. Schoenaerts realised that every last detail had been worked exhaustively through by the writer-director.

Bullhead was a tough film to make. The schedule was short and the budget was tight. ‘There were

Bullhead

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heavy days. It was a heavy schedule,’ the actor recalls.

‘But everybody was so well prepared and so eager.

They had been waiting for so long to get to this project.

You could feel this great enthusiasm. It was intense and heavy but we were really enjoying the hard work.’

Over the years in which he was preparing for the role, he slowly chiselled away toward what he calls ‘the core of the character’. Did he enjoy working with the cows?

Schoenaerts laughs at the question but acknowledges there are some extreme moments in the film. The trade in hormones is all about making the cattle grow more quickly so that they can be slaughtered at an earlier age. ‘That was something I had to overcome because I am an animal friend. Of course, in that universe, animals are just meat and they are just good for money.’

acting background

Bullhead

Schoenaerts was heartened to discover how tenderly the farmers treated their livestock. When it came to butchering them, though, there was no hesitation. ‘To them, it was just natural. They are not seeing it as killing. One moment, they’re very sweet to an animal. The next, they cut its throat.’

It is intriguing to compare the Schoenaerts of Bullhead with the character he played in Dorothée van den Berghe's My Queen Karo. Raven is a 60s radical, into free love and anarchy - a charismatic and headstrong personality a long way removed from his deeply introverted Jacky.

Schoenaerts is now such a regular fixture in Flemish films that it comes as a slight surprise to learn that acting wasn’t his first choice of career. The son of celebrated Flemish stage and screen star, Julien Schoenaerts, he grew up in an acting background. His father led the typical ‘gypsy’ existence of the actor, moving around from place to place with his family following in his wake. ‘I remember (as a child) I saw a play. The lights came on. People applauded and then they left the theatre. I was still in there. When everybody left, I just jumped on stage, grabbed the costumes and started repeating things I remembered from the play I had just seen... somehow it must have touched me deeply at that time.’

What’s up Matt!?

Matthias Schoenaerts is currently developing his first film project as a director.

This is a documentary portrait of a childhood friend he recently met again after not seeing him for many years.

‘A year and a half ago, I ran into him again. His appearance struck me because of the fact that he had lost one leg,’ Schoenaerts recalls. In spite of his disability, the old friend is a successful ‘mixed martial arts’ fighter who takes on non-handicapped fighters.

‘I was, like, damn! I need to tell his story. It is very important to note that I am not making a film about a one-legged fighter,’ he points out. For Schoenaerts, the fighting is a metaphor for the way the friend deals with the afflictions that life has put in his way. ‘It is going to be a very honest and intense portrait of someone who had a very bumpy life behind him.’ The project, tentatively called Frankie, after the name of the protagonist, is intended as much as a family portrait of a father with two kids and of a family man as it is a documentary about a fighter beating the severest odds. On top of that, it’s also a portrait of an ex-convict.

The Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) has supported the development of the screenplay. Some of the top technicians in Flanders will be working on the doc. Nicolas Karakatsanis will be the cinematographer. Nico Leunen is in line to edit. ‘I want to make it very, very honest - a touching portrait,’ the actor turned director states. ‘It will have a lot of contradictions in it but that is what humanity is about. A person is never this or that. A person is this and that. And that is what I want to show. It will be mind-blowing and heartbreaking!’

My Queen Karo

Left Bank

As a teenager, he had a part in the Oscar-nominated drama Daens (in which also his father played). He did briefly think about acting as a career but when it came to his student years, he veered off on another route. After high school, he studied directing at film school for a year. Then, he took work as a technician at a theatre in Antwerp, helping with the lights and props. Slowly, it suddenly dawned on him that acting was his universe.

Paul Verhoeven No, he hasn’t done much stage work but next year he will be working with choreographer and director Jan Fabre on a monologue. Schoenaerts is part of a new wave of Flemish talent led by directors like Tom Barman (with whom he worked on Any Way The Wind Blows), Alex Stockman (for whom he made Pulsar) and Dorothée van den Berghe. He credits Barman’s movie as ‘a breath of fresh air for Flemish filmmaking with its own energy; funky, personal and with a lot of feeling.’

International casting directors are beginning to offer him roles. He had a small part in Paul Verhoeven’s Second World War drama Black Book, an experience that he remembers with mixed feelings. He had been seriously ill with an appendix problem that almost killed him just before shooting began and wasn’t fully recovered by the time he set off for Holland for shooting. However, he realised that Verhoeven was a kindred spirit. Like Schoenaerts, the celebrated Dutch director isn’t somebody who accepts compromise. Once he takes on an assignment, he goes all the way. When producers tell him he is over schedule or budget, he makes sure that he shoots the least important scenes first. That way, Verhoeven knows, that the producer will have to make time for the other more important scenes.

Schoenaerts doesn’t need to resort to such ruses. What he does make clear, though, is that he will commit himself 100% to any project he takes - and he expects his collaborators to do the same. ‘It's too much fun not to throw yourself in,’ he reflects on his ferociously wholehearted approach. 

Matthias Schoenaerts (°1977)* Bullhead (2011) Pulsar (2011) La meute (2010) My Queen Karo (2009) The Emperor of Taste (2008, TV) Loft (2008) Left Bank (2008) TunnelRat (2008) Nadine (2007) Black Book (2006) Love Belongs to Everyone (2006) The One Thing to Do (2005, short) The End of the Ride (2005, short) Ellektra (2004) A Message from Outer Space (2004, short) Any Way the Wind Blows (2003) Daens (1992) * selected filmography

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Slab boy Text Geoffrey Macnab

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Portrait Bart Dewaele

Early on in Michaël R. Roskam’s debut FEATURE, THE BERLINALE PANORAMA SELECTED BULLHEAD, there is a shot of the main character Jacky sitting naked on the edge of a bath in the near dark. It’s an image eerily reminiscent of paintings by Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon. It is often said of these artists that they depict the human body as if it is a lump of flesh in an abattoir. In BULLHEAD, set in the world of hormone smuggling, the slaughterhouse isn’t just a metaphor. The world that Jacky inhabits is one in which cattle are injected with drugs that make them grow quicker so that they can be killed quicker and more profitably.

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In the late 1990s, a vet was murdered in Belgium because he pried too closely into what was happening in the slaughterhouses. He had stumbled on a scheme to fatten livestock artificially - and illegally. The farmers behind it intimidated and bribed anyone in a position to reveal what they were doing. The police were slow to respond. After all, you don't expect to the agricultural world to be a hotbed of Mafia corruption. When the vet had exposed the farmers, they had had to destroy the bulls which had been fattened. They were furious at losing thousands of Euros. That's why the vet was killed. Roskam studied the case in great detail. No, Bullhead isn't based directly on what happened. This is fiction, after all. However, he freely acknowledges that this notorious case was one of the inspirations for his movie.

‘For me, Bullhead is like a tragedy,’ the writer-director muses. ‘It's a tragic tale of destiny and innocence. I've always been fascinated by the American gangster films. I love them! I wanted to do one in my own way, on my own soil, with my own background.’

strange rituals Roskam realised it would be utterly implausible to make a Godfatherstyle gangster pic in Belgium. ‘It doesn't really exist,’ he says of the type of brooding, Italian-American Mafia bosses played by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Of course, Flanders has crime. By honing in on the close-knit world of the ‘hormone Mafia’, he hoped to find a Flemish equivalent to the Corleones and their sidekicks.

Bullhead has a conventional thriller narrative. There are cops, informers and plenty of heavies. However, this is as much a psychological character study as it is a gangster pic. Jacky has been deeply traumatised in childhood. As an adult, he has transformed himself into a bulky, muscle-bound and very imposing figure. No one messes with him. At the same time, Roskam insists, the character has an innocence and even an idealism about him.

All pictures Bullhead

nter view i ‘I am old enough now to understand that I have to be patient and to work, work, work until the screenplay is as pure as I can have it’

As a youngster, Roskam spent a few months working on a farm in the area where the film is set. He knew the milieu inside out. It's a tough and unforgiving world. ‘But there are different social levels,’ he remembers. He was lucky enough to be employed by ‘gentleman farmers’ who were prepared to hire student workers.

There are some strange rituals in rural Flanders. When men are still unmarried in their 30s, they are often relentlessly mocked. ‘It's typical that when you are 30 and you are single, your friends will take one of the worst pictures of you they can find. They'll copy it, call you an ox, and distribute leaflets and posters which say that you are treating everybody to beer in the local pub. You have to go through with it.’

R2D2 and C3P0

Michaël R. Roskam (°1972) Bullhead (2011) Today is Friday (2007, short) The One Thing to Do (2005, short) Carlo (2003, short) Haun (2002, short)

This is a very intense piece of filmmaking but it does have a comic undertow. Two hapless Wallonian mechanics get caught up in the hormone Mafia. These French-speakers are bewildered and appalled by the behaviour of their Flemish counterparts.

‘You know, in The Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa, you have two lowlifes... or actually it's like R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars. They also help push the plot. Because of their stupidity, they actually create the circumstances that lead to the downfall of the main characters.’

Bullhead is Roskam's first feature... and it took him five years to get it in front of the cameras. Over the last decade, he has made several well-received shorts, among them Haun, Carlo, The One Thing To Do and Today Is Friday. In the meantime, he worked on the Bullhead screenplay. And there have been some false starts along the way but the characteristic he has learned is patience. ‘I am old enough now to understand that I have to be patient and to work, work, work until the screenplay is as pure as I can have it.’

Roskam's producer is Bart Van Langendonck of Savage Film. They already worked together on Haun, Carlo and The One Thing To Do.

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As Bullhead edged toward completing its financing, Roskam took on bits and pieces of other work. ‘Radio commercials!’ he cites one source of revenue. These were relatively well-paid and didn't interfere too much with the serious business of licking his feature script into shape. He also did some part-time teaching directing at SintLukas. ‘That was a bit weird because I hadn't done my first feature film and I already had to teach some kids.’

Richter, Bacon and Freud The 38-year-old filmmaker grew up not far from Liège in a community not that far from the one he portrays in Bullhead. His father is a picture restorer. Roskam began his own career as a painter. ‘I was very much inspired by Gerhard Richter but also by guys like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud,’ he recalls. His initial passion as a teenager had been drawing comics. He studied graphic design and painting but soon decided that he ‘wanted to tell stories, to go from A to B,’ and not to be stuck with a single image. In his late 20s, he wasn't quite sure which direction he wanted to head in. He wrote novels and dabbled in experimental video. ‘At 27 and 28, I was a big mess,’ he reflects ruefully. ‘It was a very dark period. I thought I would never find my feet. I lost discipline. I couldn't finish work.’

He describes making his first short film as being like ‘coming home’. At last, he had found a medium in which he could express himself.

Yes, filmmaking is expensive and complex by comparison with painting on your own in a studio. It is also immensely time-consuming and there is often a small eternity between having an idea and being able to make the actual movie. ‘But I always make a joke about it. I am kind of lazy. I say that now I can disguise my laziness with patience!’

Bullhead was shot on 35mm. Not that the director considers himself a ‘fetishist of film stock’. He relished the quality and depth that cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis was able to achieve. However, if a digital format offered similar quality, he says he'd change immediately. ‘Up to now, the difference between film and digital has been like that between oil painting and acrylic painting.’

www.bullheadthefilm.com

So what now? Roskam has several treatments in advanced staGes of development.

He has become expert at shifting focus from one idea to another. He enjoys putting a project on one side and then revisiting some months later and seeing how it stands up. Roskam is writing a screenplay for a mini-series project with the working title Buda Bridge Bitch – ‘it's science fiction/film noir’.

He is also working with Jeroen Perceval on D'Ardennen, a road movie about three guys driving to the Ardennes with a corpse in the boot of their car. Another project is The Faithful, an escape/ heist movie about a convict whose wife is dying of cancer and who plans to help him get out of prison.

Whatever happens with Bullhead, the writer-director is bound to be busy over the coming months. ‘I have my stories ready! I have projects for the next 10 years,’ he jokes.

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Buda Bridge Bitch

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Karakatsanis is an outspoken personality with a strong artistic vision of his own. That's precisely why Roskam relished working with him.

‘Many of the people I work with are not easy guys but I liked it. They keep me sharp. Easy is boring. They're sharp, funny and serious at the same time. They want to work until everything is just right.’

What of Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays Jacky in Bullhead? ‘Oh, he's easy…(the director winks) but not boring!’ the director says of the actor, who transformed himself into the brooding, massive Jacky.

‘I am very proud of him. He knew that he could use all his talent, which is enormous, to create this character. He knew he could go 100% with all that he had.’ 

Top Cats

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A Cat In Paris isn't the typical Disney-style animated feature with cuddly characters and a storyline steeped in sentimentality.

The cartoon borrows as much from film noir as it does from The Aristocats.

It's about a cat with a double life. By day, Dino is the beloved pet of lonely girl Zoe, whose police officer mother Jeanne works

punishing

hours

and

whose

father was gunned down by gangsters.

By night, Dino takes to the rooftops of Paris with Nico, a professional burglar.

Two young Flemish animators, Pieter Samyn and Pascal Vermeersch, were a key part of the Cat Squad, bringing JeanLoup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's bold and offbeat movie to life.

Text Geoffrey Macnab

Portrait Bart Dewaele

As the title might hint, A Cat in Paris is a French production but it's one with a strong Flemish involvement. Producer Annemie Degryse of Lunanime was aboard from the outset.

She recruited Samyn and Vermeersch to join the team of animators at top French animation studio Folimage, in Bourg-lès-Valence.

First, the animators had to prove their mettle. They were asked to draw a sequence showing the cat and the burglar running on the rooftops. The directors liked their work and hired them immediately. Samyn and Vermeersch were then invited to Valence. Samyn recalls that during their time in

Pascal Vermeersch

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- Pascal Vermeersch

magination

‘Oh, animators are all the same.

They like drawing. They are very into their own world. It's kind of like a monastery I suppose’

Valence, it rained well nigh incessantly. Not that they had much time for sightseeing. ‘We went straight ahead into the animation,’ says Vermeersch.

hardboiled style The French animators already working on A Cat in Paris clearly recognised their new Belgian colleagues as kindred spirits. Any cultural differences were quickly ironed over.

‘Oh, animators are all the same,’ Vermeersch says. ‘They like drawing. They are very into their own world. It's kind of like a monastery I suppose.’

When they were drawing, the animators were so intensely focused on their work that they hardly noticed the world around them. They'd be listening to music on their MP3 players and ignoring all outside distractions.

‘Animation is concentration,’ Vermeersch declares. ‘Once you've started a scene, you have to dive in.’

The directors Felicioli and Gagnol were just as intense as the animators they had hired. Samyn likens them to Siamese twins and adds: ‘they knew what they wanted.’ The two directors were reclusive. If you saw one, you saw the other.

They refused to give feedback to the animators unless they were both present.

Vermeersch notes the way that the two directors finished each other's sentences, as if by telepathy. There was no sense of creative friction between them. Their style was instantly recognisable. Even their shorts, for example Les tragédies minuscules (made way back in 1999) featured the same angular faces and Dr Caligari-like buildings as A Cat in Paris. ‘What interested me enormously was the story behind the feature film,’ Vermeersch recalls. ‘This was nothing like I had seen before in feature films. It had a hardboiled style which was great.’

close harmony

Pieter Samyn

A Cat in Paris touches on armed robbery, death and bereavement. Nonetheless, Vermeersch and Samyn say that the original story was ‘much more dark.’ The script was softened for the sake of financiers worries that its noirish undertow would put off the kids.

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The film was made at breakneck pace. Each animator was required to provide 15 seconds a week of hand-drawn animated footage.

‘That's quite a lot,’ Vermeersch notes. ‘But, I must say, it was very well prepared. You can see immediately that Folimage are experienced. They've done some feature animation before.’

Samyn, working on his first ever animated feature, struggled initially to complete his 15 seconds quota. ‘It was not only the animation but the drawings themselves had to be cleaned up in a very particular way… there was a very clean drawing line which wasn't close to my natural way of drawing.’

Vermeersch was ‘a little bit faster’. He'd worked on features before, such as the Oscar-nominated The Secrets of Kells.

However, he points out The Secret of Kells was very different from A Cat in Paris. ‘The French are more in close harmony while the Irish are more extrovert and expressive,’ he suggests of the differences between the animation teams in the two countries.

Raoul Servais

A Cat in Paris

Both Flemish animators relished their time at Valence. They were only in France for a week or two before returning to Belgium, where they were able to complete their part of the animation from their offices at home. The directors were in constant touch with them, explaining exactly what they wanted.

The Belgians are artists in their own right. However, they were happy to follow the cues provided by their French directors.

On such a complex venture as a feature animation, it helps to have a clear sense of where you are going and why. ‘The worst thing that can happen is a director will say let's try this or try that,’ Vermeersch says.

Samyn and Vermeersch are both graduates of KASK – Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. Vermeersch left the school back in 1998, just as Samyn enrolled. Long before their college days, both were interested in animation.

Samyn, who comes from a family of teachers, was keen on drawing as a kid and cites an exhibition of the work of Raoul Servais as a major spur to his decision to become an animator.

‘Before that, I didn't realise you could make a study of it.’ His parents were initially suspicious of such a strange-seeming career. However, they eventually relented when they saw the level of his commitment.

Vermeersch relished watching old Disney cartoons as a kid. He began his studies in graphic design. ‘Same story... I didn't know you could study animation!’ He soon switched disciplines, enrolling instead in the animation department. His moment of epiphany came when he saw an animated short by another student called Going Home on the Morning Train

by Stefan Vermeulen. ‘I was blown away! I thought wow! This was something I wanted to do. It's storytelling, it's drawing.

There's music involved and sound.’

A dozen years after finishing his studies, he believes he now has the experience to switch styles and to work in different environments, whether with Irish directors like Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey on The Secret of Kells or the French team

win-win situation

i

Having worked together once, the two animators say they'd relish collaborating again. Yes, they would both like to be in charge of their own animated projects rather than working as hired guns on other artists' projects. ‘But when you're involved in a production like A Cat In Paris, you know that you are subservient,’ Samyn reflects.

‘From my point of view, it's contributing to your own development,’ Vermeersch says of working as part of a team on a big international feature. ‘You can learn a lot from those productions. Then you can use that information on your own.’ ‘It's a win-win situation,’ Samyn agrees. ‘Once you have that experience, they can't take it away from you.’ 

magination

on A Cat in Paris. Alongside his animation, he also works as an illustrator. ‘In the beginning, after graduation, it was a hard time finding jobs but you get to know people... and they know you. It's a strange word “networking”; but it works.’ As for Samyn, he combines teaching at Sint-Lucas in Ghent and working on comics with his animation.

A Cat in Paris is part of the Berlinale’s Generation K+ this year.

23

Stepping lightly

24

on the

environment Flemish commercial broadcaster VMMa is looking closely at its environmental impact, from head office to the network of independent producers who provide most of its programmes. It is also thinking about its impact on the general public.

'We can do something with our company, but we can also be a role model and persuade people to do things differently,' explains its CEO Peter Quaghebeur.

Text Ian Mundell

Portrait Bart Dewaele

e-mission

VMMa, the Vlaamse Media Maatschappij, is the parent company of commercial TV channels VTM and 2BE, the youth oriented JIM and lifestyle channel Vitaya. It also has a handful of radio stations and other business interests, including newly established film distribution business Starway Film Distribution. Based just outside Brussels, VMMa employs around 500 people and draws on a network of 15-20 independent producers across the region.

The impulse to do something about the company's environmental performance came from within, thanks to green-minded technical director Frank Mathys. On his suggestion, the company switched to guaranteed green electricity, installed solar panels and introduced more efficient routing for the satellite news-gathering trucks.

Then, in October 2009, Quaghebeur attended a seminar in Paris where environmental consultant Serge de Gheldere was speaking about climate change issues. He was so impressed by what he heard that he invited de Gheldere and his colleagues at Futureproofed to help VMMa take its green initiative forward.

diagnosis The first step was to calculate VMMa's carbon footprint, a measure of how much the company is contributing to global climate change. This usually relates to emissions of carbon dioxide, CO2, the principal greenhouse gas, although other factors are also taken into account.

The exercise was carried out so that it included the initiatives that the company had already taken. 'With the work that they did in the year or so before our involvement, they had already taken 50% off of the carbon footprint,' says de Gheldere.

'We were impressed to see that already.'

When it comes to carbon footprints, de Gheldere thinks that discussing absolute numbers is unhelpful. 'It's very dangerous to compare carbon footprints from company A to company B. Where do you draw the lines? What is included and what is not? Most of the time that's fuzzy,' he explains.

'The most important thing is for a company to know what its battles are. Then you can choose your battles, so that if you invest time and money you can be sure it is on something significant, and not on things that look nice and keep people busy, but don't really contribute to reducing your CO2 emissions.'

Above all, the carbon footprint should not be read as a judgment on how well or how badly the company is performing. 'You shouldn't see a carbon footprint as a verdict, but rather as a diagnosis of where to begin.'

During this process further ideas emerged for improving the environmental performance of VMMa's headquarters. A more energy efficient cooling system has been introduced for the computers in the organisation's data centre and 'cold lighting' has been fitted in the news studio, which reduces power use by 80%.

Staff have been encouraged to take part, with an internal competition to suggest energy saving ideas. This resulted, for example, in windows being coated with a film that helps

??????????

Al Gore (l) and Serge de Gheldere

'There is a genuine business case here. We help companies discover what that business case is' – Serge de Gheldere

25

26

retain heat in the winter and reflects sunlight in the summer.

There is also a weekly CO2-friendly day in the staff canteen, which promotes locally produced and vegetarian food.

Options being examined for the future include reducing the impact from transport even more, along with further improvements to the environmental performance of the building's lighting and air conditioning. Producing even more green electricity, with a wind turbine, is also up for consideration. 'It's a huge investment, but the payback is less than three years,' says de Gheldere.

business sense A key part of de Gheldere's message is that these environmental improvements make sound business sense, as well as contributing to the health of the planet. 'We stress the fact that you shouldn't just do this for altruistic or idealistic reasons, but there is a genuine business case here. We try to help companies discover what that business case is,' he says.

It's an argument that appeals to Quaghebeur. 'We are not a charity, we are a for-profit company with shareholders who want to see results at the end of the year,' he says. 'The good thing is that, from the outset, Serge said that you can combine both, you can do something for the environment and reduce your costs at the same time.'

The next step for VMMa will be to look at the production process, beginning with its in-house operation. 'We have a production house which makes soaps for us, such as Familie, and we will do a pilot project with them where we try to reduce the carbon footprint and see what we can learn in a production environment,' Quaghebeur says.

The findings will then be passed on to the independent production companies who make the majority of VMMa's content. The environmental impact of this work also gets set down in VMMa's carbon footprint, and de Gheldere is keen to look at ways that this can be reduced. 'By having the production companies reduce their emissions by just 10%, which is conservative, the amount of CO2 you save is 3,000 tonnes per year for the part they produce for VMMa,' he explains. 'It's enormous.'

As with VMMa's head office, the likely savings will come from looking at more efficient use of transport, sourcing green energy and more effective planning of the production process. Quaghebeur expects the message to be wellreceived. 'The type of people who work in production companies tend to be concerned about the environment, so I think they will be very open to this,' he says.

There is no intention, at this stage, to take a hard line with them. 'We won't go so far as to say "if you don't do this you can't be a supplier any more". That's too much in one go. We have to give them some time to organise themselves.'

De Gheldere thinks that there is a potential prize here for the whole region of Flanders. 'Instead of waiting it out until France and the Netherlands do it, we could say: let's be proactive, let's help each other and lower our footprint in the film industry,' he says, pointing both to the cost savings and a potential selling point for the sector. 'We could have an identity of low-carbon filmmaking. Why not?' ď Š www.futureproofed.com

Green content VMMa's Peter Quaghebeur also In October 2010 both the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) and Location Flanders launched e-Mission, a joint initiative aimed at increasing awareness among local audiovisual professionals to reduce the sector’s ecological footprint. Flanders Image also joined the initiative.

From now on all our publications are printed on FSC certified recycled paper that is also holding the EU Ecolabel. But there’s more! To reduce print circulation, we are also investing in electronic publishing. Besides a new (and much faster!) website, as well as a mobile website application, Flanders Image is launching its magazine on iPad as well as on issuu.com. The iPad version contains, of course, a few extras such as trailers and additional illustrations. www.flandersimage.com

broadcaster already has a green matters, but the CEO sees this as 'These things are more promotional, they say to well,' he explains. 'We would like to do something series or a programme.'

The trick will be to do this in a sophisticated way, course, because not everybody is ready to accept don't want to scare people away, not from our project either. So we have to think carefully about Once again getting the independent producers on the potential benefit for the environment is huge. by 0.5%, which is a very conservative estimate, times more than the total carbon footprint of

e-mission wants to look at programme content. The week, when its channels focus on environmental just a small beginning. the viewer that we care and that we would like them to take notice as much more in-depth, and try to go for something much bigger in a fiction which takes the viewers along. 'What we can't do is exaggerate, of this message or to change their behaviour,' Quaghebeur explains. 'We channel, because that's not good for our business, but not from the how we do that.' board will be important in order to come up with creative solutions. But 'If 0.5% of Flanders is reached by VMMa and they reduce their footprint the impact would be enormous,' says de Gheldere. 'It would be several VMMa.'

Futureproofed analysis on VMMa's footprint

27

love is all around

8 28

Having won plaudits with his short films on the festival circuit, Bavo Defurne is taking the leap into features with Northsea, Texas. The film, based on a novel called ‘This Will Never End’ by André Sollie, is a coming of age story with a strong romantic undertow. It follows a young boy called Pim from when he is eight until his mid-teens. He is a lonely kid who yearns for love. In his adolescence, his affections turn toward Gino, the rugged, motorcycling boy next door.

Text Geoffrey Macnab

Portrait Bart Dewaele

nter view ‘I really loved this story and I wanted to tell it.

That was what was most important’

i

‘We saw more than 200!’ Defurne says of the vast number of young hopefuls who auditioned for the role of Pim in the film. The director knew exactly what he was looking for... ‘bluntly, good actors!’ He adds that the actors he chose to play Pim at different ages needed to have an innocence about them but also to be wise and worldly enough to understand the story.

‘It is hard to be an adolescent anyway and it’s even harder to play an adolescent with all the things that are happening in their mind and body,’ the director reflects on his search for the perfect Pims. ‘And if you get people who are too mature, too old, it can be very hard to play an innocence that you don’t have any more.’

The 18-year-old Mathias Vergels, who plays the neighbour Gino, had already appeared in Hans Herbots’ Bo. ‘We found him first and then we tried to combine the possible Pims with him. We felt he had a strong character and that he was very open-minded. He could also work as an example for the younger guys.’

15-year-old Jelle Floorizone, cast in the main role as the teenage Pim, is trained as a dancer and still dances for several hours every week. What Defurne liked about him was his boldness. ‘It takes some courage to say, "hey, I am a ballet dancer!" Not all boys would just go out and say "I like dancing". He is a very brave and open kid.’

The kids who’d never been in a movie before struck an immediate rapport with the older actors.

Greenaway Northsea, Texas was produced by Yves Verbraeken, who had also worked with Defurne on several of his shorts and who co-wrote the screenplay.

The duo’s partnership dates back several years. Verbraeken was costume designer on one of Defurne’s shorts and first produced for him on the 1996 short, Saint.

This may be Defurne’s debut feature but his experience in the film business stretches back a very long way. In the early 1990s, as a very young man, he worked on the Oscar-nominated Daens. He was also a set decorator on Peter Greenaway’s controversial 1993 film, The Baby of Macon, about a supposed ‘miracle birth’ in a 17th Century community and the violence this birth provokes. Ben van Os, the art director, told the young Defurne to ‘go and see if you can help someone’. Defurne found someone to help and quickly became an integral part of the crew. He was fascinated to see how Greenaway worked. ‘I really saw there that you can tell different stories differently. As a director, you can be very precise - make clear choices about what you want and how you are going to tell stories to the audience.’

Greenaway’s film featured scenes of the dismemberment of a baby. There was nudity too. Defurne recalls that on the set itself, the crew had little idea of what extreme reactions the film would go on to provoke in audiences. They were too busy with their day to day work to think ahead.

At the time he worked on Baby of Macon, Defurne had just finished his studies at Sint-Lukas. What led him to film? ‘I had always wanted to create

Northsea, Texas

29

Northsea, Texas

30

something beautiful,’ he muses. As a kid, he thought about becoming an actor or a fashion designer. After school, he took entrance exams in fashion and film, passed both and eventually chose to study the latter.

Jarman and Pasolini Defurne’s father was a sea captain. He grew up in Ostend. His parents disapproved of TV so he didn’t watch many movies on the small screen during his childhood.

However, when he was seven or eight, his mother took him to see the Oscar-winning divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer. ‘I didn’t understand a lot of it because I was very young. It was my very first time in a cinema and I was impressed by the red floor,’ he recalls. No, he didn’t fully understand the film but he identified strongly with the young boy in the movie, torn between his bickering parents.

As a student, Defurne specialised in video art. Only later did he turn his attention toward more conventional narrative. He refined his skills at the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam where, as he recalls, ‘you really learn to tell a story’.

‘I had a more visual, experimental training at Sint-Lukas. I was trained to find my voice - to tell a unique story, a story only I could tell. At Binger, I learned more how to tell a story and how to connect with an audience,’ the director says. The two approaches complemented each other perfectly.

His shorts ran the range from experimental films in the vein of Derek Jarman and Pasolini to more conventional stories. ‘I discovered more and more that I wanted to move people emotionally. I felt the need to tell a story that would move people and

nter view i Northsea, Texas

whose stories they could connect with. I found a balance between having a beautiful visual world and telling a very, very moving story so that people really believe the characters on the screen.”

Northsea, Texas is a feelgood, coming of age drama about ‘a whole network’ of love affairs. It is aimed at a broader audience than the director reached with his shorts. Defurne’s earlier work has shown widely at gay and lesbian festivals. However, he is keen not to be labelled just as a ‘gay director’.

‘I wouldn’t consider myself the gay filmmaker from Flanders, especially for this film,’ he says. ‘For me, when working on this film, we talked about love in general... there is love between a boy and a girl and between a boy and a boy.

We tried not to overcomplicate this and to make a film anyone could connect with. I really loved this story and I wanted to tell it. That was what was most important.’

The director acknowledges that it has been ‘a long journey’ toward his first feature. So how does he feel finally to have his feature debut? Defurne ponders the question. At the time of the interview, he is still putting the finishing touches to the movie. The real satisfaction will only come, he suggests, if he can ‘touch an audience’ and fire its imagination. He describes Northsea, Texas, set in the 1970s, as ‘a very universal love story about love and longing’. He adds that making a feature, he identified with all the film’s characters whereas with his shorts, he tended to connect only with the main protagonist.

There is a nostalgic undertow to the film. ‘If we watch this film as mature adults, we might think back to our youth,’ he says of the mood of yearning which he hopes spectators will share with the main characters. 

Bavo Defurne (°1971)* Northsea, Texas (2011) Protection (2009, short) Campfire (1999, short) Sailor (1998, short) Saint (1996, short) Particularly now, in Spring (1992-1995, short) * selected filmography

31

The art of Jan

Rubens

has

been

Rubens

spending a lot of time in

Tunisia

shooting

recently, the

latest

film by veteran French director

Jean-Jacques

Annaud. The location may be exotic, but the Flemish camera

operator

and

steadicam specialist is getting used to working with the big names in international cinema. Last year it was Woody Allen, with Midnight in Paris, and before that films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Franรงois Ozon. Rubens has also claimed his first credit as a director of photography, for Hilde Van

Mieghem's

Madly

in Love, although that wasn't

something

he

planned.

32

Text Ian Mundell

On the set of Madly in Love

craftsmanship On the set of Black Thirst

His original engagement for Madly in Love had just been for a few days as a steadicam operator. ‘But then I met Hilde and she asked me to frame the movie, and after a week they decided to go on with me.'

This meant rapidly immersing himself in the world that Van Mieghem wanted to create for this fast-moving romantic comedy. 'Normally a DP does that well in advance with the director.' Rubens says. 'But I had to think about it on the spot.

I hadn't seen all the locations before.

Decisions about the lighting remained in place, with gaffer Wim Temmerman overseeing this aspect of the film, but the camera angles and lensing were both reconsidered. One change Rubens made was to emphasise the production design.

‘At the beginning of the movie I decided to use wide lenses a little more, rather than close-ups, so that you see more of the decor,’ he says. Even with close-ups, he chose lenses that left the background in view. This shifts subtly as the narrative unfolds. ‘At the end of the movie you have a really soft image behind, so that with the light in the background everything starts to feel a bit more romantic.’

static framing Despite being a specialist in steadicam, Rubens was happy to produce the static framing that Van Mieghem was looking for, giving Madly in Love a polished feel that sets it aside from the hand-held style of many Belgian films. ‘I’ve done steadicam for 22 years,’ Rubens says. ‘In the beginning it was a passion, but now it’s a tool and I don’t like to over-use it.’

Working with Van Mieghem went smoothly. ‘I had a lot of freedom, which is why it was so pleasant for me working with Hilde. We talked about everything.’

He was also struck by her rapport with the cast. ‘She really knows what she wants from an actor, and you don’t always feel that. On a lot of movies that I’ve done the director just lets the actor act and they don’t give much direction.’ From his point of view, it is better to work with directors who have a strong vision. ‘If a director really doesn’t know what he wants, it’s such a pain, and so difficult.’

‘I’ve done steadicam for 22 years. In the beginning it was a passion, but now it’s a tool and I don’t like to over-use it’

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90.000m² of filming space situated in a green paradise

The Eurocam Film Studios is one of the largest existing film studio complexes and is situated in the heart of Europe.

With 15 stages, a huge underwater stage, 13 greenrooms, 54 overnight rooms and beautiful green surroundings, this is the ideal place to make your feature film. Located centrally between Brussels and Antwerp, next to the train station, it has over 700 parking spaces and a dedicated team to guarantee the perfect carefree production.

In fall 2010 the studios welcomed the shooting of French director Rémi Bezançon’s third feature, “Un heureux événement”, as well as Wardour Pictures crime thriller in the great 1960’s British tradition “The Hot Potato”, directed by Tim Leweston. Belgian production house Skyline chose again for our studios to record the second season of TV series “De Rodenburgs”.

Contact our team for further information, a taylor-made offer or to visit our site www.eurocamfilmstudios.be Fabriekstraat 38 · 2547 LINT (Belgium) · studios@euro-cam.com · T +32 (0)3 454 20 10

It’s surprising to learn that Madly in Love is Rubens’ first major project in Flanders, although his credits include steadicam work on films such as The Alzheimer Case (The Memory of a Killer) and The Misfortunates. After graduation from the Narafi film and TV school in Brussels, job opportunities took Rubens to France rather than into the Flemish industry. ‘I did something in Lille, and the director there said he could use someone in Paris. When I went there, the word of mouth moved things on very quickly.’

Even though the French industry is crowded, a good camera operator soon gets a reputation. ‘Once you work in a crew where the director is pleased with you, the DP is pleased with you and the producers are pleased with you, you’ve got three or four people who will promote you and ask you back.’

As a result, his CV includes a lot of French assignments, including 18 TV movies as camera operator. He attributes part of his success to being good-natured and level-headed. ‘If people are getting pressured, I decompress. I’m never stressed,’ he says.

In the early years Rubens took nearly every assignment that came his way, but more recently he has been able to pick and choose. He worked with François Ozon on Angel and Ricky, and took on the challenge of shooting Big City, a western for kids, and the musical comedy Agathe Cléry.

The following year he joined the crew of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs à tire-larigot, where he did the framing for DP Tetsuo Nagata and operated the steadicam. ‘In that situation I didn’t decide very much, because Jean-Pierre Jeunet is so precise. He knows in advance everything that he wants.’

Woody Allen A high-profile international assignment followed, working with DP Darius Khondji as camera and steadicam operator on Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, an engagement he can’t discuss until the film comes out. ‘But I can say that Woody is a very bright director. He knows what he is doing,’ Rubens ventures, adding that the director was not as distant as his reputation suggests. ‘In the beginning he was very quiet, but at the end we talked a lot.’

Rubens is currently working as camera operator on Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Black Thirst, a tale of the rivalry between two Arabian emirs in the 1930s that stars Antonio Banderas, Mark Strong and Freida Pinto. The 90-day shoot is taking place mainly in Tunisia, with steadicam defining much of the film’s atmosphere.

For Rubens, it’s a chance to work again with an international cast and a renowned director. ‘He knows so much,’ he explains. ‘He is nearly 70 and he is an encyclopaedia. It’s so enriching to work with him.’

After Black Thirst wraps in the spring, Rubens will take a break and see what offers come in. He has already been approached to work with Annaud again, with his DP Jean-Marie Dreujeu, and with Hilde Van Mieghem.

In terms of further work as a DP, it depends on the right project coming along. ‘I’ll end up as a DP I’m sure, but you need to find the right people,’ he says. ‘That’s the main thing about a crew: getting the right people on the right spot. Then everything is fine.’ 

Jan Rubens (°1967)* Black Thirst (Jean-Jacques ANNAUD, 2011) Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011) Sonny Boy (Maria Peters, 2011) Madly in Love (Hilde Van Mieghem, 2010) Le petit Nicolas (Laurent Tirard, 2009) Micmacs à tire-larigot (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009) The Misfortunates (Felix van Groeningen, 2009) Ricky (François Ozon, 2009)

craftsmanship

François Ozon

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (Philippe Claudel, 2008) Un secret (Claude Miller, 2007) Angel (François Ozon, 2007) J'aurais voulu être un danseur (Alain Berliner, 2007) Zone libre (Christophe Malavoy, 2007) La maison du bonheur (Dany Boon, 2006) Combien tu m'aimes? (Bertrand Blier, 2005) Joyeux Noël (Christian Carion, 2005) Le couperet (Costa-Gavras, 2005) Erik in the Land of Insects (Gidi van Liempd, 2004) The Alzheimer Case (Erik Van Looy, 2003) * Selected filmography

35

file i

36

VAF wild cards 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 and Elias Grootaers, to name just a few, are among the past winners. Here is this year’s Wild Bunch.

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.

file i

NOW/HERE David Williamson I 25 mins

After the death of his mother, Wim returns from abroad to the Flemish city in which he grew up. While winding up her affairs, he has to confront old friends and inner fears.

David Williamson started out studying theatre, film and television from an academic point of view, a position he found increasingly unsatisfactory. '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, familiar from Felix van Groeningen's With Friends Like These. '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.'

Williamson is currently preparing for his next film, which will continue the line of thought begun in Now/here. 'It's an existential story, about how you can drift from one reality to another. But the tone will be a bit different, less real.' ď Š

37

Sometime Later Moon Blaisse I 24 mins 50 secs

38

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.'

She may not be as provocative in the future. 'I don't think I'll ever give that much attention to the plot, but it won't be this chaotic again,' she says. ď Š

file i

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 pet shop.

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, Walking the Dog and Sinematik. '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 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. 'That's always my priority, to make a movie that people can connect to.' ď Š wallysketches.wordpress.com

39

Because We Are Visual Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes I 47 mins 12 secs

40

A poetic exploration of the video images people post online, 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 online 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 was selected for IDFA, and now collects a VAF Wild Card. While thinking what to do with their award, Rochette and Claes have a new project underway, filming rehearsals of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's dance performance 'Rain' in Paris. 'It's going to be a documentary, but it has to be an experience as well,' says Claes, 'with a very choreographic approach.' ď Š 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.

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. Verbeke is still considering options for her next project. 'I'm not looking for sensational things, but really human stories,' she says. 'I think most of my projects will be human-centred, but maybe also with an abstract or poetic side.' ď Š

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Land of the Heroes

42

Waiting for the cartoons to come Sahim Omar Kalifa's main problem while at Sint-Lukas Film Academy in Brussels was having too many ideas, particularly when it came to his graduation project.

'I have too much to say, and that's not a good thing when it comes to shorts.’ HIS LATEST SHORT, LAND OF THE HEROES, PREMIERES AS PART OF THE BERLINALE'S GENERATION K+ PROGRAMME. Text Ian Mundell Portraits Bart Dewaele

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. Although he had taken photographs and made video films as a hobby, film school was not an option, so he was stuck studying economics.

He left Iraq in 2001 to join his family in Brussels. Once here he began to study accountancy, until a chance encounter with Sint-Lukas prompted him to change direction. Winning the VAF Wildcard at the end of his studies was an important encouragement. 'Competition is very tough in Belgium,' he says, 'and without the VAF Wildcard I might not have been able to continue making films. So it was a big opportunity for me.'

vein of irony He returned to Iraq to shoot the film, choosing his home city Zakho in the north of the country, close to the Turkish border. 'It's not safe near the Iranian border, although where we were was not 100% safe either,' he says.

However, it was important to be there. 'We got a lot of help from the people around us.

Material support, such as film lighting and cables, but also moral support.' The Kurdish government was less easy to deal with. 'If you ask them for help, they always push you to make political movies. I'm more interested in social drama, in culture and in psychology.'

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,' he says. 'And our lives in Iraq were full of irony.'

'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'

file

Working with mentor DorothĂŠe van den Berghe, director of My Queen Karo, and producers Hendrik VerthĂŠ and Kobe Van Steenberghe, he chose another story from his stock of ideas, and turned it into his second short film, Land of the Heroes.

It 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. This aspect of the story was borrowed from friends. 'Our city was a long way from the border with Iran, so we didn't have to deal with the war. But a lot of Kurdish children at that time collected weapons to survive. The war was their life.'

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borrowed from friends

AndrĂŠ delvAux DvD collection

cinematek pays homage to the unique work of internationally acclaimed Belgian director andrĂŠ Delvaux. over a period of two years, six feature films will be restored and made available on DvD. a bonus disc will complete the edition with lesser-known short films and documentaries, together with a portrait of the film maker.

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Royal Belgian Film aRchive inFoRmation : www.cinematek.Be/DvD

file i

Filmmakers he cites as influences include the great Kurdish director Yilmaz Güney and Emir Kusturica. 'I'm also interested in Hitchcock and his psychological themes, and in Stanley Kubrick. I also like films such as Casablanca, which addresses a big theme with a simple love story.'

Kalifa is now thinking about a first feature, the story of a second-generation immigrant to Belgium

whose strict traditional family pressures him to have his child aborted when they discover it will be a girl. While this again touches on his own environment as an immigrant, Kalifa doesn't intend to limit himself to such stories. 'I'd like to make films with Belgian and Flemish actors, and they won't always deal with my own cultural identity. I want my films to be universal.'  Land of the Heroes

Playing the Wildcards It's not just filmmakers who can get a start through the VAF Wildcards. 'It's great for young directors, but for us as a start-up company it was also a great way of beginning,' says Hendrik Verthé. He is producer with a team productions, a company he co-founded two years ago with Kobe Van Steenberghe after they graduated from the RITS film school in Brussels.

By courting VAF Wildcard winners, a team productions has been able to get an inside track on the funding process and start to build a portfolio of films. 'We always said that we need to make five or 10 shorts to show that we are able to do it, and then we will move on to feature films,' Verthé explains. 'That's the plan.'

They began with Pim Algoed, a VAF Wildcard winner in 2007, producing his extravagantly titled short How to Enrich Yourself By Driving Women Into Emotional and Financial Bankruptcy. This was followed by Sahim Omar Kalifa's just-completed Land of the Heroes. And they also worked with Robin Pront on his graduation short Injury Time which received a special mention from the VAF Wildcards jury.

Verthé sees an advantage in having young directors and producers working together. 'We are working at the same level, whereas if they go to a bigger producer, as a young director they are always just a beginner.'

Now a team productions will move on to another short, De Applausstreaker by Ruben Vermeersch, and then a feature documentary, From Science into Fiction, by 2008 VAF Wildcard winner Bram Conjaerts.

Verthé will also be attending the Rotterdam Lab, the International Film Festival Rotterdam's training programme for producers beginning an international career. In his pocket will be Algoed's outline for a debut feature.

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46

Paul demeyer On a Monday morning in the Wild Canary offices in Burbank, Belgian animator Paul Demeyer reflects on what first took him to California almost 30 years ago, what it is like living and working in Los Angeles, and how the Rugrats came into his orbit.

Text Geoffrey Macnab

In the mid-1970s, Demeyer received a Fullbright Grant for further education in the United States. He had just finished his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and wasn't yet ready to ‘go into the workforce’.

A few months before, Demeyer had seen some films at the Knokke Experimental Film Festival that he had found deeply inspiring. He was also intrigued by the attitude of the festivalgoers. ‘I remember seeing people running naked in and out of the theatre. That would make the papers!’

If he was to study abroad, he had two choices. He could go to Eastern Europe. That, though, ‘seemed a bit bleak’. Or he could head west. That, he decided, was the best option. In 1975, he headed off to Los Angeles to study at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts). His English wasn't great. When the diffident young Belgian arrived at the airport in LA, there was no-one to pick him up. ‘I had to spend like a hundred bucks on a cab,’ he recalls.

nternational

Despite the bumpy arrival, Demeyer slotted very easily into life at CalArts, which is in Valencia.

He didn't have a car and so he wasn't able to roam the city. ‘But you could keep yourself completely busy just by staying on campus, meeting people and so forth.’ He was the only Belgian in the college - a distinction of sorts. That forced him to make friends and to look outward. After a couple of months, he pooled resources with his roommate to rent a house and to hire a car. ‘After that, life became very much more interesting,’ Coming from Belgium, he relished the chance to roam the open spaces of California and to explore a city as big as LA.

Student Academy Award

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Back in Belgium, he had studied with the great Raoul Servais. The teaching at CalArts was very different. The school was still feeling the effects of what Demeyer calls ‘the 1968 syndrome’.

Its ethos was informal and freewheeling. Demeyer was taught by Jules Engel, a celebrated filmmaker and teacher who had worked on several Disney classics. Engel encouraged him to work on what most interested him.

Demeyer quickly flourished in California. His fellow students included such luminaries as Tim Burton, John Lasseter and Henry Selick. His early short The Muse picked up a prize at the Ottawa Film Festival and later won a Student Academy Award. The Belgian authorities therefore allowed Demeyer to spend a second year in the US and picked up his fees. During the summer, he worked with Richard Williams, the celebrated Canadian animator who went on to make Who Framed Roger Rabbit, on animated feature Raggedy Ann and Andy. Demeyer noticed that Williams ‘spent all his time on animation and not as much on the vision of the film’.

This, he felt, is a weakness that many animators share. They're so preoccupied with drawing and creating the illusion of movement that they risk forgetting the bigger picture. As he puts it, ‘it's all about the story in the end.’ One LA memory which sticks in his mind is attending the crew screening of the first Star Wars film. ‘That was so brilliant. It really had that enthusiasm that Americans have. Each time there was a special effect or a new actor came on screen, the whole theatre would cheer!’

Duckman

Mucinex Commercial © Reckit Benkiser

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Rugrats in Paris: The Movie © Paramount Pictures

‘I am a Gemini and Geminis are supposed to be people who want to move around, have different things going’

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Raoul Servais As a kid growing up in Belgium, Demeyer (born in Bruges) had always loved drawing.

His father worked for the military. His mother was a housewife. ‘I would not say they were intellectuals at all.’ He was an easy child. A pencil and a piece of paper was all it took to keep him happy - either that or a Tintin book to read. He was 10 years old by the time his family bought its first TV - and that was a black and white one. Even so, he was immediately drawn to Disney shows and Chuck Jones cartoons.

‘And I do remember as a child seeing Sleeping Beauty and being overwhelmed by it.

I thought it was so wonderful! I wanted to become like Walt Disney,’ he remembers a moment of childhood epiphany. ‘I was just walking on clouds.’

Demeyer wasn't sure precisely what to study, whether to specialise in graphics or photography. Eventually, he stumbled on the animation course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. ‘I was totally smitten by the place,’ he remembers.

Raoul Servais was one of his teachers and clearly spotted the promise that he had.

Demeyer confesses to being a little intimidated by him initially. However, after his two years in California, when he headed back to Belgium, Servais helped find him a job as a teacher. He enjoyed the teaching but felt that, at 25, he was still too young to teach.

During his tim at CalArts, his attitude toward animation - and toward life in general - had changed. The Demeyer who returned to Belgium in the late 1970s was more ‘open’ and took himself less seriously. Even so, he didn't relish being back in Europe. ‘Everything felt so small and narrow. Everybody seemed to be wearing the same clothes. I had finally become accustomed to t-shirts and jeans with holes in them and then suddenly everybody was wearing the same raincoats.’

troubled eyes Teaching and working on commercials somehow didn't seem enough. ‘I am a Gemini and Geminis are supposed to be people who want to move around, have different things going.’

After a year working at RTL in Luxembourg, using early computer animation, Demeyer was given the opportunity to move to London to work with Richard Purdum. ‘It was like a present from heaven for me,’ he recalls of a stint in London, which lasted from 1984 till 1991. He was living near Hampstead and relished collaborating on commercials with animators like Purdum and Michael Dudok de Wit. Demeyer says that he also learnt how to become more disciplined in his animation. Alongside his commercial work, he was illustrating children's books for publisher Victor Gollancz. In 1989/1990, he directed the animated film The Goose Girl.

nternational The Rugrats, TV series © Nickelodeon

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Although his career was flourishing, Demeyer had been having trouble with his eyes. This was linked to his diabetes. It took several years to get over the condition, which at one stage threatened to blind him. In the end, an eye doctor in Antwerp was able to help. His eyesight still isn't ‘great’. He had to give up driving. He could still draw, direct and do storyboards but wasn't able to deal with ‘fine’ work.

Despite his evident affection for London, when Demeyer had the chance to move back to LA to work with Klasky Csupo, he took it. In the mid-1990s, he worked on TV series Duckman in the US. He was asked to stay. In spite of the 1994 LA earthquake, he decided that Los Angeles was where he wanted to be. The city hadn't changed in his absence but he had. He was no longer the carefree student that he'd been in the 1970s. His poor eyesight meant he was reliant on his wife to drive him... at least until he realised that there is a viable public transport system if you look for it.

European American Back in LA, Demeyer enjoyed big success working on The Rugrats TV series and first Rugrats movie in the 1990s and eventually directing The Rugrats in Paris film. It was rewarding but very demanding work. Demeyer eventually decided to go back into commercials. He is also teaching again and is trying to hatch his own movies. One project he is attempting to make is an animated adaptation of a sci-fi novel by a legendary writer whose name he doesn’t want to reveal right now. Another is Opal, based on the diary of a little girl called Opal Whiteley who grew up in Oregon in the early 20th Century.

Since 2008, Demeyer has been a commercials director at Wild Canary. Yes, he reflects, he has come a long way since he was that little kid in Bruges, obsessed with drawing. Technology has changed enormously too since he took his first steps in the business. ‘But I still love the paper and the pencil,’ he confides.

Demeyer is now looking into taking US citizenship and is putting down roots in LA. ‘It is hard to see myself going back to Europe but when I go there to see my family and my elderly parents, I just feel at home. I still feel European... but I am also American.’ 

The Goose Girl

Paul Demeyer (°1952)* The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002) Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (2000) The Rugrats Movie (1998) Rugrats (1997-1998, TV series) Duckman (1994-1996, TV series) Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (1994, TV series) The Goose Girl (1990, short) John The Fearless (1984) Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) The Muse (1976, short) * selected filmography

49

Under the Influence Kaat Beels grew up in the grip of stories. 'That is still my main motivation.

To tell stories and discover other worlds,' she tells Ian Mundell.

Š Bart Dewaele

50

Kaat Beels

Hotels Her graduation film, Bedtime Stories, won an award at the Brussels Film Festival in 1998, and she was then offered the chance to contribute to the three-part feature Bruxelles, mon amour which came out in 2001. A further short film, Cologne followed in 2004. The stories in two of these films are set in hotels, as is her first solo feature film, Swooni.

'There is something that fascinates me about hotels,' she says, making a connection back to her early obsession with other worlds. 'A hotel is a structure where very different stories can happen together and very different lives coincide. But it's also a place where you are able to close the door to your own world and get into another.

Between the four walls of a hotel room, people can leave their problems and their identity behind, and become someone else.'

Swooni is a multi-plot film that follows six people, all victims of their own desires, through 24 hours. Once the story became clear, she started to research films that might help shape her approach. 'I have a lot of references for this film, which are very different, but which make sense in combination for what I want to do.'

Mad Men Multi-plot movies were a first port of call. 'For the beginning, a film like Gosford Park was very influential. You see these steadycam movements that link everybody,' she explains. Light and colour were influenced by the TV series Mad Men. 'It's so elegant! And while most of the time it is set in an office, they also film a lot in hotels and other fancy places.'

Finally, In the Cut by Jane Campion played a role. 'That influenced me in the way we used lighting and camera movements, because it is a bit edgy.'

Beyond Swooni, which is due out this summer, Beels has another project under way. She describes it loosely as a 'Crime and Punishment' story, involving a group of people in a rich suburban setting. The script is being written by Stefanie Vanhecke from an idea they developed together.

Like the directors who inspired her, Beels hopes to create a body of work that builds into a personal cinematic universe. 'But I'm still looking for my voice and how I can use it to tell stories that I like. Maybe I will look for it my entire life, but it is an interesting way of exploring cinema and what I want to do with it.'

Having a next step in view is reassuring. 'The stories you ought to tell ends up finding you, so I'm really happy that I already have the inspiration for a second story.' 

These are some of the works Kaat Beels currently gets inspired by: BOOK

The Comfort of Strangers

by Ian McEwan

nfluence

inspirational

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When she was growing up, films held a powerful attraction. 'As a child, most of the times I saw a movie I became so caught up by the story that I wanted to be a part of it,' she recalls. 'And my naive idea was that if I was making the movie, I would be in the story.'

Her early viewing combined European children's films, such as the Astrid Lindgren adaptation The Brothers Lionheart which she saw at a specialist cinema club, with Hollywood movies on Saturday afternoon TV. 'When I was in my mid-teens I became more interested in the 'real thing' and came to watch Krzysztof Kieslowski and David Lynch. Hal Hartley was also very popular.'

These interests stayed with her when she went to the Sint-Lukas film school in Brussels and the chance came to make her own work. 'I was looking for my own voice in the cinema, and I was influenced by many directors. What they had in common was that they created their own worlds,' she says. 'I think that's something all good directors do. The universe of David Lynch is very particular, and so is that of Martin Scorsese. That's what is powerful about them: they can tell a story in their own universe.'

In the same way, she cites Wong Kar-Wai and Billy Wilder as influences. 'Billy Wilder's films are so timeless and witty, and their stories and characters are so good,' she says.

MUSIC

Le Nozze di Figaro

by Mozart

ART

The Skirt Michaël Borremans www.zeno-x.com

PHOTOGRAPHY

William Eggleston (°1939)

FILM

Sunset Boulevard

by Billy Wilder

TV SERIES

Mad Men

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cons

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From Amsterdam to Venice, over Athens, Giffone, Hamburg and Montreal…

Here are just a few snapshots of Flemish filmmakers and stars attending the finest of film fests around the globe. t ilm Fes World F l a t s e u tr g n Au Mo ent Bille id s s e re d P Ju r y d Prix e G ra n l th e ff d u te N an presen Ha ns V ). to n s e e g u y (Ox Amériq

ight): left to r m ro (f l tréa s Van to Mon tor Han t c s e a ir d to A e (O), tian De e Valck ), Chris n o (O x m k e An duc e r ndric (T ), pro i uter He lc o a W B ), dir ots (B), Nuffel (O r, director Ka s He r b n a H te r t enting irecto Sc hu ) repres o (O), d (O p ly k h c P ze (T ). ie Vin Dries Turqua nd Ma r d a n ) a (O ), (O r ts Stef Ae Ox ygen Bo (B),

52

rld the wo a after & q lso ir A a . pe n ar no lm Loc at the o fi in t) l h e te d s ig r l n tiva om ilde 3rd Fes cond fr gnè s W e 6 A a. (s e k ), a s th d r t w ro sa cho e (p ’Alcanta Steppe zka Gro elcamp e s D th ie Vanja D is n d n g n e A D eyo actress re of B ight are ’s lead premiè left to r lm fi m e o fr th d right) picture nd (far (fest), a

st (l), s Provo la o ic N tor e r on st direc produc o (c n Stardu so ature, Daniels debut fe d d te Helena a ip afoe an ly antic illem D W r his high to in c ss ader), a d actre The Inv the lea , a c c o R Stefania der. a v In T he

er ze helm Turqua d n a alci Kadir B burg’s st H a m e F Film dde Kohlste Kathrin

rifone g the G in iv e c re r Bo. Herbots Film Festival fo s n a H ne ctor 0 Gif fo Bo dire the 201 t a o ll Crista eiving per rec p ü K rd a Ev r y Awa excited umenta c o D A ver y t en a me st Stud the Be s in a N t’ a h W for at IDFA

ry as a ve erghe w B d the e n iv e e d an he rec n for e G u st V h w r Award c a mpe irector D th t s 6 happy 1 e B at the Athens Flandr f o City of s l. u s tiva aby Je ilm Fes Little B tional F a n r te In Athens

ceptin h e n ac w y jo ith filled w mburg ck ma n Fest Ha to m S il x F le rA t the directo ward a Pulsar Circle A s ic it r C the Film

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nice: st in Ve r Stardu directo Flemish t s o v Pro Nicolas e c a p omi Ra ) a nd No m iu n (Millen

53

-fans i

Frédéric Boyer Frédéric Boyer (l) with the Little Baby Jesus of Flandr team

Frédéric Boyer is artistic director of the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. He took up the post in September 2009 having been on the selection committee of the Fortnight since 2004. Boyer is also the artistic director OF THE LES Arcs European Film Festival. At both events, he has programmed Flemish films. He talks about two of his favourite films from Flanders and about Flemish cinema.

54

I used to think that there was just one Belgian cinema but Belgian cinema and Flemish cinema are totally different. They're not the same spirit, not the same style. For me, it is very important to give a place to Flemish cinema - they are producing few films but the quality is very, very good.

I didn't pick Hans Van Nuffel's Oxygen for La Quinzaine this year because we had only 22 films screening and Oxygen we already had one Flemish film (Little Baby Jesus of Flandr) and it was difficult for me to have another one.

However, this film (which screened in Les Arcs) has quality.

There is always dark and crazy humour in Flemish films. Oxygen worked well with audiences. It's a film that can get distribution in France. In any other country, if you said you were doing a film with everything shot in a hospital, everybody would be afraid. But when you see Oxygen, you realise there is a lot of life in the film.

The Misfortunates There is sexuality, romance and friendship. Life is going on much more than outside the hospital. It's a film that is very strong and symbolic.

Young people should see this film. I don't know anybody who didn't like it. It is very well done. The editing is fantastic. There are a lot of funny parts but it's never psychological or melodramatic. It shows us the opposite of what we think about hospitals. To me, it seems a very healthy film. We have in our minds some clichés about hospitals but there are no clichés in the film. It's a feature, a fiction, but it's also very realistic. For me, it is life. It is not a fairy tale. What is very interesting is that you don't see a lot of doctors. I compare it to Tom and Jerry cartoons in which you see only the animals and the legs of the lady.

For a first feature, it was very important for me to screen the film in Les Arcs. The response was very warm and very good. It's a typical case of a film that should

be distributed everywhere - but the market is so bad.

Felix van Groeningen's The Misfortunates screened in La Quinzaine in 2009. I met Felix in Cannes and I met him in Paris during the première of the film. He gave me the first cut of Gust Van den Berghe's Little Baby Jesus of Flandr. He told me I had to see this. These Flemish filmmakers are all together. They help each others' films. There is a connection between them. These Flemish guys go to good film schools. They know how to edit a film and how to shoot a film.

The Misfortunates? Felix van Groeningen is incredible. He can have a larger audience after this film. You don't feel the camera, you don't feel anything. You are just with these people. It is the most typically Flemish film for a decade. He is a very important director.

It had a standing ovation immediately at the Quinzaine.

The Flemish cinema is totally different to the French-speaking Belgian cinema. In the Flemish cinema, there is this dark humour.

There is a craziness. It's maybe what is missing in UK cinema just now. If you remember the film Withnail and I, which I adore - that kind of film could be Flemish. It has that free spirit of cinema.  www.quinzaine-realisateurs.com

flanders

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Issue #19 | Spring 2011 | e 3.99 Cover Matthias Schoenaerts by Bart Dewaele

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Alice in Wonderland , 2010.

d l r o W d r i e W ul, “The Wonderf .” n o t r u B m i T f o , - Chris Knight OST P L A NATION

THE EXHIBIT I ON This exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Explore over 700 works – from childhood drawings to the props created for some of the world’s most treasured films.

EXCLUSIVE CANADIAN ENGAGEMENT ends April 17, 2011 Corpse Bride, 2005 Tim Burton (American. b. 1958) Carousel. 2009. Epoxy, polyester resin, plasma ball, muslin, fibreglass, foam and fluorescent paint.

Private collection. © 2011 Tim Burton Tim Burton. (American, b. 1958) Untitled (#6). 1982. Pen and ink, marker, and watercolor wash on paper, 11 x 15” (27.9 x 38.1 cm). Private collection. © 2011 Tim Burton

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