#20 - Summer 2011

flanders

TAKE 20 | Summer 2011 | e 3,99

Shorts

on the Croisette Swimsuit 46 and Bento Monogatari

The Studio 100 touch From Samson to Goliath

Coming Swooni!

Kaat Beels on her feature debut Swooni

African

Bavo Defurne MichaĂŤl R. Roskam Frank Van Passel Jean-Christophe Berjon

Blue

Gust Van den Berghe returns to Cannes with Blue Bird

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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.

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

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Cover: Gust Van den Berghe seen through the lens of Bart Dewaele

‘I’ve eaten Japanese every day for a whole year,’ explains Bento Monogatari director Pieter Dirkx

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C NTENT | Take 20 who taught himself to cook Japanese-style for the film. page 7

‘The people at the Quinzaine are wonderful people,’

says Gust Van den Berghe who returns to Cannes with his second feature, Blue Bird.

‘They gave birth to me as an artist. It’s a very important moment in my life. I’ll never forget and I’ll never be able to have that same pure experience as at that particular screening where, for the first time, I had a contact with an audience.’ page 8

‘The only similarity they have is that they are all victims of their own dreams,’ says Kaat Beels about the

main characters in her debut feature, Swooni. page 12

It all began with a shaggy dog called Samson.

Today, Studio 100 is the biggest children’s entertainment company in the Benelux, with ambitions to go much further. page 16

Although it comes to all of us, death remains a taboo subject for many people. Not for three documentary filmmakers though. page 22

Like Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, Wannes Destoop doesn’t want his actors to act, he wants them to be.

Swimsuit 46 is selected for Official Competition in Cannes. page 26

Destoop’s graduation short

Working together for the common good, is the message

behind Bo’s Bazaar, a project supported through the CASPER co-production scheme set-up in Flanders, Wallonia and the Nord-Pas-de-Calas region. Producer Viviane Vanfleteren explains. page 28

‘I adore all kinds of filmmakers, from Hitchcock to, say, the Coen brothers,’ says artist Hans Op de Beeck, talking about his new installation Sea of Tranquility. page 30

4 i-Opener The Invader | 34 influence Bavo Defurne | 36 i-Cons | 38 Fans Jean-Christophe Berjon

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The Invader In Nicolas Provost’s long-awaited feature film debut The Invader, Issaka Sawadogo plays an illegal African immigrant whose journey begins in Brussels as he searches, like many other immigrants, for a better place in the world. Through his confrontation with a harsh society, he slowly but irreversibly starts to incarnate our worst fears and becomes the monster we have created.

Scripted by Provost and François Pirot, The Invader also stars Stefania Rocca and Serge Riaboukine.

Director of Photography is Frank Vanden Eeden, with Nico Leunen signing for the editing of the film.

Flemish co-producer is Antonino Lombardo for Prime Time.

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-opener

DVD

Antwerp

A City Caught on Film available 13 may 2011

maS, a prestigious new museum about the city of antwerp will open its doors on 17 may 2011. on this occasion, cinematek publishes a DvD with a unique selection of 22 rarely seen archival films that tell the story of antwerp, its inhabitants and their encounter with 20th century history.

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

An unhappy, middle-aged woman, caught in a stale marriage to a boorish factory worker, turns her eyes to the east. Yvonne worships Japanese culture, dressing like a geisha in black wig and white make-up, filling up her apartment with Japanese gadgetry, and getting up early every morning to prepare her husband Frank sushi to take to his job at the waste collection centre.

shor t i ssimo

Lunchbox Story

That’s the starting point for Bento Monogatari (Lunchbox Story), Pieter Dirkx’s graduation project from St Lukas Film School in BRUSSELS, WHICH IS SELECTED FOR THIS YEAR'S CINEFONDATION IN CANNES. TEXT GEOFFREY MACNAB

The film has been receiving an enthusiastic response, with Dirkx being invited to present Bento Monogatari as part of this year’s Cinéfondation programme in Cannes.

The director shares his leading character’s fascination with Japanese culture. As a teenager, he steeped himself in the world of Manga and Japanese movies. ‘What I loved about them, which I didn’t find in western films, was their courage to tell stories on a very big scale,’ the filmmaker reflects on Japanese popular cinema. ‘In Japan, they can tell any kind of story. The one mentioned in my film is about bisexual vampire cowboys who are fighting dinosaurs in outer space.

They always have a way of telling stories like that,even without making it completely ridiculous.’

Lunchbox Story often looks as if it is set in the Osaka or Tokyo of Ozu and Mizoguchi but it was shot in an apartment on a down at heel council estate in Antwerp.

To prepare the lunchboxes that we see in the film, Dirkx taught himself to cook, Japanese-style. ‘For the film, I’ve eaten Japanese every day for a whole year, just to learn how to cook.’ The director turned chef experimented not just with preparing sushi but with making exotic desserts.

And, yes, he still loves the food, despite eating so much of it.

inner state One element of the film can’t help but have uncomfortable undertones for audiences watching it today. Yvonne’s apartment is so Japanese that, like many homes in Japan, it is subject to earthquakes. ‘I wanted to show a

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

Bento Monogatari lot of Japanese references. The Japanese have to live with earthquakes every day. At the same time, it was a way to show the inner state of the characters,’ he explains.

He admits that he was ‘scared’ people wouldn’t want to see the film after the real earthquakes which devastated Japan earlier this spring. ‘Now, when we think of Japan, the only thing we can think of is earthquakes, nuclear power plants and tsunamis.’

He hopes, however, that his film will make audiences think of other aspects of Japanese culture – and that it will be clear to viewers the film was made by somebody who loves Japan.

At the same time Yvonne embraces Japan, her husband searches for his own escape. ‘I wanted to say something about the different ways that people can escape. This woman does it in a very positive way – she tries to escape in a world of colour and beautiful things... and this man just goes into a completely different world which is more about the negative side of obsession.’

For all his love of Japan, Dirkx himself is yet to visit the country. One day, he is determined he will get there. ‘I hope it will work out one day. We shall see!” 

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Rhapsody in Blue

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Last year, Gust Van Den Berghe’s debut feature Little Baby Jesus Of Flandr was shown to a huge ovation in Cannes. Now, a year later, he has completed a new feature film, Blue Bird, which has already been snapped up by leading international sales agent Coproduction Office and is bound to enjoy a very long festival life.

The prodigiously talented Van Den Berghe, who is now busily plotting a third feature, is only 25 years old.

Text Geoffrey Macnab Portrait Bart Dewaele

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Cannes 2010. At the screening of Little Baby Jesus of Flandr in the Quinzaine, the audience was wildly enthusiastic. The film’s young director sat there, gratified but startled.

‘It was pretty extreme… but good extreme!’ he says of his experiences at his first major festival. ‘The people at the Quinzaine are wonderful people. They gave birth to me as an artist. It’s a very important moment in my life. I’ll never forget and I’ll never be able to have that same pure experience as at that particular screening where, for the first time, I had a contact with an audience.’

For all the excitement, Van den Berghe didn’t let the Cannes fervour go to his head. Within weeks of Cannes, he was already hatching a new project. In his spare time, Van den Berghe likes to read old Flemish plays. One writer he had stumbled on was Maurice Maeterlinck, winner of the Nobel Prize back in 1911 but hardly a household name today. In particular, he was fascinated by Ghent-born Maeterlinck’s symbolist play for children, ‘Blue Bird’, about a little girl and boy on a quest for happiness.

Van den Berghe was very curious about the way that Maeterlinck attributed a ‘soul’ to objects and to animals. The writing seemed very dated but, at the same time, it had an innocence and a lyricism about it that he found enrapturing. ‘At the bottom line, you have these two children who are looking for a bird and, for me, this was enough.’ mythical bird As a young filmmaker strongly influenced by painting, it had always been his intention to make a ‘triptych’ – a series of three films – and Blue Bird was perfect for the middle segment. He decided to shoot in Africa.

Van den Berghe’s version of Blue Bird is about children growing up without realizing it. As they search for the mythical bird, they are learning important questions about the way the adult world works.

Not many young Belgian filmmakers would have the ambition or the utopianism to want to make a low budget feature in widescreen in a country that they had never visited before and where they knew no-one.

Why Togo? ‘It could have been Russia… or Belgium. I could have shot this movie anywhere,’ the director responds. ‘A child growing up is something that happens everywhere on earth.’

Last August, seemingly almost on a whim, Van den Berghe took the plane to Togo. What appealed about the Tamberma land in the north of the country is that it has never been colonized. The tribes their still adhere to an ancient way of life. ‘Somebody tipped me off about this region. They told me it was very special.’

The director spent a month just living in Tamberma. Then, he returned in late November with a small camera crew. In order to put together his cast, he staged a few plays in the fields. ‘From these plays, I could see which kids had a certain intelligence toward directing and following orders,’ Van den Berghe recalls. By early December, the filmmakers were ready to shoot.

Blue Bird

‘The beautiful thing with blue is that you don’t know if it is day or night.

You don’t know whether you are dreaming or awake. It is the colour of the unconscious and of the symbolist movement. It is a colour often related to childhood by painters and writers.

It’s a colour linked to innocence’

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Blue Bird

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From the outset, Van den Berghe was determined not to rehash old clichés about African war, poverty or folklore. At the same time, he was aware of his position as a young white filmmaker in a remote African community.

‘If you are in Africa and you are white, it means certain things… it makes certain things very easy and certain things very difficult,’ the director reflects. He points out that there are stereotypes on both sides.

Just as the whites have their preconceptions about black Africans, the Africans see the whites as ‘rich, with money to spend.’ The filmmakers didn’t pay the kids in the cast directly but provided them with practical gifts and underwrote their school fees. soul In one scene, we hear a man complaining that the carpenter has cut down the trees and taken them away without making recompense to the gods of the woods. Warriors wait for the children, ready to punish them for the carpenter’s misdeeds. This sequence is taken from Maeterlinck’s play but it also chimed with the culture of the Togolese. When the director asked his actors to portray ‘the soul of the woods’, they took the advice sincerely. ‘It would be very difficult to tell this to someone in Belgium – become a soul of a tree!'

The kids, meanwhile, relished working with the filmmakers. ‘They had a great time. They saw things that nobody in their village ever saw – they saw trucks, they saw the sea, which is 600 km down.’

These children had never come across a movie camera before and were fascinated by the way Van den Berghe and his team put together their story in images. One key instruction he gave them was not to look into the lens when the camera was shooting.

Speak to most young European filmmakers and they will tell you of the struggles and frustrations that have faced them over many years as they have striven to finance and shoot their movies. Why was it so quick and straightforward for Van den Berghe?

The young director explains that he won a €60,000 VAF Wildcard with Little Baby Jesus of Flandr, his graduation movie, and that he used this toward Blue Bird. ‘I wanted to make this fast because I didn’t want to work three years on this movie,’ Van den Berghe declares. innocence Whatever the circumstances in which it was shot, Blue Bird is a film on a very big canvas. Blue tinted, full of lovingly composed landscapes of forests and dusty plains, and with subtle sound and music - rustling grass, bells chiming - it rekindles memories of the work of the Russian master, Andrei Tarkovsky. The director talks of his determination to make ‘a cinematic experience… it’s important that people can go and see films in theatres.’

Why the blue? Van den Berghe points out that blue was the only colour he didn’t see on location in Togo. ‘And the beautiful thing with blue is that you don’t know if it is day or night. You don’t know whether you are dreaming or awake. It is the colour of the unconscious and of the symbolist movement.

It is a colour often related to childhood by painters and writers. It’s a colour linked to innocence.'

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Producer Tomas Leyers, of Brussels-based Minds Meet, had worked with Van den Berghe on which he very successfully self-released in Belgium. He was again on board for Blue Bird, which he had read shortly after Cannes and immediately committed to. ‘The good thing about Tomas is that he is a dreamer, albeit a realistic one. That’s a very noble thing to be in this profession.’

Van den Berghe, who grew up in Bruges, comes from artistic family. His mother is a writer and teacher.

His father was "an old bartender". ‘He knows the art of conversation. He is a good listener. While my mum talks, my dad listens. I always say that my mum taught me how to fly and my dad taught me how to land.’

As an 18-year-old, Van den Berghe was more involved in music and dance than in film. Film, he guessed, could be a way to bring his interests together. After a difficult first six months at film school, where he chafed against the rules and prescriptive style of teaching, he fell head over heels in love with movies. He cites titles like Godard’s A bout de souffle and the works of ‘visionaries’ like Pasolini and Tarkovsky as important inspirations.

He first had the idea for a series of movies about birth, the road and death when he was at the RITS film academy. A few years later and the cycle is already two thirds complete. Now, he has to make the third film in his loosely styled trilogy. ‘I don’t know the story yet but the first one (Little Baby Jesus of Flandr) is about permanent innocence. This one (Blue Bird) is more about the road and losing that innocence… and for the third film I am working on guilt and how it is connected to knowledge and self-esteem…'

Van den Berghe is a filmmaker in a hurry. ‘I am really inspired at the moment and I have the flow… I would like to shoot these three movies in the same period in order to maintain a similar identity.’  www.flandersimage.com

Blue Bird

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Heartbreak Hotel

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Summer in the city. A hotel. A wedding.

A woman in love. A deceived husband.

An estranged daughter. A dying mother.

A lost child. Fitting all of this and more into one movie was the challenge director Kaat Beels accepted for her debut feature, Swooni. Here she explains to us why.

Text Ian Mundell Portrait Bart Dewaele

'In the beginning I didn’t hesitate about choosing a multiplot, but while making it I started to think: “Oh my God, this is a difficult job!”’ Beels says. ‘You have less time to develop characters and all the stories have to mingle together. But I really enjoyed making it.’

The decision to work on a film with multiple plot lines dates back half a decade to a meeting with the writer Annelies Verbeke. At that point Beels had an award-winning student short to her name, Bedtime Stories, an episode in the three-part feature Bruxelles, mon amour, and further short film, Cologne. Producer Peter Bouckaert had seen her work and suggested the meeting with Verbeke.

‘He noticed some similarities in atmosphere and story telling, and he thought we were soul mates,’ Beels recalls.

‘He was quite right.’ As the two women talked about possible projects, they started to see similarities between some of Verbeke’s short stories, and the basic idea for a multi-plot film emerged. ‘We had just seen Me and You and Everyone We Know, and we were both fans of Robert Altman, so it was a structure that inspired us.’

pyramid of human needs However it was also to prove a problem. Multi-plot films can be expensive, and the financing did not quite reach the level necessary to go into production. Verbeke had to begin a new book, and so Michel Sabbe was brought in to take a fresh look at the material.

One of his suggestions was to set the action entirely in a hotel, rather than the original idea of having the characters gradually converge upon a hotel from across a city. As well as reducing the costs, this made dramatic sense. ‘It felt stronger if everything was centred on the hotel immediately,’ Beels recalls.

It’s also a setting that recurs in her films. ‘There is something that fascinates me about hotels,’ she explains.

‘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.’

In Swooni, Anna (Sara Deroo) is staying in the large hotel to attend her sister’s wedding. Her relationship with husband Hendrik (Geert Van Rampelberg) already seems to be under some strain, but this threatens to become more serious when it turns out that her lover (Tibo Vandenborre) has followed her to the hotel, with an ultimatum.

nter view i Also checking into the hotel is the brash Violette (Viviane De Muynck), who has unfinished business with Vicky (Natali Broods), in charge of housekeeping in the plush establishment. Vicky in turn has her hands full with Joyeux (Vigny Tchakouani), a little African boy who has turned up in the hotel claiming that he must meet his father Amadou (Issaka Sawadogo) there. He refuses to leave under any circumstances.

‘Michel describes it as a pyramid of human needs,’ Beels explains. ‘At the bottom you have Amadou and Joyeux, who just want a better life. They want food and they want the basics. And on the top you have Anna, a typical westerner, who has everything: she has a nice job, she is quite rich, she has a husband and a lovely son and they are all healthy. But she is also wondering if this is really what her life is about, if it wasn’t bigger and better in her imagination.’

Besides this chance meeting in a hotel, these characters have little in common. ‘The only similarity they have is that they are all victims of their own dreams.’

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Swooni

bilingual Brussels A further challenge of turning the multi-plot script into a film was the difficulty of bringing a visual quality to the tightly written scenario. ‘Sometimes I had the impression that there was no room for me to add something, because the script was so wellstructured. If you pulled one thing, it all fell apart.

But bit by bit I integrated more visual things.’

For instance, a series of pre-title scenes show Joyeux making his way to the hotel, emphasising how hot the city is on this summer day. This impression of heat then contrasts with the closeness of the hotel rooms, evoked with subdued lighting.

Another change Beels made was to take the wedding up and out. ‘At first the marriage was more an inside event and I decided to do everything on the roof. So there is a party at night and a reception,’ she says.

The roof-top restaurant becomes an arena for early encounters between the characters and the film’s dramatic denouement.

As well as shooting in two Brussels hotels, the production created a roof terrace on another building in the city. But the fact that it takes place in Brussels is not important to Beels. ‘For me it’s a minor detail. It could be any big city.’

The one local detail evident in the story is that the characters speak both Dutch and French, reflecting the bilingual character of Brussels. The wedding is a Flemish affair, but Joyeux and Amadou are from Frenchspeaking west Africa. Anna’s lover also turns out to be a French-speaker. ‘I thought it was nice that her romance was in a language other than her own. For her it’s a fantasy, another world compared to that of her family,’ Beels explains.

good fortune Anna and her husband are played by the same actors who starred in Beels’ short film Cologne. Sara Deroo was in her mind when the film was being written, but casting Geert Van Rampelberg was a later decision. ‘I thought it was too easy to cast Geert again,’ Beels says, ‘but something feels right when they are together so I thought, what the heck.’

For the part of Joyeux it was necessary to find a new talent, and Beels was blessed by a piece of good fortune. Casting was underway but not going so well, when she saw a perfect candidate travelling with his father on a train between Brussels and Antwerp.

‘I had to get my courage together and approach them,’ she recalls. ‘I explained I was looking for an African boy to play a part in a movie, and the father just turned to his son and asked: “Do you want to be in a movie?” and he said “Yes!”’ Vigny Tchakouani, from Cameroon, proved to be very capable when he came to audition for the part. ‘We felt a kind of passion in him. He was really eager. And the good thing about him was that he had only been in Belgium for six months, so he still had this look of amazement. He was still surprised by things.’

In the five years it took to get Swooni financed, Beels was not idle. She made more short films, a documentary and wrote and directed for the TV show Jes, a romantic comedy also set in Brussels.

Now that Swooni is finished she is about to begin another TV series - Clan, a dark comedy with a murderous theme - while thinking about her next feature projects. ‘There are always things you can learn,’ she says of returning to TV. ‘There are things you can do with the script or learn from being on set. I believe very much that, as a director, experience is very important. You can sit and wait for a brilliant script, but you should also be practicing.’  www.swooni.be

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Dominic Stas (l), Maya the Bee, Hans Bourlon (r)

From Samson to Goliath The Samson & Gert double act built from this modest beginning into a small empire. Next to their television show, the pair sang songs together, expanded from TV to stage shows, and crossed over into comic books and merchandising. ‘We had all these activities connected to a TV programme, and at a certain point the idea was to out-source them and bring all these activities under one company,’ explains Hans Bourlon, who worked behind the scenes on the show.

He, Verhulst and Danny Verbiest (the original voice of Samson) set up Studio 100 in 1996 to look after the Samson & Gert franchise. ‘We were lucky in that we could start the company with a contract with national TV, a contract that still exists after 15 years,’ says Bourlon, now joint managing director of Studio 100 with Verhulst.

Samson & Gert also established the model that the company would follow in developing new series. ‘Starting with a live-action TV show, mostly fiction, we try to make

nternational

Text Ian Mundell Portrait Bart Dewaele

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It began with a puppet called Samson, a shaggy dog who sat alongside Gert Verhulst while he introduced children’s programmes on Flemish public TV in 1989.

Now Studio 100 is the biggest children’s entertainment company in the Benelux, with ambitions to go much further.

songs with those characters,’ Bourlon explains. ‘Because they are living in a fictional environment, with other actors, then you have everything you need to make a stage or theatre show, books, movies, etc.’

In the years that followed, characters such as Plop the Gnome, Pirate Pete, Wizzy & Woppy, Mega Mindy and Big & Betsy joined the stable, targeting children of different ages.

Studio 100 also took on girl band K3, eventually building up a TV universe for the band.

big-screen Beginning with Plop the Gnome, characters also started to appear on the big screen. ‘Movies allow us to tell more stories and to open up the world of our characters,’ says Dominic Stas, who heads Studio 100 Benelux. ‘It’s very important in the total storytelling strategy.’

Made without any subsidies, these films are frequently among the highest earners at the local box office,

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38th Ghent International Film Festival (11-22 October 2011)

Submit

your film now!

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 More info (incl. festival regulations) on www.filmfestival.be Subscribe to our newsletter!

Ghent International Film Festival • 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 130,000 visitors • Instigator of the World Soundtrack Awards – 11th edition: 22 October 2011 • Sabam Award For Best Young European Composer: an annual competition for European film music composers aged 36 or less. The prize includes 2.500 euros and a live performance of the composition by the Brussels Philharmonic - the Orchestra of Flanders during the World Soundtrack Awards ceremony on 22 October.

www.filmfestival.be www.worldsoundtrackacademy.com

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

Studio 100 gets animated Maya the Bee, the vintage one Moving into animation meant a more dramatic change for the company.

‘It’s another way of working entirely. Budgets are also higher and it’s a more international activity.’ The acquisition of German company EM Entertainment in 2008 was an important step in this process, since it brought with it ownership of the Australian animation studio Flying Bark.

Alongside this, Studio 100 set up its second animation studio in Paris.

Maya the Bee, 3D style

Buying EM Entertainment was also important because it owned a catalogue of classic children’s characters such as Maya the Bee and Vicky the Viking, which Studio 100 is now reworking for a modern audience. ‘There are hundreds of millions of people who grew up with these characters, and this was the hidden value in this acquisition,’ says Bourlon.

Choosing Paris as the home for its new animation operation meant Studio 100 could tap into one of Europe's largest, richest cartoon industries. ‘We were able to hand-pick some of the best talents available,’ says Jan Van Rijsselberge, creative director of the studio. He’s a case in point, joining the company from major French studio Gaumont Alphanim.

The first task for Studio 100 Animation is to update three classic formats from the EM catalogue: Maya the Bee (a series of 78x13 minutes, plus a feature film), Vicky the Viking and Heidi (both 78x13 minutes). ‘These three shows are being developed in a fresh, crisp full 3D contemporary style,’ Van Rijsselberge says.

Care is required when updating such well-known characters. ‘You don’t want to be the one that messes up well loved brands, especially in an age where everyone has a trigger-happy finger on the keyboard ready to shoot you down in flames,’ he explains. ‘Secondly, modernising a character in a different technique, whilst maintaining instant recognisability, is no walk in the park. What works in 2D doesn’t automatically translate to CGI.’ Further down the line there are likely to be animated features, as well as an animated life for some Studio 100 regulars. The animation studio will also start creating original content for TV series, features and theme parks.

Vicky the Viking

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‘At the heart of our company are people who buy a ticket, who come to a show or a park. This is the driver of our turnover. It’s not the boss of a TV channel who makes that decision, it’s all about consumers’ – Hans Bourlon

Plop the Gnome

Theme park Plopsa Supersplash (Belgium)

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and become major events for each franchise. ‘There’s no entertainment form that has the same impact,’ says Stas.

‘If you have a movie, then you are really something special.

That adds something important to our characters.’

Another turning point came in 1999 when the company took over a theme park by the Belgian coast and populated it with Studio 100 characters. Since then the company has expanded to five theme parks in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

Bourlon counts this as one of the company’s most important activities, forming a direct link with the public. ‘At the heart of our company are people who buy a ticket, who come to a show or a park. This is the driver of our turnover. It’s not the boss of a TV channel who makes that decision, it’s all about consumers.’

Anubis Next, the company moved up the age range, producing TV series for the 9+ market. ‘It’s not easy because, in a very aspirational way, they watch programmes for adults, but we succeeded with teenage soaps and tele-novellas like

nternational Studio 100 visualised

Sales growth Studio 100 in million EUR

107,1

75,1

Studio 100 Benelux

79,1

75,1

50,3

5,6

52

33,5 17,9

33,5

Studio 100 Media

‘96 ‘00

‘02

‘03

Theater

Plopsaland De Panne

‘97

‘98

‘04

‘05

DVD-Audio- Publishing Multimedia Plopsa

Plopsa Coo

19,6

International TV sales

‘99 ‘06

‘00 ‘07

‘02 ‘08

‘03

‘04

‘05

‘06

‘07

‘08

Plopsa Indoor Hasselt

Studio 100 Media Junior TV

11,3

Studio 100 Animation ‘99

Movie

41,8

52

41,8

19,6

Plopsa theme parks

79,1

50,3

TV

theme parks

64,4 64,4

Studio 100 Benelux

107,1

132,4

0 in figures

‘98

House of Anubis Studio 100 visualised

132,4

Studio 100 in figures

udio 100 in million EUR

7,9

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Spring and House of Anubis,’ says Bourlon. Spring is set in a dance and music studio, while House of Anubis is about a group of teens living in a student house that contains a dark secret.

Even with these successes, the company realised in 2006 that if growth was to continue it would have to break out of the Dutch-speaking market. ‘First of all we wanted to use our know-how in live action to remake existing concepts,’ Bourlon explains, ‘and secondly we wanted to really go into the production of animation.’

Anubis was the target for remakes, first appearing in a German version and since 2011 in an English version for the USA and Nickelodeon worldwide. ‘It’s a series with a lot of international appeal, with some universal themes in it,’ Bourlon says, ‘but I think that you can only have this kind of success when you really localise programmes. It’s all about teenage language and how people behave, and for this target group this is often very cultural.’ 

Productions animation sequences

VOD-DTOInteractive

Studio 100 Animation

TV

Movie

MerchandisingLicences

Plopsaland De Panne

Theater

DVD-Audio- Multimedia

Digital media

Pub

Plopsa Coo

Plopsa Indo Hasselt

Junior TV

VOD-DTOInteractive

Plopsa Indoor Coevorden

International TV sales MerchandisingLicences

Productions animation sequences

Co-productions

Co-productions

‘09

‘09

Studio 100 comes to Germany In 2007, Studio 100 took its first step into the German market with the creation of Studio 100 Media in Munich. It’s this company that holds the rights to the former EM Entertainment catalogue. It’s a massive catalogue of kids’ programmes: 17,000 half-hours for German-speaking markets and 5-8,000 half hours of international material.

‘It’s a very heterogeneous catalogue, from pre-school to pre-teen, from live action to animation, from shorts to series and mini-series to feature films,’ explains Patrick Elmendorff, managing director of the company.

This catalogue is just the beginning. Studio 100 Media’s mission is to reproduce, as far as possible, the Benelux success of Studio 100 in German-speaking territories. The first series to come over was House of Anubis, remade with German actors in Studio 100’s Belgian studios. ‘We have just signed up for the third season and we intend to do a feature film which we will release either at the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012,’ says Elmendorff.

Great things are also expected from the new 3D animated versions of Maya the Bee, Vicky the Viking and Heidi, since the characters have huge local brand recognition.

As well as making Germany a new home territory for the group, Studio 100 Media plays an international role. ‘We take care of world-wide TV distribution, of the home entertainment side of the group and international strategy for games,’ says Elmendorff. ‘We also support strongly co-production and co-financing for animation.’ It brought German public broadcaster ZDF in as a co-producer for Maya and Vicky the Viking, and has pre-sold and co-financed the projects on an international scale with other partners.

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Epilogue

Beginning Death comes to all of us, but remains a taboo subject for many people. Three Flemish documentary filmmakers have ventured into this sensitive territory and emerged with striking films about the end of life. They discuss the challenges of documenting death.

Text Ian Mundell

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All three filmmakers had personal reasons for beginning their projects. ‘When I was very young I was scared of death,’ says Maris De Smedt, whose film Claire, Me and My Brother follows the last months of a teenage girl. ‘I would wake up worried about when I was going to die, and worry if my heart was still beating. I wanted to make a film about being confronted with death, so that perhaps I could live with another idea of it in the future.’

Similar anxieties motivated Nathalie Basteyns, whose film Still is about suicide. ‘As a child I always feared that

someone I loved would go away,’ she recalls. ‘Suicide was even worse, because I think it is a very lonely act.’

For Manno Lanssens the impetus came from seeing his grandmother’s difficult final year. ‘It was not a very nice way to die, so I asked myself: is there a good way to die? And that was the start of the project.’ His documentary Epilogue, which received its world première at Visions du Réel in Nyon (where it also received a Special Mention), follows a woman with terminal cancer as she spends her last months at home, surrounded by her family.

file i Still

at the End

Claire, Me and My Brother

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life-affirming attitude The first challenge for each filmmaker was to find someone facing death, or touched by it in the most traumatic way, who was willing to go in front of the camera. ‘I spent months and months without any result, despite having good contacts in support organisations,’ says Lanssens. ‘I met people who were ill and who wanted to participate, but then the family was very strongly opposed.’

Finally, working on a TV programme taking stock of Belgium’s euthanasia law, he met Neel Couwels and her family. Not only were they willing to take part, but they were facing Neel’s illness in a very positive way. ‘I didn’t want it to be morbid,’ says Lanssens. ‘I wanted to have life around this sick person, to have that contrast.’

A life-affirming attitude in the face of death was also what drew De Smedt to the Geudens family. The three children were non-identical triplets, with Claire and Michelle both struggling with severe cystic fibrosis, while Vincent was free of the disease. ‘I was intrigued by the optimism of the two girls and I felt I wanted to know them better,’ she says.

She read a newspaper interview in which the girls talked about turning 18 and looking forward to being 19, so she proposed a film that would follow them through that year, come what may. At this point Claire had already gone through two unsuccessful lung transplants and could not expect a third. ‘I knew that she might die during the making of the film, but not how fast.’

Maris De Smedt

Basteyns meanwhile was looking for the families of young people who had committed suicide. One came through a support organisation, another through her producer, Kaat Beels. One had lost a son, Freek, 10 years previously, the other a daughter, Eva, barely a year before. In some respects this difference in time can be seen in the film, but in others time seems to have stood still. Finally, she included Stefaan Maene, a former Olympic swimmer who had written about attempting suicide.

She was careful to tell the families that she didn’t want to discuss how their children had killed themselves. ‘When you read tabloid accounts of suicide it’s the first thing they say, but I didn’t want to do that. I even didn’t ask them about it.’

intimate view Setting limits in this way was even more important for the films made with dying people and their families. ‘Sometimes moments are really intimate,’ Lanssens says, ‘and I always told them: “You have the power. If you tell us to stop, I will stop the camera and there will be no discussion.” But that never happened.’

And while the idea was to document Neel’s death, the decision to film right up to her last breath was only taken as her illness advanced. ‘In the end it was almost a natural thing for me to be there, because we had been through it with them from the beginning. I didn’t feel like a voyeur.’

De Smedt also set out to film Claire throughout her illness.

Claire agreed, but on her own terms. ‘When she was really sick in the beginning she would ask us not to film her because she didn’t look good. She was really proud. She wanted to be beautiful for the camera.’ The decision to cut away when the final moment came was taken by the filmmaker herself.

‘If I’d wanted to film her last breath, I think Claire and the family would have said yes, but it was a taboo for me.’

Throughout the film she was careful not to sensationalise, choosing a discrete camera style. ‘I didn’t want to film her very close up in the hospital. I wanted to be a fly on the wall,’ she explains. Instead, a more intimate view is provided by Michelle’s video diary. ‘I knew she would be the one who would tell the story. I didn’t want to do it, and Claire couldn’t.’

Basteyns also drew on personal images, including video and photographs taken by Eva before she killed herself. There are also scenes that recall Maene’s career as a swimmer, but these contrast sharply with the stillness of the interviews. ‘I decided at the beginning that I didn’t want moving images.

Because everything in their lives has stopped, I wanted everything still.’

Lanssens found the visual side challenging, since everything had to be filmed in the family home. ‘I wanted an image that was very intimate. I wanted us to be part of this family. At the same time I didn’t want images that were too dark, so we have worked a bit on the colours.’

Unusually in documentary making, some of the subjects were invited into the editing room. ‘I said: “if there is something that you don’t want in it, say so and I’ll take it out”,’ Basteyns recalls. ‘They laid their lives open, and this is

Manno Lanssens

really a taboo, so I thought they needed to have the choice.’

In the end, there were no objections.

Lanssens also consulted Neel’s family, and found them concerned with small, practical details rather than the bigger issues. ‘They see it a completely different way, they are not just spectators. They have been through it.’

positive message Spending so long with death is not without its cost for the filmmakers. ‘I was able to cope with this situation for such a long time because I was making a film,’ Lanssens says. ‘It puts you in a position where you don’t focus on the dying but on the technical side of things.’ Even so, his cameraman couldn’t go through with shooting Neel’s final moments and a replacement had to be found.

De Smedt started out doing interviews, sound and camera work all on her own, but eventually brought in an assistant.

‘In the beginning it was OK, but after a while the theme became so heavy that I needed someone to talk to.’

But there was also a positive side to the experience. ‘It has made me more aware of death, but also of life,’ says Lanssens. De Smedt agrees. ‘Now I want to enjoy every minute of life. I don’t complain too much, because there isn’t time.’

Despite the sometimes dark subject matter, all three directors want their films to have a positive message. ‘At the beginning the film I wanted to make was about loss and grief, but it turns out to be a film about courage and surviving,’ says Basteyns.  www.flandersimage.com

Nathalie Basteyns

Contemporary Taboos Claire, Me and My Brother and Still are part of a collection of six documentaries about ‘contemporary taboos’. A collaboration between Flemish pubcaster VRT and the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), they deal with subjects such as obesity, giving away a child for adoption, and homosexuality among Muslim immigrants.

The other titles in this series are: - Off Spring by Dorothée van den Berghe and Arielle Sleutel - De kolonie by Filip Lenaerts - Silent Stories by Hanne Phlypo and Cathérine Vuylsteke - Through Thick and Thin by Marc Didden

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Making a splash Wannes Destoop grew up in a small town and is drawn to small-town stories. ‘I don’t want to tell stories about the problems of the world, but about the man in the street or a girl who has to fight to have new swimming goggles,’ he says. A girl just like Chantal, in fact, the main character in his short film Swimsuit 46, which is in Official Competition at Cannes this year.

TEXT IAN MUNDELL

Swimsuit 46

magical Part of the attraction of this story for Destoop was that it meant working with a young, untried actress. ‘It’s magical to work with someone like Janis,’ he says. ‘It was her first role in a film and I was really touched by the way she acted.

It was so realistic.’

Destoop’s guiding light as a director is the Mexican Carlos Reygadas, who made Silent Light and Battle in Heaven. ‘He said once in an article: “I don’t want my actors to act, I want them to be.” And I find that so true.’

Janis was not self-conscious about the role, which includes scenes in which she pulls at her own stomach while looking in a mirror, and a wardrobe of clinging clothes and swim suits. ‘We trusted one another very much, and I think that you can see that in the film,’ Destoop says.

Wannes Destoop

‘What the actors do in a film is even more important than what I do on set, so all the glory should go to them’

He laughs at the memory of seeing himself behind the monitor in the ‘making of’ film for Swimsuit 46. ‘I can really see on my face how much I was enjoying her acting!’

Alongside Janis he was able to cast experienced actors Wim Opbrouck and Johan Heldenbergh. ‘I’ve wanted to work with them for a long time,’ he says. ‘I adore the way that they act and give themselves to a role. It’s quite amazing.’ Another familiar face in the film is Kenneth Vanbaeden, who plays Chantal’s brother, but is better known as the young boy at the centre of Felix van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates.

shor t i ssimo

Swimsuit 46 is Destoop’s second short film to feature a girl who is having trouble fitting in because of her size. ‘I’m passionate about people who don’t fit society’s norms, and who have to find their own place,’ he explains.

His bachelor degree project at the KASK film school in Ghent in 2008 was We Are So Happy, in which large 16-year-old Claudine has to fight for the love of her best friend, whose affections appear to have settled on someone else. For Swimsuit 46 Destoop changed the focus slightly. ‘I really wanted to do something with a younger teenager, and to write something about how they find their place in society, how they develop, how they become an adult,’ he says.

He began with a story told on an internet forum, in which a teenage girl described how her mother had criticised her for being too fat during a shopping trip. ‘It touched me so much that I really wanted to do something with it,’ Destoop recalls, ‘so I re-wrote it and this scene was the starting point for the whole film.’

Twelve-year-old Chantal (Janis Vercaempst) has to go shopping for a new swimming costume with her mother after tearing the old one in a fight with her brother. But this means there is no money to spare for the goggles she needs for an imminent competition. Since Chantal takes her swimming very seriously, she has to find other ways to raise the money.

challenging People are already talking of Destoop as an actor’s director, which pleases him a great deal. ‘That’s the greatest compliment that I could have. What the actors do in a film is even more important than what I do on set, so all the glory should go to them.’

Even so he pulls off some technically challenging scenes in the film, such as a long shot of Chantal cycling through a rain storm and the underwater sequence that opens the film. ‘I’m a big fan of underwater images,’ Destoop explains. ‘You see Chantal diving, and it is so calm and quiet, then we really get into the film when the teacher blows his whistle. I really wanted to present her like this at the beginning of the film.’

For the future, Destoop would like to continue making films that explore the experience of young people, working with non-professional actors and developing stories from their own experiences. ‘My dream is to work with four or five teenagers, improvise with them, and act with them and write a story based on their own lives,’ he says.  www.badpakje46.be

Swimsuit 46

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The CASPER co-production scheme brings together animation talent from Flanders, Wallonia and NordPas-de-Calais. What better project for it to support than a cartoon about working together for the common good?

Text Ian Mundell

Portrait BART DEWAELE

The pilot that originated in Flanders is Bo’s Bazaar, which is set in the sleepy town Saint-Martins-by-the-Sea. Mayor Coldeheart wants to turn the town into a resort and get rich quick in the process, but nothing seems to go his way. This is because 12-year-old Bo has a magical artefact which lets her see the future. Knowing each of the mayor’s schemes, Bo and her friends can find ingenious ways to send him off course.

‘The message we want to deliver is that if you are doing good for your friends and fellow citizens, if you are doing good for your village, then you are doing good for the world,’ explains Viviane Vanfleteren of Vivi Film, which is producing the series.

The target audience is children between six and nine, an age when most will have lessons in active citizenship at school. The aim is to make them think about issues of solidarity and social diversity, and to have some fun at the same time.

The idea came from Jan Bultheel, the Flemish animator who made the series International Hareport, also co-produced by Vivi Film. He heard about the CASPER scheme and came to Vanfleteren with several ideas to submit for consideration. Bo’s Bazaar was the one they decided to run with.

CASPER is an initiative of three regional film funds – the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) and Wallimage in Belgium and CRAVV in France – which funds production of a pilot episode for three animated series involving partners from each region. Vanfleteren had already been approached by French studio Art’Fx, from Lille, to act as co-producer for its own submission to the scheme.

‘This was set in a Capuchin convent, I think, and when I saw the 3D backgrounds I thought they were amazing,’ she recalls. ‘So we decided to do a two-way co-production.’ The Art’Fx project wasn’t selected, but the company stayed on board to do the backgrounds for Bo.

Citizen Bo

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From Wallonia, Vanfleteren chose Nozon in Liège, with whom she has worked before. ‘They will do the character animation and modelling,’ she explains. ‘We’re doing it in 3D, but with a 2D look. We really want it to have a cartoony feel.’

Putting a new project into CASPER rather than one that was already underway has proved to be a challenge. ‘It’s a good initiative, because you get to meet other people, but the requirement to work across three regions makes it quite difficult to get everything organised at such an early stage,’

It’s a busy time for Vanfleteren, who has a live-action feature approaching completion and another in the blocks. The first is Quixote’s Island by Didier Volckaert, a retelling of Cervantes’ classic story in which a 16-year-old boy, San, runs away from school with the mysterious Quixote. The second is Weekend, by Ilse Somers, about four female friends who organise a reunion by the sea. ‘It’s a little bit Sex in the City in Ostend,’ says Vanfleteren.

But after these projects she intends to concentrate on animation. ‘It’s not that live action isn’t as satisfying as animation, but that it’s completely different,’ she explains. ‘And doing both at the same time is too difficult.’

This move will build on her success as a co-producer of award-winning features The Triplets of Belleville and Brendan and the Secret of Kells, which has brought a stream of new projects to her door. ‘I get a lot of people who ask me to produce them. That makes it easier, because you get a whole series of possibilities and you just have to pick the right ones.’

For example, there is a lot of demand for another Brendan film. ‘We are thinking now about making a sequel on the girl, Aisling, who was very popular. I think it would be quite nice to get her story.’

Another idea is Chess, about a pawn from a hand-carved chess set who leads an uprising against the computers that are taking over the game.

This is a project Vanfleteren has developed with Frank De Wulf, founder of Flemish effects house Grid. ‘It’s a producer’s film,’ she explains. ‘We are brainstorming it, working on the story line and then we want to attach graphical designers, character designers, screenwriters and a director. But we are going to supervise everything.’  www.vivifilm.be Sketches of Bo's Bazaar

magination

Triplets and Brendan

‘The message we want to deliver with Bo’s Bazaar is that if you are doing good for your friends and fellow citizens, if you are doing good for your village, then you are doing good for the world’

i

Vanfleteren says. Now they are racing to get the pilot ready for September’s CARTOON Forum.

CASPER'S CLASS OF 2010 The first three CASPER projects currently in development are:

Bo’s Bazar

by Jan Bultheel A co-production between Vivi Film (Flanders, BE) , Nozon (Wallonia, BE) and SAS Virtuo / Art’fx Studio (FR)

Toc Toc

by Xavier Steenman A co-production between Nexus Factory (Wallonia, BE), Creative Conspiracy (Flanders, BE) and Planet Nemo (FR)

Tuktulik

by Fabienne Giezendanner Produced by Studio Redfrog (FR), Araneo (Wallonia, BE) and Walking The Dog (Flanders, BE)

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The floating world of Hans Op de Beeck The artist Hans Op de Beeck works across all forms of media, combining painting and sculpture, photography and video. At the heart of his most recent work, Sea of Tranquillity, is a 30-minute film that takes us on a voyage into the night.

Text Ian Mundell

Sea of Tranquility, installation view (top photo) and video stills 1

nstallation i Room (1) 2 Sea of Tranquillity has its origins in 2008, when Op de Beeck spent a short time as artist in residence in the French town of Saint-Nazaire. Situated on the Atlantic coast, it has a long tradition of shipbuilding, most recently of massive ocean liners.

‘Initially I really didn’t have a clue what I’d find in Saint-Nazaire,’ he recalls. ‘My simple plan was to go over there and see what the surroundings could bring me. Pretty fast I found that the cruise liner construction activity would be something to work with, since it says so much about how we construct preconceived, artificial, safe and tamed spaces, for example shopping malls and gated communities. The cruise liner is an archetype of how we stage life nowadays.’

Hearing stories about the construction of the Queen Mary 2, which when completed in 2003 was the largest ocean liner in the world, he decided to design his own liner using the same empty parameters and categories: the highest, the largest, the longest.

‘Then I thought about how we sacralise and glorify local myths in museum settings, and I decided to create a museum evocation dedicated to my fictitious cruise liner "Sea of Tranquillity".’

When you walk into the installation, it’s as if you are visiting this museum at night, after the public and the attendants have all gone home. The centrepiece is a large model of the ship, its hundreds of windows lit up and mirrored in the dark glass that represents the sea. On the walls of the ‘museum’, picked out in the dark, are watercolours of the open sea, the night sky, and views of the ship. Also in the shadows are life-size sculptures of the ship’s captain and a chambermaid, both in uniform.

Meanwhile another large model shows a section of the dock where the ship would have been built, and the makeshift living quarters of the workers inside old shipping containers. This is the dark side of the construction of a luxury lifestyle.

‘When they constructed the Queen Mary 2, they needed 10,000 people for the job, so workers from Malaysia, India and elsewhere were imported to the city. But then, the workers were underpaid and housed in poor conditions. There were lots of strikes. It became a big social problem,’ Op de Beeck explains. ‘So it was not such a happy story, although it was sold as something memorable and prestigious.’

Hans Op de Beeck (°1969)*

3D environments

*Selected filmography video art

The idea of including a film in the piece follows from the museum concept. ‘Most museums dedicated to historical subjects, say a local history of WW I, include a screening room with a video projection of a kind of re-enactment that takes you into that time and place. In case of my ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ museum, the film takes you on board the ship.’

Beginning with the captain saying farewell to his wife, and the workers starting a night shift in the ship yard, the film takes us in a tour of life on the ‘Sea of Tranquillity’. The interiors are digitally generated 3D environments, which Op de Beeck has populated with members of the crew and the occasional passenger. The camera glides through

Sea of Tranquillity (2010) Staging Silence (2009) Extensions (2009) Celebration (2008) All together now… (2005) Loss (2004) My brother’s gardens (2003) Blender (2003) Border (2001) Situation (1) (2000) Coffee (1999) Insert Coin – for Love (1999) Determination (4) (1998)

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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.

The studios already 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 Nancy Kegelaers (nancy.kegelaers@euro-cam.com) for further information, a taylor-made offer or a visit. www.eurocamfilmstudios.be · Fabriekstraat 38 · 2547 LINT (Belgium) · studios@euro-cam.com · T +32 (0)3 454 20 10

Location (5), 2004, sculptural installation, mixed media, sound 3

these pristine but airless rooms and corridors, creating a feeling of luxury but also of profound unease.

‘The idea of using the cruise liner as the subject for the whole exhibition derives from the thought that nowadays we like to construct environments that are protected and safe,’ he explains. ‘There is nothing to worry about because everything is taken care of. It’s a model of high consumerism and leisure, like a floating shopping mall where everything is organised.’

This contrasts with our previous relationship with the sea. ‘Centuries ago, people boarded on these ships to explore the other side of the ocean. They took in the wind and the sand, and experienced the distance and the elements. Today, we just want to be taken care of and to relax once on board. I am not judging on this kind of behaviour, but it says how far we are removed now from the initial idea of travelling.’

clear form of fiction Op de Beeck has often made films in the past, but this is the first time he has placed actors within digitally generated 3D sets. ‘Previously I used this approach for a series of staged photographs, called ‘Room’ (2007-ongoing), and I made a digital animation film some years ago called The Building (2007). Those works showed me the possibilities of creating fictitious but credible and photo-realistic 3D environments, and the advantages of including characters in these environments.’

Cinematic themes and archetypes appear frequently in his work. ‘I adore all kinds of filmmakers, from Hitchcock to, say, the Coen brothers. These are good examples of filmmakers that reach a large audience with uncompromised artistic filmmaking,’ he says.

‘Cinema is a clear form of fiction: there’s no denial that it’s a construction, and when you allow yourself to surrender to this illusion, it becomes an authentic experience.

That’s what I like about the cinematic: it’s staged, it’s fake, but it can become authentic and touch the emotions.’

The film Sea of Tranquillity, which was co-funded by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), will appear on its own as well as with the whole installation. ‘It finally became both an autonomous art film and a part of my travelling museum exhibition – which includes sculptures, paintings and scenery – where it has another layer within that context,’ Op de Beeck explains.

The next stop for the exhibition is the Kunstmuseum Thun, in Thun, Switzerland (until 4 September 2011). As an autonomous piece, the film will be part of Art Unlimited during Art Basel in Switzerland (June 2011) then Prospect.2, the International Biennal of Contemporary Art in New Orleans (Fall 2011). 

Staging Silence 4

‘Cinema is a clear form of fiction: there’s no denial that it’s a construction, and when you allow yourself to surrender to this illusion, it becomes an authentic experience. That’s what I like about the cinematic: it’s staged, it’s fake, but it can become authentic and touch the emotions’

www.hansopdebeeck.com 1 Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam Coproduced by the National Centre for Visual Arts - Ministry of Culture and Communication (F), the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (B), Emmanuelle and Michael Guttman and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains 2 , 4 ©Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam 3 © Courtesy Towada Art Centre (JP) and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

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© Kris Dewitte

Under the Influence

Bavo Defurne Bavo Defurne (centre)

As a young filmmaker, Bavo Defurne went direct to the source for his inspiration, working on films by Peter Greenaway and Matthias Müller. Partly it was their work, partly their attitude that inspired him.

Text Ian Mundell

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After wavering between fashion and film, Defurne finally decided to study moving images at Sint-Lukas academy in Brussels in the early 1990s. His interests were distinctly experimental, and he was drawn to figures such as the German filmmaker Matthias Müller, whose work at the time involved found footage and deconstructing Hollywood classics.

‘I was fascinated by his films when I was a student, so I wrote him a letter, met him and worked on two of his films, partly as set decorator, partly assistant director,’ Defurne recalls. ‘I learned a lot and I really adore his work, but it’s very particular.

It’s not narrative, it’s not linear at all.’

Carl Theodor Dreyer The short films he made throughout the 1990s drew on his video art training, but also inspirations such as the photographer Herbert List, who from the 1930s on made very poetic, aestheticised black and white images of people. He was also inspired by Carl Theodor Dreyer. ‘Not only The Passion of Joan of Arc but also Vampyr,’ he explains. ‘That is one of my favourite movies. I can’t pin-down why, and maybe that is why it is so interesting. It is such a weird story and such a nonlinear film. It’s something that keeps you thinking.’

Defurne’s feature debut, Northsea, Texas, seems to be something of a break with his short films. This story of a love-struck adolescent boy growing up on the Flemish coast at an unspecified time in the 1960s is far less stylised than his earlier work. ‘Maybe the short films were much more about the visual concept and about doing something with images, and less about telling a story and touching people emotionally,’ Defurne reflects, although he is quick to defend the innovations in Northsea, Texas.

‘The film is less experimental, but it’s not un-experimental either. It’s a linear story, but it takes its time to go into the world of a teenager and into his dreams, and into the relaxed world of a long summer. It also has the bumpy rhythm of being in love and then not being in love any more.’

These are some of the works Bavo Defurne currently gets inspired by:

nfluence

inspirational

i

Defurne also managed to talk his way into a job on the set of Greenaway’s 1993 film The Baby of Mâcon. ‘My films are completely unlike those of Peter Greenaway, but he inspired me, especially at the beginning of my career, because he did something so different from anyone else, telling stories in a way only he could.’

It’s this individual voice that Defurne set out to find in his own work. ‘There are filmmakers who see a film in the cinema and say: “Oh that’s cool, I want to make a film like that!” But I make films because I have not seen a film like that, yet. Or I’ve seen parts of it, but the combination of the visuals and the story and the way it is told has never been done before.’

BOOK Finistere

by Fritz Peters

Film A Single Man

by Tom Ford The Skirt

Terence Malick Some of Defurne’s old influences also come into play, such as Dreyer’s Ordet.

‘Just thinking of it now makes me realise that there are things in Northsea, Texas that remind me of that film. All those silences and the unsaid things in the family, the very reduced emotions.’

When preparing for the film, Defurne and cinematographer Anton Mertens looked at the work of photographer Will McBride. ‘What inspired me there was how he works photographing the body and sunlight, and the beauty of natural things.’

Similar qualities draw him to Terrence Malick. ‘He also has these slow rhythms that you can really dive into. It overwhelms you. There is dialogue in his films that haunts me, and the way he works with music and with natural light is very important to me.’ He cites Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line as particular favourites.

Cinematographer Néstor Almendros, who shot Days of Heaven, provides a link to one of Defurne’s earliest inspirations, the film Kramer vs. Kramer. ‘It’s very beautiful because it’s very reduced, very un-pretentious. It just tells the story of people, with good actors and very beautiful moments,’ he says. ‘I saw that film when I was eight, but maybe it’s only 30 years later that I realised how beautiful it was, or what I could do with it in my own film making.’  www.bavo.org

Classical Music Arvo Part

Contemporary Music Stars of the Lid

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cons From Berverly Hills to Nyon, over Rotterdam, Berlin and Beaune…

Here are just a few snaphots of flemish filmmakers and stars attending the finest of film fests around the globe.

Glerum

ions du ar’s Vis e y is h T ked the on ma r y N in l Manno Ré e ière of m re p m ld wor ue. Fro ’ Epilog s n n e e ll s E s er L an produc t: h el ig é r R left to s du , Vision le o e n a ia w De r Lu c directo c o ti n s n ti r a a e a nd M s. n Barison e s L a ns

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Critic, actor and theatre director JeanChristophe Berjon became artistic director of Cannes’ International Critics’ Week in 2004. This year’s edition, which marks the 50th anniversary of the event, will be his final one in charge. Among the Flemish films programmed in critics’ week during his time at the helm have been Christophe Van Rompaey’s Moscow, Belgium, Brosens & Woodworth’s Altiplano and Caroline Strubbe’s Lost Persons Area.

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Jean-Christophe Berjon I think we have our own position in Cannes. The Critics’ Week is not weak or strong… it’s different. The mission we have is to present first and second feature films. In the past, in Critics’ Week, future winners of the Palme D’Or and future Jury Presidents have had their work shown. We know that in Critics’ Week, we are going to see something we don’t know anything about but that could be very interesting.

What Critics’ Week tries to do is to show the future cinema in the present. We want to present now the directors of tomorrow – and not just the directors of tomorrow but the cinema of tomorrow. We want to find the new countries and to find the new directors.

I’ve always been able to speak very easily with the heads of the other sections in Cannes: Olivier Père and then Frédéric Boyer at the Quinzaine and Thierry Frémaux for the Official Selection. We don’t work as in Berlin where they decide more or less together where a movie can be shown. So, of course, there is a sort of competition. With three or four movies each year, the Critics’ Week and the Quinzaine are both wanting to have them. For example, last year, with Little Baby Jesus of Flandr by Gust Van den Berghe, we spoke about the film.

It was in our short list. When we knew the Quinzaine would show it, we let them have the movie without trying to rob it!

The Critics’ Week is about helping young directors. Take an example from Flanders - when we selected Moscow, Belgium.

This was not a particular Cannes movie type. It’s a popular narrative with love and a social point of view. We were pleased to present it.

There are a lot of new things coming from Flanders. It is interesting for us not just to show a director and a movie but to show a new professional family. With Moscow, Belgium, we saw a very enjoyable movie with a great sensibility. We could feel the talent of the director. As more or less the first expression of this new professional family, we thought it was very important to invite this movie. Before you’ve even seen one minute of this movie, you can have an idea why it is here.

How would I characterize Flemish cinema? The first thing is

that it is very creative and very dynamic. That is interesting. It is the confirmation that there is a new family of cinema here.

It’s the same thing as in Mexico or in South Korea. It is not a big volume of production but it is incredible, the talent. I can feel a very professional context. It’s a young and small industry but an ambitious and serious one. These are films that want to touch the audience. That’s why we are so interested in Flemish cinema. Most of the directors are very, very young. And I think that the actors are really good. There was Barbara Sarafian (in Moscow, Belgium) and Sam Louwyck (in Lost Persons Area). I saw Louwyck in Bullhead. He has such a singular face. In Lost Person’s Area, he has a look of such profound pain… and it’s exactly the opposite in Bullhead. Of course, Jan Decleir is a very important icon of this region but the younger actors are more reflective of this new generation of directors.

For each region in the world, we have a different way to approach and choose movies. In the office of Critics’ Week, we have two or three people who are in permanent investigation of where there might be something interesting. We are always in touch with the national institutes in each country. And we try to have a national critic in the country who tells us what is going on or we have someone who sees everything and meets people. In the case of Flanders, we delegated this to Paris-based critic Alex Masson, who immediately told us that it was incredible what was going on in Flemish Belgium. This wasn’t just a superficial analysis but he had names and titles of future projects. So there was a sensation of something that was coming up in Flanders – and we had to go with it! Alex went to Flanders regularly. He met a lot of directors. And we also saw a lot of films in Paris.

This will be my seventh Critics’ Week – and the last one! I am leaving for special reasons… my wife is Mexican and I want to be in Mexico. Seven years is like a small life. It has been a magnificent experience but I have to leave it for someone else.  as told to Geoffrey Macnab www.semainedelacritique.com

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