#18 - Autumn 2010

flanders #18 | Autumn 2010 | e 3.99

Wine takes it

all!

Wine Dierickx I Koen Mortier | Hans Van Nuffel | Kadir Balci | Alex Stockman | LenNy Van Wesemael | MICHAËL R. ROSKAM | nWave | Plankton Invasion | Stefaan Contreras I www.flandersimage.com

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i nside Cover: Wine Dierickx As seen through the lens of Bart Dewaele

04 i-OPENER

A widescreen impression of Sophie Schoukens’ feature film debut Marieke Marieke

07 i-CATCHER

Nicolas Provost’s Stardust has been selected for this year’s revamped Orizzonti programme at Venice

08 IN FOCUS

Actress Wine Dierickx sparkles in Hilde Van Mieghem’s intelligent and quirky Madly In Love, a fast, frank romantic comedy with lots to say about human relationships

12 INTERVIEW

Hans Van Nuffel’s feature debut Oxygen, which has been selected for competition in Montreal, is a hospital drama with a difference

16 INTERVIEW

Koen Mortier’s TIFF-selected 22nd of May is a striking and thought-provoking response to the times we live in

20 IMAGINATION

Joeri Christiaen is a man with a mission. He wants to show that drawing what he calls ‘stupid characters’ can actually help save the plane

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Producer Bart Van Langendonck exclusively works with directors who have a strong vision – people such as Michaël R. Roskam, Fleur Boonman, Frank Theys, Mike Figgis and Peter Greenaway

28 INNOVATION

nWave’s Dirk De Loose and Carlo Giesa take you inside the Brussels toon factory responsible for such 3D titles as Fly Me To The Moon and the new Sammy’s Adventures – The Secret Passage

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24 IDENTIKIT

32 INTERNATIONALS

LA-based Stefaan Contreras has been instrumental in creating some of the eye-popping sights we’ve seen in recent blockbusters such as Alice In Wonderland, I Am Legend and Beowulf

36 INTERVIEW

Kadir Balci has been biding his time, waiting till he felt ready to direct his first feature Turquaze because, for him, filmmaking is about more than just technique

40 INTERVIEW

Alex Stockman’s second feature, Pulsar, received its world premiere screening in Locarno this year. It’s a film about life, paranoia and radio waves

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44 I-SHORT

Is it a coincidence that Lenny Van Wesemael’s shorts are full of dancing?

We asked her, just after she’d completed her latest, Dancing With Travolta

46 INFLUENCE

Who are the people Michaël R. Roskam was influenced by?

48 I-CONS

Hot Docs, Cannes… Just a few places where you may have seen our filmmakers shine

50 I-FANS

Karin Beyens of Paris-based Diaphana talks about two of her favourite films from Flanders

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-opener i

Marieke

Marieke

In her San Sebastian selected Marieke Marieke, first-time director Sophie Schoukens portrays a 20-yearold woman who wants to live her own life. The question is how this can be achieved when love has been taken away from her. She seeks refuge in the arms of much older men. With them she feels strong, cherished and free. It allows her to find the strength necessary to face the past and to finally achieve her goal. Starring Hande Kodja, Jan Decleir and Barbara Sarafian, Marieke Marieke is lensed by Alain Marcoen, who was also responsible for the photography in the Dardenne brothers’ Palme d’Or winners Rosetta and L’Enfant (The Child). Schoukens also wrote the screenplay, while the Flemish producer is Jan Roekens for Sophimages. 

www.mariekemarieke.be

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YOUR IDEAS

OUR KNOWHOW K

S p e c i a l i s e d i n R E D w o r k f l o w s , 3 d a n i m at i o n & s t e r e o s c o p i c 3 d

a c e

d i g i ta l

h o u s e

Schiphollaan 2 1140 Brussels phone: +32 2 735 60 20 info@ace-postproduction.com w w w . a c e - p o s t p r o d u c t i o n . c o m

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Stardust

Following this year’s Berlinale, where his short, Long Live the New Flesh, premiered in competition, Nicolas Provost will be back on the Lido, where he is to present his latest short, Stardust. The film is part of the entirely revamped Orizzonti section at Venice’s Biennale, where it also will be shown in competition.

Stardust is the second part of Provost's trilogy investigating the boundaries of fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden high resolution camera and using language to turn cinematic images into a fiction film.

After shooting everyday life around New York’s Times Square in 2007's brilliant Plot Point, Provost this time took his hidden camera to Las Vegas, where he uses the glorious and ambiguous power of the gambling capital to stage an exciting crime story using real Hollywood stars like Jon Voight, and the late Dennis Hopper.

The third part of the trilogy – currently in post-production – is set in Tokyo and follows the dark journey of a fictitious serial killer interacting with real people.  www.nicolasprovost.com

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

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Mad

With filming finished and the final touches being put to Hilde Van Mieghem's Madly in Love, leading actress Wine Dierickx is impatient to know how the film will be received. 'I think the film will have a big audience,' she says, 'but I'm curious to see if it will be a women's film or if men are also going to like it. That's my big question.'

By Ian Mundell

Š Bart Dewaele

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Wine Dierickx is not the only one wondering how Madly in Love will go down with the public, since it’s not the kind of movie that the Flemish film industry produces every day. It’s a fast, frank romantic comedy, with lots to say about human relationships. It’s intelligent and quirky - think Woody Allen, think Federico Fellini.

Set in Antwerp, the film focuses on the four women of the Miller family. There’s 14-year-old Eva, who is carefully planning her first romantic experience, and her 23-year-old half-sister Michelle, who is too busy working to think of love.

Eva’s mother, Judith, is still looking for amorous adventures, while her aunt Barbara is settling down. Unfolding over four seasons, their stories reflect on women and men, commitment and passion, family and freedom.

Dierickx plays Barbara, a school teacher in her thirties with a steady boyfriend (Kevin Janssens) who dreams of buying a house and having a child.

But then she falls for a new colleague at school (Koen De Graeve), and her plans are turned upside down by this unexpected passion.

Hilde Van Mieghem The moment she saw the script, Dierickx felt attracted by the role. ‘I’m 32 now, so when I read it I could see myself in it a little bit. It’s not that I’m so desperate to have children or a house

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Wine

i

about

Madly In Love

– I don’t like to have such a strict life – but in a way I can also feel these feelings, that you can fall in love and the conflict between passion and what you want to do in life.’ Being able to identify with the role is a key part of her working method. ‘It’s really important to me to be able to understand the character.

Sometimes that takes more time, and I have to read a scenario over and over, but sometimes I immediately think, yes, I really understand this.’ Both paths

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Madly In Love

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can be satisfying from an acting point of view. ‘It’s also very interesting that, sometimes, you have to search for a connection,’ she explains.

This quick identification with Barbara made preparation for the film relatively straightforward, since Van Mieghem was very focused, calling only for cast readings and a little rehearsal on set.

‘She really knows what she wants,’ Dierickx recalls, ‘and she is quite explosive on set. But I like that. She doesn’t push you, but gives you really strong direction. I prepared the role before, but I was also aware that she could say: “No! You have to go this way or that way.” But I trust her a lot.’

This shows in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, when Barbara is caught off-guard by her partner when she is with her lover. It calls for Dierickx to make a transition from the heights of passion to the depths of despair in

one take. ‘Emotionally it’s quite a heavy scene to play, and I was quite nervous about it,’ she remembers. ‘I felt I could just go for it, but then it could also develop in the wrong direction. But Hilde created an atmosphere which told me she really wanted me to go for it: do it, and if it’s wrong, it’s OK.’ Dierickx thinks that Van Mieghem’s sympathy for the performer comes from her own experience in front of the camera, where she has around 30 feature films to her name. ‘Being an actress makes her the director she is. When she is directing she is really in the performance, almost in your body. She comes and takes you and moves you. She’s very physical. But for this role that was really good, it helped me to enter into this world of Hilde!’

While Van Mieghem has acted extensively in film and TV, Dierickx has more of a theatre background. She trained at the Maastricht theatre academy in the Netherlands, an unusual choice for a Flemish actress but one that provided the rigorous approach to acting she was seeking. At the end of her studies, she and fellow students set up a theatre collective which now goes by the name of Wunderbaum. First working with the Hollandia theatre group in Eindhoven under Johan Simons, they moved with him to the Dutch Theatre in Ghent (NTGent) in 2005 and, since 2008, have also worked independently in Rotterdam.

‘Theatre was my base, what I really wanted to do, and then sometimes there were little film roles in the summer or when I had time or liked the scenario,’ Dierickx says. ‘But now I really like film. It’s another medium, another way of working and I think that it’s a very interesting thing to do alongside the theatre.’

With Friends Like These

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Her first film roles were small parts in the Flemish films Any Way the Wind Blows by Tom Barman and Steve + Sky by Felix van Groeningen. A more substantial role came in Wunderbaum’s own film, Maybe Sweden, about five young people holidaying on a Mediterranean island whose obsessive reading is disturbed by the arrival of a boatload of African migrants, heading north.

But it was van Groeningen who gave Dierickx her first substantial leading role, casting her in his second film, With Friends Like These. She plays Dark Kelly, a young woman returning to a small town in Flanders and unfinished business among a group of friends.

Also with a background in theatre, van Groeningen’s working methods on this film were rather different from those she has just experienced on Madly in Love. ‘He rehearses a lot with his actors, reading and doing a lot of improvisation, and we changed the script, so we were really in it together,’ she says. ‘It’s really special. I don’t think that there are many directors who work in this way.’

After With Friends Like These she had supporting roles in Flemish blockbuster Loft and Storm, a film about a Bosnian war crimes trial in The Hague made

by German director Hans Christian Schmid. ‘It’s a small role, but it was a nice experience to be on a German set, and to work with Kerry Fox and Anamaria Marinca, who was in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.’

In the future Dierickx wants to continue balancing film and theatre, both with Wunderbaum and other theatre groups. TV is a possibility, although up until now she has not found the right project. Her next Wunderbaum production will be ‘Natives’, which will be performed in a Rotterdam apartment block whose front will be removed to create six miniature stages, one from each flat. The audience will watch from the street. ‘It’s mainly images and music, and very physical,’ Dierickx explains. ‘We always try to find another form, and always something important in society. We think that it’s important to communicate about themes that are very current. We almost never do a love story. Madly in Love is quite different in this way.’ In the autumn she will start her next feature film project, Madonna’s Pig, directed by Frank Van Passel.

The plot defies description, involving elements such as a computerised device for artificially inseminating pigs, dead World War I soldiers and a Flemish village threatened by plans to build a new road. ‘It’s a surreal story about love,’ she explains, ‘but not just how men and women love but also love of a place and the planet we live on.’ 

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Felix van Groeningen

Wine Dierickx (°1978)* (2010) – Madly in Love (2009) – Storm (2008) – Loft (2008) – Julie, Dear (short) (2007) – With Friends Like These (2006) – Maybe Sweden (2005) – De twijfelaar (short) (2004) – Steve + Sky (2004) – Au cigogne (TV) (2003) – Any Way the Wind Blows * selected filmography

watch the trailer on the Flanders Image channel www.wunderbaum.nl

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Coming up

© Bart Dewaele

for air

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Hans Van Nuffel’s debut feature Oxygen is a hospital drama with a difference. Don’t expect a terminal illness melodrama with wailing violins. The film, whose protagonist is a teenager suffering from cystic fibrosis, has a spikiness, lyricism and irony not often found in films set on the wards. It is to receive its world première at this year’s Montreal World Film Festival. By Ian Mundell Oxygen

‘Chronic patients often have a really weird sense of humour and a desperate optimism,’ the director reflects on the tone of the film. The goofing around, boyish jokes and recklessness of Tom (Stef Aerts) and his fellow patients is their ‘defence mechanism’ in the face of their own potentially fatal illnesses. Van Nuffel knows the hospital subculture inside out. As a cystic fibrosis sufferer himself, the 28-year-old filmmaker has seen the inside of wards and operating theatres. ‘I have a mild form which is why I am able to make films at this age,’ he reflects. ‘The autobiographical part of Oxygen is undeniable. A lot of my experiences have found some way into the script.’

nter view Hans Van Nuffel (°1981) 2005 – The End of the Ride

(Het einde van de rit, short) 2007 – FAL (short) 2010 – Nighthawks (short) 2010 – Oxygen Oxygen

In the film, the director is raising questions that he has asked about his own experiences. ‘What is the meaning of life, my life? How do you make the most of the short time you have? Those are questions I asked myself a lot when I was growing up. I think this film is a way to express these thoughts.’

Darth Vader As he points out, hospitals exist in their own surreal universe. Leuven Hospital, for example, has 8,000 people working there and 2,000 patients. It’s like a mini city-state with its own pool, its own chapel and its own restaurants. The institution exists to save lives... and to make money.

‘It’s like an animal that has to feed itself and you, as a patient, are part of its digestive system and you get slooshed through it!’

The spectre of death is never far away but the hospital authorities do their best to keep it out of sight. ‘They never want you to see dead people so they transport corpses through a corridor that is not meant for the public.’

Certain scenes in Oxygen, for example Tom dressing up in mask and medical suit to visit the girl he is courting in an isolated room, look like something out of a science fiction film. ‘It’s like Star Wars!’ Van Nuffel jokes of the hospital workers in their white costumes and the doctors who begin to seem to many of the patients like clones. All the rooms are furnished the same. This may be a contemporary drama but the director was thinking about sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell when he decided to portray hospital life. In sci-fi movies, there are often characters who yearn to be immortal. In Oxygen, this is a desire that the patients share. For some, the only chance of prolonging their lives is having a lung transplant. ‘It’s like Darth Vader who is horribly disfigured and later gets this whole life support system... Darth Vader also has to give up a lot. He stops being human in a way. For the patients,

if they have a lung transplant, which is their only option out, they don’t just gain something.

They lose a lot as well. They’ll have to take a lot of medication and a lot of tests. It’s not a solution. It’s just a stopgap.’

vampires Another frame of reference is movies about the undead. Van Nuffel’s recent short Nighthawks was a vampire movie. In Oxygen, we briefly hear the characters discussing vampire films.

Van Nuffel believes there are obvious parallels between hospital patients and vampires. ‘They are unnatural beings. They shouldn’t be there.

Most of my work has something to do with life and death. Both vampires and the characters in this movie are fighting for their own survival.

They need something that makes them vulnerable. To become a vampire, you have to give up light. You will live forever but you have to give up so much too.’

The characters in Oxygen have a feverish intensity about them. They know they are unlikely to have long lives and so they are trying to seize the moment. With vampires, the opposite applies. Their fate is to live forever.

‘They have all the time in the world and nothing

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Oxygen

left to do.’ Van Nuffel co-wrote the screenplay for Oxygen with Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem, the writer and producer behind Christophe van Rompaey’s 2008 hit, Moscow, Belgium.

‘Jean-Claude is a true romantic!’ Van Nuffel says of his co-writer. As originally conceived, the project had a dark and morbid streak. Van Rijckeghem, helped foreground the lighter elements, especially the love story. ‘He has a sense of what people want to see. I want to take them to where they don’t want to go. This combination is interesting,’ Van Nuffel says of his partnership with van Rijckeghem, whose company A Private View produced the film.

research Van Nuffel chose Stef Aerts to play Tom because Aerts had a restless energy and rebelliousness that fitted the role perfectly. ‘I really wanted somebody who had this mindset. He has this ‘I don’t really belong here’ feeling - a suave, cool feeling that a lot of method actors have. The coolness with the character of Tom is a defence mechanism. The thing with Stef is that you can always see behind the facade. He can tell you one thing but you know he is thinking of something else.’ Tom, as played

by Aerts, reflects elements of Van Nuffel when he was young. Other characters also carry traces of their creator, for example the reckless Jimmy (Rik Verheye), desperate to squeeze as much out of

Van Nuffel is a filmmaker in a hurry. ‘I think I am very ambitious. Some people hold it against me and wonder why I am so relentless,’ he says. Given his own medical condition, he doesn’t like to waste time. ‘That’s the natural way to do things. For me, it’s the only way. After this film, I might make two or three more if it all goes well but I won’t be around when I am 50, making films.

I don’t think so.’

Filmmaking is stressful and exhausting. ‘That’s also the high!’ Van Nuffel says.

Like the character who goes diving even though he knows it is dangerous for him, he gets a huge adrenaline rush from making films. ‘It’s maybe a bit of a Belgian mindset not to be too ambitious and I hate that. People should make the most out of their lives.’ His goal is always to make the best movie he can.

Yes, he can be moody on set. ‘I know what I want and I think crews like this. I don’t often just send them into limbo... but I don’t think I am a tyrant. I am not a shouter. I let my first assistant shout for me. When people are committed, you don’t need to shout a lot because you know that everybody is doing their best!’ Ironically, when he is on a film set, Van Nuffel is calmer than he is ‘in real life'. He relishes the opportunity of being able to express himself through cinema. ‘Every day on set is a good day. It’s the best feeling you can have.

Sure it’s hard sometimes and there can be things you don’t want to do.’

During the shooting of Oxygen, everybody in the cast and crew was – as Van Nuffel puts it – inside the story'. Technicians would ask him questions about the characters’ motivations. His storytelling style was deliberately restrained. He went to great lengths to keep mawkishness at bay. ‘It’s a very emotional story.

It’s obviously about something very close to me but it’s almost unbearable to milk it and abuse it...’ 

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emotional story

‘I know what I want and I think crews like this. I don’t often just send them into limbo... but I don’t think I am a tyrant. I am not a shouter. When people are committed, you don’t need to shout a lot because you know that everybody is doing their best!’

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life as possible. ‘When I write a character, there are always parts of me in it,’ Van Nuffel declares. ‘The only way to make work that is truthful or meaningful is to let people inside of you.’ Oxygen was one project that he did not need to research. ‘My whole life has been the research!’ His knowledge meant that he was able to push the film into production in double quick time. Oxygen went from a first draft to fully polished shooting script in a matter of months.

Nighthawks

Watch the trailer on the Flanders Image channel www.oxygenthemovie.com

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Koen Mortier’s Ex Drummer (2007) is already acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking Flemish films in recent years. Like it or loathe it, Mortier’s freewheeling, in-your-face adaptation of the novel by Herman Brusselmans, the bad boy of Flemish literature, was a shot in the arm for the local film scene. Younger Flemish filmmakers looked to Mortier as an example of a filmmaker ready to use shock tactics to provoke and entertain audiences. Now he’s back with his new film, 22nd of May, which is to receive

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its world première at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. By Geoffrey Macnab

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KOEN and

THE BANG

22nd of May

22nd of May is about a security guard (Sam Louwyck) in a shopping mall who fails to stop a suicide bomber from wreaking havoc. The film ends with a spectacular slow motion explosion.

How did Mortier stage his big bang? ‘I wanted to finish the film with a happy ending. Of course, with this kind of film, it is very difficult to have something happy about explosions... So I thought why not make something really beautiful.’

In Hollywood movies, Mortier noted, explosions are always fiery affairs with flames leaping into the sky. The reality, though, is that when a bomb goes off, there are trails of smoke and the air is clogged with dust.

When he was working on a commercial in Argentina, Mortier had a chance to experiment on a screen explosion. He knew that he wanted the explosion in 22nd of May to be poetic. ‘I wanted something that looked like dancing or the freeze frame of a painting,’ the director recalls.

guilt and redemption Mortier tested with slow motion cameras that filmed at 3000 frames a second. He met special effects experts who could help him control the dust. One trick was to paint pieces of cork black and to fill them with dust. He also experimented with shattered glass and transparent plastic.

The explosion in 22nd of May is seen in two forms: first as a hardcore blast lasting for a few

titeltiteltitel seconds and leaving utter destruction in its wake and then in far more stylised and lyrical fashion at the end of the film. One challenge was to co-ordinate the actors’ reactions in a scene in which hundredths of a second made a difference.

The new film has been gestating for a long time. Mortier started writing it before Ex Drummer and sees the two films as companion pieces. They have many of the same actors and were made by the same crew. ‘Everybody who sees the new film and has seen Ex Drummer says it is made by the same director... it’s again a kind of trip. You step in it or you don’t.’

Mortier describes the film as being about ‘guilt and redemption’. He was keen to take the point of view of the victims of a terrorist atrocity. Often, he points out, when there is a bomb blast, the media will report on the numbers of deaths without giving their names.

The director was intensely curious about the feelings of a bystander, like the security guard, who fails to intervene and thereby shares some of the guilt for the carnage that ensues.

wildly ambitious Mortier was fascinated by the part that coincidence plays in being caught up in an event like the bombing of a shopping mall.

‘You drive your car and somebody crashes into it and you are dead,’ he muses. ‘If you had started one tenth of a second earlier, you wouldn’t be dead. If you started one tenth of a second later, you wouldn’t be dead either.’

Mortier was also intensely curious about memory. Different characters recall the circumstances of an accident in very different ways.

When he wrote his first treatment, Mortier already had actors in mind. Sam Louwyck, whom he had known since film school days, was his first choice as the security guard. ‘I wanted to work with the same team. I trust them and they trust me... I knew it was not going to be easy and I needed people who wanted to support me and go along with me for a very long time.’

22nd of May is wildly ambitious in scope even if it was made for a relatively modest e1.8 million on a shooting schedule of only 28 days. ‘We have to keep it small because we can’t

‘I wanted to finish the film with a happy ending. Of course, with this kind of film, it is very difficult to have something happy about explosions...

So I thought why not make something really beautiful’

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22nd of May

find the big money,’ the director expresses a frustration shared by many other Flemish filmmakers.

Ex Drummer had shown at many festivals and had sold well in the international market. Even so, 22nd of May proved a tough sell when Mortier took the project to CineMart, the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s co-production market.

‘There were some people interested but because it was an experimental project, they wanted to see it,’ Mortier recalls. ‘But the international community is not waiting for a Flemish film.’

from Czar to CCCP As is well chronicled, Mortier juggles several different careers. Alongside his features, he is also a leading commercials and pop promos director. And, no, it is not always easy skipping from one to the other. ‘My commercials are not that good for the moment because I am too much into my films...’ In the past, Mortier would battle to make what he calls ‘the perfect commercial.’ Now, his attitude has changed. ‘Maybe I am less obsessed about commercials... I’ll make the best thing possible but I am not going to war for it again.’

At the same time that he has been working on commercials and finishing his second film, Mortier has become increasingly involved in the day to day running of Czar, one of Belgium’s biggest commercials producers. When the business manager left Czar abruptly, Mortier stepped into the breach. ‘That was pretty difficult. I am not at all a business person. It was really weird because I was business leader of the company and at the same time, I had to shoot a feature film. That was a really strange combination.’

To add to his responsibilities, Mortier is heavily involved with CCCP, the film production outfit behind Ex Drummer and 22nd of May which also is to produce The Wasteland, the next film from Pieter Van Hees. Meanwhile, he is a family man too, with several young children. ‘I like to combine a lot of things together,’ he says stoically. ‘I am pretty busy.’

the big step Ask Mortier, who is in his mid-40s, if he feels he is at a vanguard of a new wave in Flemish cinema – as some critics now claim – and he parries the question.

‘That’s a difficult question,’ he sighs. ‘People need or want to be different but it’s pretty difficult to be different.’ However, he agrees that there is now a new mood in Flemish filmmaking. ‘I feel that there is something hanging there...’

nter view i To be a real movement, he adds, there needs to be ‘more films and more courage'. Flemish filmmakers, he points out, simply can’t make a living from directing deeply personal arthouse features. Their sometimes cautious career decisions are prompted by money. What they need to do now is to ‘take the big step’.

‘We will only have a grown-up film culture if everybody takes their freedom totally literally. If they don’t, then there will be nothing left in five years.’

He adds that younger Flemish filmmakers need to develop thicker skins. Too many refuse to accept criticism, even when it is constructive, or to acknowledge that collaborating is necessary for their success.

In order for Flemish cinema to register internationally, Mortier argues that it may be necessary for filmmakers to work abroad. ‘We should leave our language sometimes. We shouldn’t always shoot in Flemish,’ he says. Mortier cites the example of Danish maverick Lars Von Trier, who worked in English with international actors and helped spark a renaissance in Danish filmmaking in the process. ‘You have to be open to that. You have to take a big jump sometimes.’

pretty controversial Underlining his own willingness to look beyond Belgium, Mortier recently optioned the rights to Haunted, the 2005 book by US cult writer Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke. It seems that Palahniuk or his advisors must have been fans of Ex Drummer. Although Palahniuk is a hugely popular novelist, Mortier only had to pay $15,000 for an 18 month option on the book.

‘That’s really nothing when you see he has a million readers!’

Mortier compares Palahniuk to Belgium’s own Herman Brusselmans. ‘They both write about human horror and human terror... I think Palahniuk is more of a philosopher than Brusselmans.’

The challenge now is to track down an international producer to get the project, likely to cost between $5 and $7 million, off the ground. ‘There’s a lot of interest from Americans but the film I have been writing is not really for Americans,’ the director states. ‘It’s pretty controversial... totally controversial!’ In other words, it’s likely to polarise audiences... just as Mortier’s other films have always done. 22 May

Watch the trailer on the Flanders Image channel

www.cccp.be

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Think global

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With Plankton Invasion, Joeri Christiaen wants to show that 'drawing stupid characters' can help save the planet.

But he also knows that things go better with a smile, which is why his tiny heroes are out to drown us all.

By Ian Mundell

Christiaen studied animation at the KASK film school in Ghent in the late 1990s, but found himself at odds with its approach. Partly that was because the school preferred traditional animation to newer computer techniques, but also because it was a rather serious place. ‘I was more into the Bill Plympton type of animation, playing with humour,’ Christiaen explains. ‘I’d rather have people leave the room smiling and then think about things later.

I guess my style was also quite mainstream.’

When classmates came up with an idea for an animated series, Christiaen left KASK to join the company they set up with Flemish post-production house Grid-VFX. This was his first chance to explore computer animation. ‘It was there that I learned to work with the tools, and I’ve worked with the same tools ever since,’ he says.

Nothing came of the series, but the young animators did have the valuable experience of working on Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar-nominated feature Les triplettes de Belleville. They were hired to animate the cyclists, cars, motorcycles and vans in the first half of the film’s iconic race sequence.

© Bart Dewaele

Christiaen went on to work as a freelance animator, but beyond routine commissions he needed a creative outlet. ‘I was making money but I wanted to do stuff of my own, so I started playing with the tools I had to create a pipeline that was fast enough so that I could get results. I couldn’t afford to wait years to finish something.’

He used the pipeline to make TeeVeeMan, a two-minute show reel introduction that took just two weeks to complete. ‘It’s rendered with one light, no radiosity, so less than a minute for a frame to render. With the Fusion post-production tool you can put a grain on an image to make it look older, but I stretched the grains and got a pencil effect.’ Both the look and the humour are similar to that of his early inspiration, Bill Plympton.

Plankton Invasion also began life as an after-hours project, this time while he was working at Grid-VFX as a story-boarder, animator and animation director.

‘I was following the whole global warming debate,’ he says, ‘and I have a friend who is a scientist who can actually contribute to the whole thing, whereas if you draw stupid characters you’re not actually contributing anything. So it was in the back of my mind to do something.’

Using the sea as inspiration was a matter of family tradition. ‘My dad was a fisherman, and his dad too, but I was the first man in the whole family who was seasick.

At 14 I was given my chance to start as a fisherman, but I came back to land as green as

Plankton Invasion © 2010 TeamTO-Tinkertree-Vivi Film

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Plankton Invasion © 2010 Team TO - Tinkertree - Vivi Film

The Hulk but without the muscles. I said never again, but I’ve always been linked to the sea.’

The concept he came up with flips the usual environmental message on its head. There are millions of plankton in the sea, and they need more space to live in. This means more water.

So the plankton leader hatches a plan to melt the polar ice, drown the land and rule the world! He sends a crack squad ashore to start the operation: Captain John C Star, Sergeant Pulpo Kalmarez and Doctor Anna Medusa.

webisodes Christiaen showed his character designs to Jan Goossen and Frank De Wulf, the management team at Grid-VFX, with whom he had set up a separate development company called Tinkertree in 2007. They liked the concept and greenlit developing Plankton Invasion for the web.

‘I did the first episode after hours,’ Christiaen recalls. ‘We posted it on various sites, and within a week we had 3-4,000 visits a day. The site went down and Captain Star started turning up on other sites.’

As well as presenting short ‘webisodes’, the idea was to develop an interactive component. ‘I thought it was interesting to try something like a contest, and have people write jokes about global warming with the characters. Whoever wanted to

participate had to take some time to look at the whole global warming problem, think of one of the many issues that it has, and turn that around.’

But after six webisodes, success caught up with the project. French animation studio TeamTO came on board to develop the concept as a TV series for kids of eight and over, with 39 sevenminute episodes. Canal+ came on board as a coproducer, and the project received support from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF).

The pitch at Cartoon Forum in 2008 was promising, but then the financial crisis began to bite and money became harder to pin down. Broadcasters now want more before they commit. ‘They want to see an episode,’ Christiaen explains. ‘They are convinced about the animation and the look and so on, but they want to see the stories. Everyone has the same question: "It has spirit, but will you keep it up?"’

Unesco So the past few months Christiaen has been working on a seven-minute pilot, splitting his time between his base in Melle, near Ghent, and TeamTO’s studios in Paris and Valence. He’s enjoyed the transition from short gags to real narratives. ‘We could dive into it and bring the characters to life,’ he says. ‘It’s a good experience to see them talk now and they are layered. They are becoming real little people... with a bad attitude!’

The characters will be lip-synched for English dialogue, but he is keen to keep Plankton Invasion as European as possible. ‘While the Captain has an Elvis thing going on, the other characters won’t have American accents.’

The production of the series will be split between France and Belgium; both French and Belgian talent will be involved. Animation will be handled in France, but Christiaen wants to have Belgian talent involved. In particular he hopes to work with co-directors, with Emmanuel Klotz of Lascars fame set to come on board from the French side.

‘I have some people in mind for the Belgian part, but it is too early to approach them right now. It depends how the whole Belgian financing goes.’

little victory Once Plankton Invasion became Christiaen’s day job, he inevitably started looking for new projects to do on the side, this time working through his own company, Thuristar. The first was Fair Trading?, a one-minute short made in just three weeks for a competition organised by Belgium’s Trade for Development Center. It won, going on to be selected for numerous European festivals. ‘Since we have a fast pipeline I’d like to do little films like that now and then, tackling certain subjects in a funny way,’ Christiaen says.

His next project will be 850 Meters, a mediaeval story with a twist about a knight with bravery issues. Aimed at next year’s festivals, the eight-minute short is being co-produced with

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Lunanime and supported by VAF. All of this makes Christiaen think back to his days at KASK. ‘I saw one of my teachers at the Annecy animation festival and I was very happy to tell him that I have a short film in production and my own series. It was my little victory,’ he says.

‘Actually, I hope that one day my teachers will invite me back to the school to talk about it. I’d be happy to do that, so that if there are kids like me who have different ideas, they can see that there is always a path to where you want to go.’ 

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Vivi Film recently came on board as Plankton Invasion’s Belgian co-producer, and the project has also won the backing of Unesco, receiving its education for sustainable development label.

It’s the first-ever series to receive this label.

Plankton Invasion Fair Trading Thuristar www.planktoninvasion.com www.thuristar.com THURIST

850 Meters © 2010 Thuristar - Lunanime

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Man Galloping

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Bart Van Langendonck came into the film business after a successful career in music management and as general manager of Ultima Vez, the famous dance company run by Wim Vandekeybus. His Brussels-based production outfit Savage Film is nothing if not adventurous. Features, documentaries, multimedia work, shorts - Van Langendonck does it all. By Geoffrey Macnab When you’ve traveled around the world with a top international dance company in tow, you know all about egos, money and logistics. Bart Van Langendonck freely acknowledges that his many years working with Ultima Vez were useful preparation for the topsy turvy life of a movie producer, first at CCCP and then with his own company, Savage Film.

In his days with Ultima Vez, securing financing was relatively straightforward. Public funders and private sponsors queued up to work with Wim Vandekeybus, whose shows are sold out months in advance. Film, Van Langendonck has discovered, is altogether more complicated.

‘It’s a different landscape, especially in terms of how you finance things,’ sighs the producer. ‘In the performing arts world, Wim is a big name. He has been working for over 20 years... you have more room, more freedom with financing. It’s a whole different story with film.’

Van Langendonck believes that a film producer needs many more skills than a music impresario. He ticks off the many bases the producer must cover: financing, psychology (‘in order to be able to work with certain directors and actors’), an artistic vision and some marketing talent in order to get your movie noticed.

strong vision He and Vandekeybus have been working together for several years now on a film project called Galloping Mind. A story about a kids’ gang moving around on ponies, this was originally being set up as the first ever Belgian/Brazilian co-production.

To the producer’s dismay, the Brazilian partners went bankrupt, thereby pulling the rug from under a project which had looked likely to shoot very soon when it was presented in Rotterdam’s CineMart in early 2009. The scheduled shooting date has had to be put back to 2012 and the location changed to South Africa.

You need a certain stoicism to deal with such reverses. It helps that Van Langendonck has so many other projects on the boil. ‘That’s a good thing but at the same time, it’s one of my biggest flaws,’ the producer laughs ruefully as he contemplates the many different films he takes on at the same time. ‘I’ve had a hard time saying “no”. When I like a project, I get very excited!’

In theory, Van Langendonck is very selective. He’ll only work with directors who have a strong vision and who make congenial companions. If he doesn’t get on with them, he points out that it will be agony collaborating for two or more years together. However, there are a lot of filmmakers who excite him.

Eyeworks The name Savage Film comes originally from a 1997 book by American novelist Jay McInerney called The Last of the Savages. In hindsight, he admits that naming a production company after a novel he wanted to make a film of probably wasn’t an astute idea. ‘It’s a very stupid choice, of course...,’ he grins. ‘The publishing company will immediately know you want to do it!’

Even so, he has stuck with the name.

‘I thought it sounded nice... since I work with a lot of wild personalities, savages!’

When Van Langendonck left CCCP in 2006, he approached various bigger Belgian companies for advice. ‘I felt the need to associate myself with a bigger structure,’ he explains. ‘You work a lot with tax shelter money in Belgium and as a small company, you don’t have

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© Bart Dewaele

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‘I’ve had a hard time saying “no”.

When I like a project, I get very excited!’

enough equity.’ Eyeworks Film and TV Drama Managing Director Peter Bouckaert was immediately interested in the selection of projects that Van Langendonck was pushing with visionary directors like Vandekeybus and Michaël R. Roskam.

‘We quickly set up a structure through which Eyeworks gives me offices in their big space. They look for my tax shelter financing and also back up the bank guarantees. When they look for tax shelter money, that is handled by their accountants. That means my structure doesn’t have to become too big on an administrative level,’ Van Langendonck explains the partnership. ‘I also benefit from the vast production experience at Eyeworks.’

Recent Savage Film credits include Fleur Boonman’s upcoming road movie, Portable Life costarring Rutger Hauer, and set in South Africa, Indonesia, Belgium, France, Greece and the US. Van Langendonck co-produces it with the flamboyant Dutch producer, San Fu Maltha. Other more timorous souls might have been overawed by Maltha who produced Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book.

However, Van Langendonck calls his collaboration with the Dutchman ‘an education’. ‘I get along quite well with San Fu although he’s quite a character,’ Van Langendonck says of his fellow producer.

‘I know that he has more experience in certain fields than I do. I trust his judgement and I learned a lot from him.’

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dentikit

Another intriguing Savage project is Cotelette - The Film On Screen, a screen adaptation of the dance performance by Ann Van Den Broek that is being directed by Mike Figgis (of Leaving Las Vegas fame).

‘It was a real pleasure to see him direct,’ the producer says of the maverick British director. And, no, he didn’t give Figgis extensive notes. ‘With Mike Figgis, you don’t nudge him in a certain direction.

You trust that he will do an original and a good job.’

The film, which is around 60 minutes long, is likely to surface on the festival circuit in the autumn.

Van Langendonck also has high hopes for Roskam’s noirish thriller Bullhead (Rundskop). The film, currently in post-production, is based on a true story about crime and corruption in the Belgian agricultural world and the so-called ‘cattle hormone mafia’ in the 1980s. Matthias Schoenaerts plays the leading role and reportedly did some Robert De Niro-style method preparation for the role, beefing himself up so he looks like a bodybuilder. Schoenaerts and Jeroen Perceval play two old friends harbouring a terrible secret from their childhood who meet again as adults.

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Mike Figgis

Corbijn, Greenaway, Theys Savage Film is also set to co-produce a new feature documentary on Dutch rock photographer turned filmmaker Anton Corbijn, to be directed by Klaartje Quirijns. And there’s Peter Greenaway’s new feature, Goltzius & The Pelican Company. Savage Film recently also secured production money from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) for Frank Theys’ feature-length documentary Lab-Life, as well as development support for the experimental doc RIP-Japan by Jeroen Van der Stock.

There are several other titles percolating away at Savage Film. Van Langendonck again successfully secured Media Programme slate funding which has helped him to develop his ever-expanding mix of documentary, features and shorts. ‘We don’t have a lot of producers in Belgium so eventually anyone with a little ambition finds his way to a producer. I get a lot of proposals.’

He points to one constant in all the films he tries to make: he must be excited by the artistic vision of the director. Otherwise he won’t throw himself into battle. 

www.savagefilm.be Savage Film

Bullhead

Portable Life

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© Bart Dewaele

Inside the Brussels toon factory

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Dirk De Loose (l) - Carlo Giesa (r)

From the outside, it looks like just another office or apartment block.

Walk through the glass doors of 282 rue des Alliés, the home of nWave Pictures, and you enter a bustling hive of activity. It’s from here that ambitious animated 3D movies like Fly Me To The Moon and Sammy’s Adventures – The Secret Passage are hatched. Look on the walls in the open-plan foyer and you can see posters of Fly Me To The Moon in many different languages – a reminder that this was a film which sold all around the world. When the company is at full throttle on a new project, close to 100 people will be working here – and that number is set to rise yet further… By Geoffrey Macnab

All Stills Sammy's Adventures - The Secret Passage

On a Friday morning in June, when I visit, the mood is relaxed. Sammy’s Adventures is already complete.

The initial animation was completed last summer.

Work is just beginning in earnest on the sequel. The team is also working on more ‘attraction movies’, the spectacular shorts for theme parks that made the company’s name in the first place.

Dirk De Loose, the animation supervisor on Sammy’s Adventures, is on a coffee break. He took on the job in 2008 when his predecessor left nWave to work on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. De Loose acknowledges that when he saw Fly Me To The Moon, which he didn’t work on, he felt that it would be possible to bring more emotional depth to the animation. On Sammy’s Adventures, he has driven his team of animators to give more ‘real feelings and real emotion’ to their work.

Sammy’s Adventures is the story of a sea turtle on an epic journey from hatching to maturity. The film begins in 1959 and ends in the present day. The original title was, aptly enough, Around The World In 50 Years.

No, De Loose says, the animators don’t have their own turtles in a tank downstairs to draw inspiration from. ‘It’s not so easy as getting a dog into the studio!’

Nonetheless, they studied turtle movement in forensic detail. Turtles don’t have hands - the trick is to make the flippers as expressive as possible. Some liberties have to be taken. ‘If the flippers always have to be on the ground, as they are with real turtles, that’s impossible!’

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When Ben Stassen founded nWave Pictures in 1994, the company specialised in CGI ride films that were shown in IMAX theatres, often in theme parks. Now, the company has turned its eyes toward feature animation.

Independent distributors crave movies like the ones the company is currently producing. Fly Me To The Moon was distributed in the US by Summit (the company behind the Twilight Franchise.) Now, nWave has struck a long-term development deal with French major StudioCanal. This should ensure that the company’s future films are seen all around the world. The challenge is to deliver new movies that can compete with Hollywood animation even if they’re made for much smaller budgets. Sammy’s Adventures cost around $20 million – a huge amount for a European movie but loose change by comparison with the $200 million that Pixar is said to have spent on Toy Story 3. nWave is currently ramping up. Stassen suggests that the secret of a successful animation studio is to have projects overlapping one another. ‘We’re going to staff up to about 120,’ he says. That way, there is never a hiatus between productions. Employees can move seamlessly from one film to the next.

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‘We really push the depth to the maximum. We really want to make the movie an attraction.

The characters come out of the screen - you can almost touch them!’ – Dirk De Loose

48 frames On Sammy’s Adventures, De Loose was in charge of a team of 15 animators. ‘They came from all over Europe.

We had an Israeli, an Italian, a Romanian, a lot of French people – and of course there are Belgians too.’

Each was expected to provide around 48 frames (around two seconds) of completed animation per day.

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nnovation i De Loose saw each piece of animation from five to 10 times before giving it his approval. The director Ben Stassen also had to give each frame his blessing.

‘I was more realistic. I thought two seconds a day was a bit high,’ De Loose says of the production schedule. When you have 20 or 30 fish, not to mention turtles and octopuses in frame, he explains, it’s very hard to hit the required rate.

Other departments also had their hands full. ‘We had to deal with a lot of different kinds of characters with different anatomies. We had birds, we had humans, we had fishes - everything you can imagine,’ says 3D artist and technical director Carlo Giesa, who oversaw the rigging and also worked on the special effects.

The sequel promises to be even more elaborate - so De Loose cut his team some slack. The tempo is still very high.

By way of comparison, he points out that nWave will do as much in a day as Pixar in a week. ‘They have more time,’ he says. ‘They have bigger budgets so they can work longer.’ nWave animators will work for two years on a production.

Their counterparts at Pixar will work for four years. In other

words, there is some distance to go before the Belgian animation house can compete on equal terms with John Lasseter and co. Even so, the feeling in the nWave offices is that the company is making big strides.

‘A lot of animators had already worked on Fly Me To The Moon. They really raised their level of quality on Sammy’s Adventures,’ De Loose says. The goal now is to evolve an nWave house style that will be instantly recognisable to audiences. The animators already believe they use 3D more inventively than their US counterparts. ‘We really push the depth to the maximum. We really want to make the movie an attraction. The characters come out of the screen – you can almost touch them!’ says De Loose.

He adds that the mood at nWave ‘is fun and stressful. Fun because we are doing what we like to do and stressful because we want to make a good movie and raise the level. It’s a positive drive.’ 

www.nwave.com

What’s next for nWave?

The team is now getting underway in earnest on a $25 million Sammy sequel, tentatively called Sammy and Ray. This is billed as an ‘action comedy’ in which the turtles end up in captivity in a huge underwater aquarium in the Middle East. Further down the line, nWave is plotting a new animated yarn, Enchaunted Castle, about a house owned by an elderly magician. When the magician’s nephew tries to have him put in an old people’s home and sell the house, the house comes to life to keep the real estate agents at bay. The company is also plotting a foray into live-action features with epic feature-doc African Safari 3D (working title) which Ben Stassen will direct later this year.

The nWave team is clearly delighted at the opportunity to make big 3D animated features that will be seen all over the world. ‘We are very lucky that there is a studio like this in Brussels,’ De Loose enthuses. ‘It’s a rare opportunity to be able to work on a feature movie in our own country!’

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Stefaan in Don’t ask Stefaan Contreras about his latest project. The Belgian visual effects maestro is sworn to secrecy regarding new Hollywood films that he is working on and he is far too discreet to breach a

Š Hilde Van Gool

confidence. By Geoffrey Macnab

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Alias Wavefront At the start of his working life, he served stints in a print shop and an advertising agency without feeling fulfilled. It was before the Internet era. It wasn’t possible to access websites which detailed all the secrets of the art of visual effects. He therefore learned about 3D animation and computer animation through trade magazines and by old-fashioned trial and error ‘One of my colleagues was also really interested in computer graphics, 3D and animation. We were talking about

Alice in Wonderland

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‘Unfortunately the project's release has been rescheduled to summer 2011 and we cannot disclose any information about it till it releases,’ he states cryptically of his latest feature. Whatever the film might be, it’s a fair guess that it will offer plenty of eye-popping spectacle. The Santa Monica-based Contreras has already racked up credits for Visual Effects and Animation on such films as Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, G-Force, I Am Legend, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Beowulf.

Contreras, born in 1972, studied graphical engineering in Ghent – not the usual background for a career in Hollywood. However, he was fascinated by computer graphics and animation. As a kid, he used to draw a lot. He also had an early interest in photography. This had been fuelled by images he saw of the ancient Egyptian king, Tutankchamun. In his early childhood experiments with computers, he was very curious to see how ‘realistic’ computer-generated images could be made. For such a technically-minded kid, it was very helpful to have a father who was a professor of biotechnology. The young Stefaan was able to experiment on the university computers, which had software for molecular modelling.

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Wonderland

STEFAAN’S COMPUTER BUG ‘I think I was 12 years old when I had my first computer,’ Contreras recalls. ‘I think I was really lucky my parents saw the potential of computers.’ Young Stefaan’s first computer was a Commodore 64. His father encouraged him to tinker and experiment.

‘I burned through many, many computers. I would get one. After a couple of years, it would be old. I’d do a summer job and try to sell the old one. I was super-enthusiastic. That is how it started!’

These days, he has what he describes as ‘a fairly standard’ computer at home. ‘With today’s technology, everyone can buy for a reasonable price a good computer that is powerful enough to run really good computer software.’

G-Force

Beowulf

Jurassic Park, which was super hot at the time because they had their dinosaurs done in 3D and animated with computers. He told me about this company Alias Wavefront which was developing software to do that,’ he recalls.

The name ‘Alias Wavefront’ stayed in his mind. A little while later, Contreras was having a job interview with a software company specialising in traditional graphics. His interview was on the top floor of an office building. By chance, he decided to take the stairs instead of the lift on the way down. A few floors below, he saw a boiler plate signing with the name... Alias Waterfront.

Consumed by curiosity about why a big US/Canadian company would have a base in Ghent in Belgium, he later applied to Alias Waterfront and was promptly given a job. This was his first step in earnest into the film business. Alias Waterfront was working with all the big movie effects houses in London: outfits like Double Negative, Framestore and CFC. Contreras had no experience of using the ‘super expensive’ silicon graphic software used by his new employers. However, he had a background in 3D. It helped, too, that he could speak a little German. Alias Waterfront was looking for ‘someone to serve their German market'.

Contreras was trained up on how to use their equipment. He worked for Alias Waterfront for six years, contributing work to the early Harry Potter movies and to Lara Croft.

‘We were working for customers. They would send us a rig for a certain character to de-bug... we were working on a lot of movies, sometimes without really knowing what they were.’

Imageworks

I Am Legend

Beowulf

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Eventually, the company decided to centralise its activities in its Toronto offices. Contreras was given the chance to move to Canada. For personal reasons, this was impossible. He therefore took a job with a big advertising agency in Brussels. Over the following years, he kept in touch with many of his old colleagues from Alias Waterfront. ‘They had spread all over the world. A lot of them had gone to Weta to New Zealand to work on the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.’ A bunch of them went to London. Some went to Paris,’ the graphic effects wiz remembers how his old friends ended up working all over the world. Some of these colleagues took jobs at Sony just as the Hollywood major was embarking on its next big animated project, Surf’s Up. 'They convinced me to come over to Hollywood. I first had to convince my wife.’ Moving to Hollywood to work for Sony wasn’t quite as big a wrench as Contreras had anticipated. ‘We were after something new,’ he admits. Arriving in California, he enjoyed a reunion with many old Alias Waterfront colleagues.

He joined Surf’s Up in the middle of the production. ‘That’s a good time. I wasn’t exposed to all the stress of getting the movie rolling!’ The Hollywood film community has always been made up of outsiders: talented artists, actors and technicians. For that reason, Contreras argues, it is not so difficult for newcomers to fit in. ‘There are a lot of people in the same situation you are. They’ve all left their home country and come here to do a project.’ Through the very active Belgian Consulate General, Contreras is able to keep in touch with contacts from Benelux. 'There definitely is a community. Even outside film, there are Belgian and Flemish people around that work in different industries: advertising, Internet, etc. But it's very informal.'

One reason Contreras and his wife relish being in California is that it's an excellent base from which to travel. He is on a full-time contract at Sony Pictures' Imageworks. Holidays are relatively meagre. Nonetheless, when he has time off, he and his wife enjoy going on far-flung expeditions – for example, to Alaska.

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Does he feel nostalgic for Europe? It seems he does. ‘Weather and climate-wise, it’s great in California although we do miss seasons. It might sound weird to a lot of people but sometimes you long for a little bit of rain or for fall to be fall and winter winter.’ He even misses the rain in Belgium... but not that much. ‘Then again, when it’s raining the entire summer, there are drawbacks.’

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Since moving to the US nearly four years ago, Contreras has been kept very busy. From Surf’s Up, via Beowulf, G-Force and I Am Legend, he went to Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, then Alice In Wonderland – and then the big new project that he is keeping very quiet about. His credit on most of these movies has been ‘Pipeline Technical Director’.

‘Basically, it encompasses a lot of things. It means that you develop a working pipeline, almost as if in a factory. You start adding tools for all the artists’ departments. You help them do their work and get their stuff through,’ Contreras explains his job. He also works on character development and character rigging – which, translated into layman’s language, means ‘taking a 3D model and putting all the biomechanics in it so an animator can animate it.’ One moment, he’ll be working on realistic, human-like warriors in Beowulf. The next, his concentration will be devoted toward helping talking guinea pigs come to life in G-Force.

His work is collaborative. It’s not something he can sitting in front of a computer at home. ‘Pretty much everything we do couldn’t be done remotely. That’s because the equipment is expensive.

Also, security-wise, it would be a big issue. A lot of the tools and software are proprietary.’ There is a small army of animators and technicians working on each movie. Contreras is likely to have some contact with every department, whether the ‘art department’ or ‘lighting and compositing'.

He’ll talk at length with CG supervisors and will also have some contact with the directors themselves, especially early in a project. Largely self-taught, Contreras says there wasn’t ‘any big guru’ who had a key formative influence on his career. ‘I’d pick up many smaller things from a lot of people.’ This is a process that is still going on. ‘What I like about the industry and one of the reasons I got into it is that there is not a single day when you are not learning something!’  www.imageworks.com

The Smurfs © Sony Pictures Releasing 2010

Stefaan Contreras

What’s smurfing!

Stefaan Contreras will soon go into production on what is set to be one of 2011’s big releases: Raja Gosnell’s The Smurfs, based on the characters from Belgium’s comic strip author Peyo, which is scheduled to open next summer.

In the film, the tiny blue Smurfs tumble from their magical world smack dab into the middle of New York’s Central Park. Just three apples high and stuck in the Big Apple, they must find a way to get back to their village before the evil Gargamel tracks them down. The film's international roll-out is scheduled for 3 August, 2011.

Neil Patrick Harris, star of How I Met Your Mother, and Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara head the live-action cast, while Katy Perry, Alan Cumming and even Wolfgang Puck are among those lending their voices to the Smurfs.

Contreras recently finished working on Frank Coraci’s The Zookeeper. Also set for a 2011 release, the film presents the story of animals at a zoo who decide to break their code of silence in order to help their keeper (Kevin James) win the heart of a woman. Sylvester Stallone, Adam Sandler and Cher lend their voices to a lion, a monkey and a giraffe, respectively. www.sonypictures.com/previews/movies/ (The Smurfs)

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TURKISH

DELIGHTS

Turquaze may be Kadir Balci’s first feature but it’s a mistake to see him as a newcomer. The 39-year-old auteur has been biding his time, waiting till he felt he was ready to direct a full-length film. For him, filmmaking is not just a matter of technique. It is to do with having something to say and an intimate knowledge of sides of life that no film school can teach you. By Geoffrey Macnab Kadir Balci is a very patient man. It is many years now since he left film school in Belgium and many years too since his time as an Erasmus scholar at the Bournemouth & Poole College for Art & Design on the Dorset Coast in the south of England.

Balci, who was born in 1970 in Ghent and has a degree from the Fine Arts Academy, entered the film industry in very circuitous fashion. His parents were skeptical about his desire to become a filmmaker. ‘They said, what! You want to be an artist? How are you going to make a living?’ In spite of their objections, he told them that he was determined to become a director.

However, heeding a family friend’s advice, he tried some other forms of employment first.

‘I worked in every kind of job,’ the writer-director says of his unlikely apprenticeship as a film director. He took jobs in bars, in theatres, in factories. At one stage, Balci worked as a cleaner in a Volvo car factory. He was a pipe fitter. With a friend, he started a home-made pizza baking business. He was a barman in a cocktail bar in Ghent, a housekeeper in a hotel and a salesman for Belgian beer. The closest Balci came to cinema was when he was a projectionist and ticket seller. The worst job was the one as a cleaner. The best was as a travel rep at Brussels Airport

Turquaze

focus i © Bart Dewaele

for Richard Branson’s Virgin. ‘I didn't have anything to do with filmmaking,’ he recalls. ‘That was very deliberate. Some of my colleagues from film school went to work in film studios from the beginning. I felt I shouldn’t do that. I felt I needed to learn more about people and about human interests.’

The Only One Six years on, with a wealth of real life experience at his disposal, he finally felt that he had a story worth telling in a movie. First, though, he made a training video for Virgin.

His crew was paid in travel tickets. The short film was well received and he was asked to make another. By then, though, he had his eye on his own project. Back home in Ghent, he was beginning to write in earnest.

‘At that point, I was thinking what was the best story I could tell. What would be a really good, natural and authentic story

for me?’ After some deliberation, he decided the obvious story for his debut feature was... his own one. ‘But a bit dramatised.’ The original treatment, about three brothers, took only three days to write. Turquaze is about Timur, one of three brothers, whose life is thrown into upheaval after his father dies suddenly. He begins to question his relationship with his family and his girlfriend. He is under pressure in the workplace too.

Balci has experience of acting, albeit in small roles as Turkish characters in Flemish films. For example, he had a bit part in The Only One by his friend Geoffrey Enthoven. ‘People used to call me because they couldn’t find Turkish people who could speak Dutch but I try not to take parts as an actor.

I am very confident behind the camera – not in front of it! I think I am too perfectionist to be an actor. I want to see what I am getting.’

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Turquaze

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No, he didn’t think about taking the role of Timur in Turquaze.

However, he did keep it in the family. In the end, he gave the part to his brother, a guitar player and coffee bar manager in Ghent. ‘He did everything I asked. I was very hard with him.

He knew how important this was to me - and so everything I asked, he did it as I asked it.’ His brother later admitted he was partially basing his performance on his memories of Kadir as a child.

After his very long wait, Balci relished finally being able to shoot his first feature. ‘It was like a holiday!’ he remembers.

No, he didn’t feel any stress. If there were problems during production, which took place in Belgium and in Turkey, he wouldn’t throw his head up in despair but would simply work out the best way to solve them. It helped that he had skilful and experienced crew members, among them a D.O.P in Ruben Impens whom he had known since student days.

search for identity The rest of his family hasn’t seen the film yet. ‘I’ve been hiding it from them!’ However, he describes Turquaze as a feelgood movie and is confident his relatives will like it.

Balci freely admits that he draws heavily on his Turkish-Belgian roots in his work. ‘When I start thinking about things I want to tell, I always come back to identity,’ he reflects. ‘When I’ve done research into people like Michelangelo Antonioni and Anthony Minghella or Ang Lee, it’s always about identity too – so I shouldn’t be afraid of that. I believe that the search for identity is something that goes on your whole life.’

His parents are from Macedonia originally. They moved to Turkey as small children. Then the family came to Belgium in the late 1960s. Balci’s father worked as a welder. He and his siblings were all born in Belgium. Balci still has relatives in Macedonia and in Turkey. He has dual Belgian and Turkish nationality and is clearly fascinated by the culture he encounters on his trips to Istanbul. Turkey is a country looking two ways at once - west toward Europe and the EU and, at the same time, east toward the Islamic world. Istanbul itself is a seething and sophisticated metropolis. However, other parts of Turkey remain relatively underdeveloped. As a kid growing up in Belgium, Balci had a foot in two different cultures. At home, his mother always cooked Turkish food. ‘The only Belgian thing she cooked was fries and steak. We didn’t eat waffles at home.’

focus i

However, he is keen to make a distinction: cinema is his passion but it’s not his whole life. ‘It should stay a passion. If I decide tomorrow to start a furniture shop or to go and be a mechanic, I wouldn’t mind that. I know that it’s not easy to make films. I say to myself, OK, I’ve made one film. You have to be thankful for that and you have to work harder to make your second... but if it’s not happening, it is not happening. My father says everything should be moderate. We don’t go for highs and we don’t go for lows – we stay in between. I will try my hardest to make this second movie but if it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to happen!’ 

Turquaze

After his stint studying and working in England, Balci remains a keen anglophile. ‘It’s the seaside, the parties... and a lot of studying too... I miss it a lot. I miss the south of England. Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Southampton - it’s just great. I believe you have everything there: nature, cities, very good education.’ Balci is even fond of British costume dramas. He is still in touch with his old English friends through Facebook and is looking forward to showing them his movie.

Ang Lee Meanwhile, he is already preparing another project, a black comedy with the working title Döner Kebab which is inspired by Turkish cuisine. Dirk Impens’ production company, Menuet (which also produced Turquaze), is again behind the new film.

Döner Kebab is also partly inspired by his love for Ang Lee movies like Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and The Wedding Banquet.

‘What I like so much about this guy is that he is not afraid to do anything,’ Balci says of Ang Lee’s progression from smallish budget, very personal Taiwanese films through costume dramas like Sense and Sensibility to even a Marvel adaptation in The Hulk.

He would like to pursue an equally varied and adventurous career.

Kadir Balci, Turquaze www.turquazethemovie.com Watch the trailer on the Flanders Image channel

39

footage for his second feature, Pulsar. While there, he wasn’t far from Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano whose ash cloud brought European air travel to a halt earlier this spring. The eruption forced many to revise their travel plans. Indirectly, the volcano also helped Pulsar to secure a berth at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. By Geoffrey Macnab

© Bart Dewaele

40

Alex Stockman recently went to Iceland to shoot some extra

radio waves

nter view i

Life, paranoia and ‘It was on a beautiful sunny day that Olivier Père, the artistic director of Locarno himself, came to see the film here in Brussels,’ Stockman recalls of the impromptu trip that Père made to Belgium along with his selection committee member, Mark Peranson. After seeing an unfinished version of Pulsar, they invited it to Locarno. Neither had been due in Brussels that day but Peranson had been stuck in Bucharest because of the volcanic ash cloud. He decided to stop by Brussels en route to Berlin. Père, in Paris, also changed his travel plans.

‘It was a kind of magic day,’ Stockman recalls. ‘That gave us a nice boost.’

Pulsar is about a young man who becomes convinced that he is being targeted by a hacker.

His girlfriend is away in New York. His worries about losing her heighten his insecurities yet further.

He becomes ever more reliant on technology to stay in touch with her. ‘Life, paranoia and radio waves’ is the strapline. The idea for the film came to Stockman after reading articles warning about the negative effects of pulsed electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, wireless networks, etc. ‘Institutions like universities are taking this technology for granted without knowing the real effect of it,’ Stockman suggests. He shares the general enthusiasm for the brave new digital world but is also intrigued by its dark side: the contradictory reports about the effects of radiation, the threat posed by hackers and the new technology’s potential for undermining social interaction and morality.

Eyjafjallajökull ‘I am bit perplexed by the way people give out their Visa card number. Sometimes on the web, you’ll get a message that says this page is not secure but you urgently need to do banking business,’ he reflects. ‘I think our private information is becoming increasingly vulnerable to wireless communication. I recognise people getting nervous and paranoid about this. It’s also a big hoax – a way to sell you all these new programmes, filters and antivirus software that are safer.’

New technology is supposed to make our lives easier. The problem, Stockman suggests, is that the technology is dominating our lives. It makes people more impatient and has a tendency to shorten their attention spans. ‘We’re simply not as smart as our phones!’ he jokes.

Stockman describes the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull as a wake-up call for humans who think they can ignore nature. He shot scenes in Iceland as an antidote to the claustrophobic world in the Brussels-set scenes. Stockman made his first trip to Iceland in February 2010 and was scouting at the foot of the volcano. His guide had no idea then that it would erupt a few weeks later. He returned to Iceland to shoot in the summer, after the travel chaos.

‘When I was walking there, I felt very impressed, blessed to be living in relatively quiet times, geologically speaking,’ he says of the rugged, forbidding and ever-changing landscape.

41

42

long time coming The main role in Pulsar is played by fast-rising Flemish star Matthias Schoenaerts. Stockman’s aim is to put the audience ‘inside the mental space of this quite ordinary character'.

This was a very demanding role for Schoenaerts. Stockman first met the actor on the set of Any Way The Wind Blows. That was one of Schoenaerts’ first important film roles but his ability was already evident.

‘He is very committed. He gives himself 400%.’ Stockman worked with him again as a producer on a short, directed by Nicolas Bruyelle and was struck by Schoenaerts’ versatility. ‘He can be very spectacular. He can play the action hero or the love interest but he can also show a very, very subtle way of playing,’ the director enthuses. In Pulsar, much of the action is set within the main character’s apartment but Schoenaerts was always able to hint at the world beyond. He is very precise in his actions but is also able to bring a sense of mystery to his roles.

Pulsar has been a long time coming. As he is too often reminded, it is now almost a decade since Stockman’s debut feature, I Know I’ll See Your Face Again, way back in 2001. He tried to make a follow-up, Speed Of Love, but the project stalled. Other feature ideas were also ‘lost in the fire', as he puts it.

‘I saw the second movie very clearly in front of my eyes but I wasn’t prepared for the resistance in finding the finance,’ he says today. ‘There was also a resistance within myself to the story. I don’t know why.’

Any Way...

Pulsar

Stockman is clearly proud that he has managed to complete two features, even if he has taken 10 years to do it. ‘Cinema to me − it’s a miracle!’ He also makes it clear that he has not been idle since his debut feature. He was one of the producers on Tom Barman’s Antwerp-set ensemble movie, Any Way The Wind Blows (2003), about a day and a night in the lives of several hip young Belgians. He first encountered the project at a very early stage, as a 40-page treatment, and enjoyed helping Barman bring it to the screen. ‘I enjoyed seeing the film grow from one grain of an idea,’ he says. ‘I had the privilege of being very close to the imagination and the working process of another director.’

As the son of a photographer, Stockman has always had a love of images. He is self-taught as a filmmaker. ‘I didn’t go to film school because I didn’t decide to be a filmmaker when I was 18. It was a slowly growing passion for film and music and storytelling that drove me toward filmmaking.’ He adds that he learned about cinema by attending screening after screening of Murnau, Lang and Chaplin movies at the Cinemathèque in Brussels.

Despite his work as a producer, Stockman always knew that he would return to directing himself. While he waited to pull together the financing for a feature, he made a short. ‘I wanted to get back to work in order not to lose my instincts.’ He had come across the work of inspirational figure Ivan Alavarez, a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound writer. He deeply admired Alavarez’s short story, Eva Stays in The Cupboard on Nights of the Full Moon. Its central character was a man whose disability mysteriously vanishes during the full moon.

‘He (Alavarez) had written four or five very compact novels. A friend of his gave me this novel once. She said it might be something for me. I

nter view i Pulsar

was very touched by it and by how Ivan tried to transcend his own pain by inventing this werewolf story in reverse.’

Stockman was struck by the mix of fantasy elements and closely observed realism in the story – in particular, its affectionate observation of Brussels. His film version was selected for the Venice Film Festival (2006).

The writer, whose condition had worsened, had committed suicide before Stockman made his film. Apparently his last words were ‘la vie est belle'.

intense Pulsar was an enjoyable but sometimes fraught film to make. Stockman admits that he became as tense and as close to exhaustion as the character played by Schoenaerts. ‘But that’s a good sign. You need to be on the edge to make the movie ... you just have to make sure that you don’t fall on the other side.’

Now that the film is complete, the writer-director is beginning to think about a third feature, with a working title of The Mute. ‘I don’t want to say a lot about it... it’s about a guy who doesn’t talk. The first thing I should do is not start to talk about but first write it!’

There may have been a 10 year hiatus between Stockman’s debut feature and Pulsar. He is confident, though, that the new film won’t take so long to complete. 

Watch the trailer on the Flanders Image channel www.pulsar-movie.com

43

It is no coincidence that Lenny Van Wesemael’s short films are full of dancing. ‘I dance a lot, and I try to combine that with movies,’ she says.

‘I want people to feel what I feel when I’m dancing with somebody.’ By Ian Mundell

Dancing with

Lenny

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

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

She worked on the script with Geert Verbanck, who wrote the Oscar-nominated Flemish short film Tanghi Argentini, also with a dance theme. They came up with the story of Heleen, a 25-yearold woman who works in a 1950s-style diner with her boyfriend.

He doesn’t dance, so she will need to find a partner if she wants to enter the John Travolta dancing competition. There seems to be no other choice but John, her ex-lover and the man who used to move her on the dance floor.

© Bart Dewaele

bigger commitment

44

The diner, with its waitresses on roller skates, suggests the retro feel that Van Wesemael is after. ‘It’s set in the present, but all these people are obsessed a bit by the past. It’s in their character,’ she explains. But the star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever doesn’t actually appear in the film. ‘You never see John Travolta. We thought we might have a false Travolta, but that doesn’t work, so there is a judge who is judging on his behalf.’

Working with a dance theme means a much bigger commitment compared to conventional short films. ‘For a dance scene of three minutes you rehearse for five weeks. It’s totally different.’ The music was specially prepared for the film by Flemish pop star Lien De Greef (aka Lady Linn), for whom Van Wesemael had previously made music videos. ‘Lien and I worked together with the band for the end of the movie. It had to sound like live music, and we made a recording that fitted the climax of the story.’

shor t i On the set of Dancing With Travolta

At the same time it’s important not to lose the connection between the dancing and the plot. ‘You have to feel the drama in the dance,’ Van Wesemael says. This is not something that can be created in the edit. It has to be there in the performance. ‘For me it’s really important that the feeling is there on set,’ she says. ‘That’s why we worked a lot on the dance.’ But this is also the attraction for her. ‘I really like the process of creating something together with the actors. We really get a connection.’

visual approach Working with dance also demands a particular visual approach.

For Dancing With Travolta, cinematographer Ruben Impens (known for his work on The Misfortunates) shot a lot of the action on the shoulder.

‘Ruben is really good at following the dancers, and everyone runs after Ruben!’ Van Wesemael says. ‘He really knew the dance, and so was able to get between the dancers. It’s like you are dancing with the person. Sometimes you have to be far away to see what is happening, but sometimes you have to get into it and see the point of view of the dancers looking at each other.’

Van Wesemael sees Dancing with Travolta as preparation for her first feature film, a bigger prize than a brief bop with a film star. ‘You make short movies to make a good short movie, but also for the future, to have experience and learn how to work with actors and crew.’

It’s still unclear what that first feature will be. ‘Maybe I would like to work with a script that already exists, but on the other hand I want to tell my own stories,’ Van Wesemael says. But she is ready to make the change to a bigger production. ‘Sometimes when you are making a short movie you want the characters to grow more and have a bigger story. I’m looking forward to having the time to develop my characters.’ 

Lenny Van Wesemael (°1981)* (2010) – Dancing With Travolta (short) (2009) – I Don’t Wanna Dance (music video) (2008) – L’Origine du monde (short) (2008) – A Love Affair (music video) (2005) – Test (short) (2004) – Dance With Me (short) * selected filmography

Lenny Van Wesemael Music videos: user1852966 Making of Dancing With Travolta: groups/makingof/videos/10997387

45

Michaël R. Roskam is a film enthusiast. 'I have 100 films in my top three,' he says. But he also has a broad view of what it means to make films. 'For me, being a filmmaker fits into the idea of being an artist and being a storyteller.' By Ian Mundell

Under the Influence

Michaël R. Roskam

After graduation he wrote and experimented with video, then came up with an idea that a friend suggested should be filmed 'properly'. So he put in a bid for funding, and was successful. 'Suddenly we had the

© Bart Dewaele

© Bart Dewaele

46

He grew up loving European comics such as 'Tintin' and the American movies on afternoon TV. 'I had hardly any contact with European cinema until pretty late,' he says. Wanting to become a comic book artist, he studied painting at Sint Lukas art school in Brussels. 'Very soon I was pulled into contemporary art and making videos, paintings and drawings, then back to comics,' he recalls. 'I was still looking for something. And I thought that making a film one day was also something that you had to do if you were an artist.'

He has never felt that he missed out on film school. 'There was no influence or pressure to tell me what I should or should not do,' he says. 'When I wanted to use voice-over in Carlo, I was told that this wasn't done: "You have to tell a story within the rules of cinema." What? It's just voice-over. I'm using cinema, it works.

Scorsese uses it all the time. "But you're not Scorsese." Yeah, whatever...'

Martin Scorsese is among the directors who inspired him from the start, alongside the Coen brothers and Akira Kurosawa. 'On the cinematographic level, but also in storytelling, Kurosawa combines drama and serious, almost contemplative things, with humour. It's all there. I think he's an incredible artist.' Favourites include The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Rashomon and early cop film Stray Dog.

Spielberg, Mann, Cronenberg Roskam is not shy of mainstream Hollywood, also admiring directors such as Steven Spielberg and Michael Mann. 'Spielberg is more an influence for his perception of cinema than as a director,' Roskam says. 'When you see a Spielberg film, it feels like a good dream that you don't want to wake up from, whereas with Ken Loach, for example, when you wake up, well that's what you get!'

For Bullhead, he is looking for a tone that is also just a tiny bit larger than life. 'It's going to be a dark and very strange world,' he says. 'It's set in a criminal environment, but it's not a story about crime, it's more about the people living in it.'

David Cronenberg was an inspiration in this sense. 'A History of Violence and Eastern Promises helped me see that I had to consider my story as a tale, not a fairy tale but an imagined story that tells us something about ourselves.' There are similar lessons in Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai and John Huston's The Misfits.

Coen brothers

Rundskop www.savagefilm.be

BOOK The Road

by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

film Angels with Dirty Faces

by Michael Curtiz (1938)

TV Belga Sport.

Documentaries on sporting icons (2008-...) © EddyMerckx.be

He was also struck by the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. 'That was a hugely inspiring film for me,' he says. 'It runs against all the rules of storytelling that you hear, but it works brilliantly and the tone is perfect. It's scary, it's funny, it's dramatic. It's actually very simple but at the same time extremely complex.'

The arts also continue to be an influence on Roskam's work, with the film noir feeling of Bullhead coming as much from the golden age of Dutch painting as 1940s Hollywood. 'Rembrandt was a kind of reference in light and darkness,' he says.

Beyond Bullhead, Roskam simply wants to carry on making films, probably alternating his own scripts with those from other writers to establish a steady pace of production. 'I have lots of ideas. I can easily go on for the next 20 years.' he says.

'Now politicians are telling us that people will have to work until they are 65, and I'm like "Hell yeah!"' 

These are some of the works Michaël R. Roskam currently gets inspired by:

nfluence

Scorsese and Kurosawa

inspirational

i

money, but I'd never seen a film set before!' He soon realised that he had found what he was looking for. 'The process of making a film, especially when you are a writer-director, contains all the elements of art for me.'

That was Haun in 2002. Other shorts followed: Carlo in 2004, The One Thing To Do in 2005 and Today Is Friday in 2007. Now Roskam is finishing his first feature, Bullhead (Rundskop), an unsettling story about loyalty and friendship.

Music Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine by Olivier Messiaen

47

i

cons

Both Toronto’s Hot Docs and Cannes turned out to be small victories for the VAF Wildcards programme, with three recent winners found among the selected films at the two fests.

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48

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on was mpetiti o C ts r ho IJsland tival’s S the Fes winning r rd fo a d c ild Selecte VAF W oulier’s C s le il G

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st ne r Gu ard win e c d il n W as o th VAF erghe w F B A n V e is d th Van presen to te t re e tu Crois ing fea rd-winn landr, F f o Wildca s y Je s u b a B e d for Littl selecte s a w h whic ight rs’ For tn Directo

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ry umenta ing doc n in w u r rd gu Wildca c sales ere VAF ok’s do w o tl s u c A o D e?), r’s Hot a Nam this yea at’s in g h in en (W d h n r g Atte H ae Küppe r Dimke er Eva e k c a u m d film nd pro äger, a Peter J

49

-fans i

Brussels By Night and The Misfortunates Karin Beyens is head of acquisitions at Paris-based outfit Diaphana Distribution. She talks about two of her favourite films: Marc Didden’s Brussels By Night and Felix van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates.

50

I have been working in distribution for 20 years or more.

For 10 years, I worked for Cinéart (in Belgium) and then I went to work for Diaphana in France. I’ve been following Flemish cinema very closely but more as a member of the audience. I am watching a lot of Flemish films because it just interests me. It reflects my country and it reflects my culture - I am a Flemish-speaking Belgian.

There are a couple of films that I think have transformed the Flemish film landscape. They’ve been markers for a Brussels By Night generation. One of those is Marc Didden’s Brussels By Night (1983). Another one is The Misfortunates (2009)

by Felix van Groeningen.

With Brussels By Night, suddenly that film spoke to my generation in a very modern and normal way. The films that went before, for example the adaptations of books, may have been very respectable films but emotionally they didn’t say anything. I wasn’t the only one who felt that because Brussels By Night was a very successful The Misfortunates film. It was a movie that changed the way we look at Flemish films. I remember that it went to the San Sebastian Film Festival. I saw it there. I was a critic at that time.

At that time, it was remarkable for a Flemish film even to go to an international festival. It was well reviewed abroad and then afterwards, it was seen in Belgium.

It was the first time I saw a movie with actors playing characters who spoke the way that we all spoke. The dialogue seemed right. The emotions expressed were of that time. It was a very modern film.

It’s interesting how Flemish films are seen abroad. I didn’t go to see The Misfortunates last year in Cannes. I went to see it in a normal cinema in Paris (where I live) on a Sunday afternoon. I think this was two or three weeks after it had opened. It had been very well received in Paris and got good reviews.

I had thought that was very strange. Usually, Flemish-language films in France are looked down on. The French audiences don’t get the language. I had seen

previous films by the director Felix van Groeningen and had been interested in them. It was a Sunday afternoon in January.

It was very cold. I sat in the theatre and I noticed it was full.

The dialogue and the attitudes in The Misfortunates made it seem like I was back in Belgium. It’s not my dialect they were speaking but I understood it perfectly.

I felt very close to home. I felt that I could see much more in that film than everyone else around me although they were laughing and enjoying the movie. The setting of the film is very specific but it’s very common at the same time. In the place where I grew up, Diest, there was a cafe like the bar in the film where people were always coming in and out. I could never understand why they were there all the time and I wondered if they had anything else to do. All of a sudden, I understood. That cafe still exists. I had the same feeling watching The Misfortunates as when I saw Brussels By Night. At the same time, both films were very well made and you could see there was really a director at work. It wasn’t just somebody who had adapted a book. Those two films are, for me, markers of generations, each in its own different way. I was very proud of both films.  As told to Geoffrey Macnab www.diaphana.fr

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