Flanders (i) Magazine #27 - Autumn 2013

TAKE 27 | AUTUMN 2013 | € 3.99

DOSSIER

KOEN

KOEN DE BOUW ON THE VERDICT AND ON ACTING

IN FLANDERS FIELDS REMEMBERING THE GREAT WAR ON FILM AND TV

Liesbeth De Ceulaer BEHIND THE REDWOOD CURTAIN

HOUSES WITH SMALL WINDOWS Bülent Öztürk on the Lido

X TRA VERSION FRANÇAISE

WOUTER BONGAERTS EVELIEN BOSMANS WOUTER BOUVIJN DOMINIQUE DERUDDERE JOHAN LEYSEN JAN MATTHYS MATTEO SIMONI BENNY VANDENDRIESSCHE JAN VERHEYEN DAVID WILLIAMSON

FILM FESTIVAL GHENT

C NTENT I TAKE 27 22

Shortissimo Houses With Small Windows, Wolf's Milk, Dust Breeding

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Wouter Bouvijn Got a taste of Oscar thanks to his graduation short Crossroads

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Alone in the crowd When Koen De Bouw acts he 'acts' as little as possible and that is not easy, he explains

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Johan Leysen The only place where you really live as an actor is in your own language, claims this familiar face in many European films

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The Verdict Jan Verheyen has no pretensions about changing the world. What he does like is a good discussion.

That's what he also aims for a.o. with The Verdict

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Mia VAF Wildcard winning helmer Wouter Bongaerts talks about the making of his new animated short, Mia

In Flanders Fields With In Flanders Fields, about a family and the way it survives and copes with World War I, director Jan Matthys was determined to bring the past into the present + a look at some of the other recent and upcoming World War I projects from Flanders

Drift With Drift, Benny Vandendriessche tells a tale of grief and lost love through the physical presence of its main character, played by artist Dirk Hendrikx

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Le supplément en français avec Caroline Strubbe, Koen De Bouw, Bart Van den Bempt et Bülent Öztürk

Dominique Deruddere Dominique Deruddere about his new romantic feature, Flying Home, about pigeon racing and World War I

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Tree Spirit A documentary can also be a cinematographic experience, explains Liesbeth De Ceulaer

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When Matteo met Evelien The duo talks about working with Stijn Coninx on his new biopic Marina

6 i-Opener Cub I 9 Sneak Peek Plan Bart I 58 Influence David Williamson I 61 i-cons Baghdad Messi I 62 Casting Call Joren Seldeslachts I www.flandersimage.com

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WOUTERBOUVIJN

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WHEN WOUTER MET OSCAR TEXT IAN MUNDELL

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

WOUTER BOUVIJN WAS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED WHEN HIS GRADUATION FILM CROSSROADS DID NOT WIN A VAF WILDCARD, ONE OF THE HOTLY CONTESTED AWARDS THAT FAST-TRACK FLEMISH FILM STUDENTS TO THEIR FIRST PROFESSIONAL PROJECT. BUT THEN HIS FILM WON THE DEBUT PRIZE AT THE LEUVEN SHORT FILM FEST, THE JURY PRIZE AT THE PREMIERS PLANS FESTIVAL IN ANGERS, AND THE BRONZE MEDAL AT THE STUDENT ACADEMY AWARDS IN THE USA. WITH THE DOORS THIS HAS OPENED, HE CAN NOW THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT MAKING HIS FIRST FEATURE FILM. ‘SO YOU SEE, IF YOU MAKE A GOOD FILM AND PEOPLE LIKE IT, AND PRODUCERS LIKE IT, THEY WILL FIND YOU A WILDCARD AS WELL.’

no rehearsals

Casting the film was tricky. Tom De Hoog was an early choice for Thomas. ‘I’ve worked with Tom a couple of times before and I knew that I wanted to have him in the film,’ Bouvijn says. But finding Maxime was harder.

‘I didn’t know any actors around that age who I thought were able to play this role, so the first thing I did was cast his girlfriend.’ That was Lynn Van Royen, who suggested Joren Seldeslachts, an actor she had worked with on the TV series Double Life. ‘She thought he could do it, but also that it would be cool, because they already had a good connection.’

Initially Seldeslachts said he was too busy, but changed his mind after reading the script. ‘I think he loved the story,’ Bouvijn says. ‘Until now he hadn’t had the chance to play this kind of role.’ While agreeing to do the film, he warned

the director that he would arrive on set tired from all his other work. ‘I said: that’s good, because in this film you are meant to be tired. So we didn’t need to use make-up!’

Something else Bouvijn dispensed with were rehearsals, since the actors gave great results straight away. ‘I saw things were much more natural during rehearsal than when we were shooting, so after a couple of days we stopped rehearsing.’

Supported by a crew he already knew well, he was able to devote all his time to the actors. ‘I trust my cameraman [Maximiliaan Dierickx] a lot, so I didn’t look at the monitor very much,’ he says. ‘My actors are the main thing.’ At the same time, this produced a very visual form of storytelling.

‘I think that’s the most important thing: to tell a story with images and not with words. I think that is why the film has had an international success.’

people

Bouvijn started out studying audiovisual techniques at the RITS film school in Brussels, but a couple of assignments as assistant director brought home how much he wanted to be in charge. So he switched to the directing track, making Crossroads as his graduation project.

The film centres on a family where the father is dying of an incurable inherited disease. There is a 50% chance that his sons, Thomas and Maxime, will also have the condition, but rather than live their lives under a death sentence they make a pact not to get tested.

Bouvijn was inspired to tell this story by a friend who faces a similar dilemma. 'He doesn't want to know if he is sick or not, and for me that was a very interesting idea,' he recalls.

'If I was him, would I want to know or not? It's a big question, about life and death.'

From this starting point, Bouvijn constructed a fictional situation with the same kind of questions. Making it about brothers brought the 50% chance of inheriting a genetic condition into sharp focus, but ideas of sickness and death were starting to dominate. 'The first drafts were very dark, so I wrote a love story into the theme to lighten it up.'

burning desire

The Student Academy Awards not only brought recognition for Crossroads, but also gave Bouvijn the chance to spend a week in Hollywood meeting industry figures and discussing their craft. This included directors, writers and cinematographers, with credits including Mean Streets, Apocalypse Now, Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park.

‘One day we went to the American Society of Cinematographers and met 15 directors of photography.

Visiting the Writers Guild of America was even more inspiring as they had really seen our films,’ he recalls. ‘That was the most positive thing about the meetings: we talked about our films, not about their films.’

Now he is keen to get back to work. He has set his sights on a feature film, details of which he is keeping under wraps at present. ‘Now I’m burning to make another film,’ he says.

‘Being on set as a director and working with people, that’s the thing I love the most.’  www.tweesprong-film.com

Crossroads

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CUB The Boy Scout motto 'Be Prepared' takes on a sinister new meaning in Cub, a backwoods horror movie that pits a troop of cubs against the Poacher and his ingenious traps.

Flanders rarely ventures into horror, but the Cub team has plenty of genre experience. Director Jonas Govaerts, making his feature debut, has kudos on the horror circuit for his short films, while DoP Nicolas Karakatsanis shot cult films Left Bank and Small Gods before finding fame with Bullhead.

Cub shoots over summer 2013 with a cast of talented newcomers, plus Stef Aerts (Oxygen), Evelien Bosmans (Marina) and Jan Hammenecker (22nd of May). Potemkino produces, while Kinology represents the film internationally. ď Š www.cubthemovie.com

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INNOVATIVE POST PRODUCTION feature films / shorts / documentaries / tv series / title design / music videos / commercials 4K COLOR GRADING • VFX • CGI • 3D STEREO • MOTION GRAPHICS • EDITING • BROADCAST DELIVERIES • CINEMA ROOM • VFX SUPERVISION

www.aceimagefactory.net

sneak peek

PL AN BART Thirty-something Sarah has always wanted children, but delayed for the sake of her career. When she decides the moment has finally come, her husband confesses that he doesn’t want children after all. Feeling betrayed, she throws him out. But now that her biological clock is ticking, where will she find another father?

Enter Bart, an old friend and eternal bachelor, who agrees to do the deed if the money is right. Sarah accepts, on condition that they never see each other again afterwards.

But as nature takes its course, will they be able to keep such a promise?

Plan Bart is a feel-good movie about love and commitment that plays out in cosmopolitan Brussels. This is familiar territory for director Roel Mondelaers, who is making his

feature film debut after working on Brussels TV drama series De Vijfhoek (The Pentagon).

The film re-unites Wine Dierickx and Jeroen Perceval, who played opposite each another in Felix van Groeningen’s With Friends Like These. Since then Dierickx has made a name as a romantic lead in films such as Madly in Love and Madonna’s Pig, while Perceval won international plaudits as the small-time crook Diederik Maes in Bullhead.

The eternal triangle is completed by Wouter Hendrickx, who plays Sarah’s husband. His credits range from debauchery in The Misfortunates to celebration of life in Oxygen.

Plan Bart is written by Mondelaers and Hans Van Nuffel (director of Oxygen). It is produced by Caviar.

ETA: Spring 2014.  IM

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INTOR ????????????????????????????

ALONE IN THE CROWD PART OF KOEN DE BOUW'S PREPARATION FOR HIS STARRING ROLE IN LEGAL DRAMA THE VERDICT, SELECTED FOR OFFICIAL COMPETITION IN MONTREAL, WAS TO DO NOTHING AT ALL. 'I THOUGHT PERHAPS I SHOULD GO TO COURT AND SEE HOW THINGS WORKED,' HE SAYS, 'BUT FOR THE CHARACTER I PLAY IT'S ALSO HIS FIRST EXPERIENCE. SO THE BEST WAY TO PREPARE WAS TO STAY AWAY AND LET THE FIRST DAY OF FILMING BE MY FIRST DAY IN COURT.' TEXT IAN MUNDELL

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

subject

Early versions of the script gave Segers nothing to say in court, but then writer-director Jan Verheyen relented and allowed him a closing statement. Even so, this is slight and modest compared to the other court speeches. 'It was a challenge for me to do it with as few words as possible,' says De Bouw. 'But then I always try to reduce the text to a minimum. The fewer words you need, the better it becomes.'

The Verdict

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He felt a distinct frisson when the cameras started to roll and extras in the crowd started shouting at him. 'Even as an actor it was sometimes hard to sit there knowing I was innocent, or had done something for a reason, while people who didn't know the whole story were shouting at me,' he recalls. The feeling didn't go away as the prosecution scenes progressed. 'When all you can do is sit there and be quiet, while other people speak... It was an overwhelming experience.'

De Bouw plays Luc Segers, a man who loses his wife and young child in a violent encounter with a criminal. When a procedural error in the arrest sets the killer free, Segers takes matters into his own hands. He tracks the man down and shoots him. Then he challenges the judicial system to set him free as well.

Segers is the kind of troubled man that De Bouw likes to bring to the screen. 'It's a subtle part.

It needs the eyes to say a lot, without words, and I know that I'm able to do that,' he says. 'A third of the film takes place in court and this man is just sitting there, but you must feel his hurt.'

De Bouw has an unexpected reference to describe his method. 'It’s a little bit like the Buster Keaton effect,' he says, referring to the scene in Steamboat Bill Jr. where a building facade falls on Keaton, leaving him standing in the space left by a window. 'For me that's a very important image.

It demonstrates a little bit how I work as an actor. The rest of the world is in motion and I try to be as serene as possible. The court scenes are a good example, where everything around him is moving and he is still.'

This requires great attention to detail. 'When I act I 'act' as little as possible, which is not easy.

Each movement you make must be there for a reason, even when the movement is meant to have no reason.'

De Bouw's minimal performance in The Verdict is juxtaposed with the set-piece speeches given to Jappe Claes, Veerle Baetens (The Broken Circle Breakdown) and Johan Leysen (The American) in the principle legal roles. 'Of course, having a lawyer's speech like Johan and Veerle have here, it's great to do that. It's fun. There's a lot for any actor to get their teeth into.'

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De Bouw has worked with Verheyen on two previous films.

In Missing Persons Unit he played the head of a police missing persons unit, investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl, while in Dossier K. he reprised his role as police detective Eric Vincke from The Alzheimer Case (The Memory of a Killer), this time going up against a group of Albanian gangsters. Although his role is different in The Verdict, he sees a connection.

'Jan knows that when I'm playing Vincke in Dossier K. or The Alzheimer Case, he's not just a police officer. There's more in the character than what we read in the story, so he knows that I can add something specific to the role. I think that's why he chose me.'

He also sees the film as a departure from Verheyen's previous work. 'It's the first film he's written himself, so that brings another level of engagement. And it's about a subject that concerns him. But I think this is a film that has come at the right time for him,' De Bouw says. 'I felt on set that he is growing as a director, and that's why he has been able to do this now. He has skills now that he didn't have 10 years ago.'

The subject was also an important attraction for De Bouw.

'I was glad to step into a story that is so topical, although it is a pity that it is topical. We read about these procedural errors almost everyday in the newspapers, and for the people involved it is very difficult to understand why these things happen.'

effect

While he expects The Verdict to create a lively debate when it is released in Belgium in October, he doesn't see it as a campaigning film. 'I don't think we have the pretention of bringing forward a story expecting it to change things, but I wouldn't want to underestimate the effect that it will have.

It's a film that will generate a lot of discussion among the public and in the media. But at the same time the story is strong enough for the film to succeed on its own.' 

The Verdict

www.hetvonnis.be

'When I act I 'act' as little as possible, which is not easy.

Each movement you make must be there for a reason, even when the movement is meant to have no reason'

KOEN DE BOUW (°1964)* (2013) - THE VERDICT (2012) – BRASSERIE ROMANTIQUE (2011) – GERMAINE (2010) – MADLY IN LOVE (2009) – DOSSIER K. (2008) – LOFT (2007) – MISSING PERSONS UNIT (2005) – LONG WEEKEND (2005) – THE INTRUDER (2003) – THE MEMORY OF A KILLER (2000) – THE PUBLISHERS (2000) – FALLING ROCKS (1992) – LESS DEAD THAN THE OTHERS (1990) – HAN DE WIT * selected filmography

DOSSIER KOEN Koen De Bouw studied for a career in theatre at the prestigious Studio Herman Teirlinck in Antwerp. When he graduated in 1987 both film and television seemed to be closed worlds. 'The head of the school didn't want to know anything about film,' he recalls. 'Film and television were out of the question. It was very theatre and dance oriented.'

But then he got an offer to appear in a Dutch film, Han de Wit by Joost Ranzijn. Frustrated with being typecast as a juvenile lead on the stage, he leapt at the chance to play an anti-hero on the big screen. 'It was my first role and a big thing for me to do at the time,' he recalls. 'It was overwhelming. I was fascinated by acting for the camera and with the camera. From that moment on I changed my focus to film and television.'

Although Han de Wit has all but disappeared from cinema history, he still counts it as a decisive role in his filmography.

The next was that of detective Eric Vincke in Erik Van Looy's The Alzheimer Case, a role he reprised in Jan Verheyen's Dossier K. 'They are both great stories, great pictures, in which I was able to play a leading role. Vincke is a nice melancholic character. Besides the police story I was able to give him another dimension.'

Finally he singles out The Intruder, directed by Frank Van Mechelen, which tells the story of a father desperately searching for his runaway daughter. 'He's a character you can compare to Luc in The Verdict. I like to play men who are a little bit damaged, or even very damaged, but who are ordinary men all the same.'

While he continues to play dark characters, De Bouw has also developed a nice line in comedy. 'I'm glad that people The Alzheimer Case - The Intruder - Madly in Love are discovering the humorous side of me as well,' he says.

These roles range from broad comedy in Germaine, to romantic comedy in Madly in Love and Brasserie Romantique. '10 years ago, no-one would have thought that we would be making romantic comedies in Flanders. It's something we've only just discovered. It's new and we have to experiment with the genre.'

De Bouw chooses his roles primarily for the story. 'When the story is interesting, then the characters are interesting,' he says. Looking forward he has both comedy and action roles lined up on television, including a return to the long-running series Missing Persons Unit that runs in well over 90 territories.

On the big screen, he will appear in the next Hilde Van Mieghem film, Speechless, based on a novel

by Tom Lanoye, and in Double Face, the third film to feature detective Eric Vincke. No director has yet been announced for this project. And in the long term, he has already signed to work with Erik Van Looy on a feature film to be shot in 2015.

His next film to be released in Belgium is Daniel Lambo's comedy Los Flamencos, about three brothers who plan a bank robbery in honour of their dead mother. De Bouw appears as a policeman, again, but a policeman unlike any he has played before.

'He's a very sad man, but very humorous at the same time,' he says. 'But I don't really know what to expect. It's one of those instances where you have no idea how it will look on screen while you are playing it. But it was great fun to do, and that's already important. When you have fun on the set, then in most cases the film is good too.'

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DEFENDING THE UNDEFENDABLE A FAMILIAR FACE IN MANY EUROPEAN FILMS, ACTOR JOHAN LEYSEN RECENTLY RETURNED TO HIS NATIVE FLANDERS TO SHOOT JAN VERHEYEN’S THE VERDICT, HIS FIRST MAJOR LOCAL FILM SINCE FIEN TROCH’S 2005 FEATURE SOMEONE ELSE’S HAPPINESS. ‘A DUTCHLANGUAGE ROLE IS ALWAYS A TREAT,’ SAYS THE ACTOR, BECAUSE ‘THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU REALLY LIVE AS AN ACTOR IS IN YOUR LANGUAGE.’ TEXT BOYD VAN HOEIJ

PORTRAIT FABRIZIO MALTESE

Johan Leysen is one of those European character actors who keeps popping up in parts that he immediately makes his own, even though the roles aren’t always those of the protagonists. He was the tough bad guy in Anton Corbijn’s 2010 title The American opposite George Clooney and played a tender older man who becomes a young prostitute’s first regular customer in François Ozon’s Jeune & jolie, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year.

Currently based in Paris, Leysen often works in his adopted home country, though he’s happy to travel across Europe for projects in a variety of languages and is equally happy on stage, on TV or in film projects. We meet the actor in Reims, north of the French capital, where he’s rehearsing for the dream role of every mature actor: King Lear, which he’ll perform at the Avignon Theatre Festival. Of course the Shakespearean text will be in French. There indeed seems to be very little this versatile and fearless Flemish actor can’t do.

The future star was born into a large family as the son of Bert Leysen, one of the founders of Flemish television and himself a big film fan. ‘I remember he would wake us kids up during the night when a film like Crin blanc (White Mane) from Albert Lamorisse came on TV so we could watch it together,’ remembers Leysen. ‘Both my parents studied Germanic languages and thus literature and also plays were definitely part of our upbringing. But from there to actually doing theatre was not that easy. In the late 60s, it was really not done to want to become an actor. And actually getting work was also very difficult because there was hardly a film industry in Belgium and theatre was not as organized as it is now. That was one of the reasons why I left for the Netherlands, so I could do theatre there.’

Since working north of the Belgian border early in his career, Leysen has continued to alternate working at home and abroad, on stage and in front of the cameras. ‘One major eye opener came early in my career, when I was cast in a small role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary,’ says the actor. The director, whom he describes as an unusual phenomenon, ‘was unlike anyone I’d worked with. There was no narrative structure to speak of but somehow it was absolutely clear that he knew what he was doing. I think it taught me that as an actor you’re really a small part in someone else’s puzzle.’

'The eventual outcome of The Verdict's courtroom battle isn't what interests me necessarily but rather the fact that each side had good arguments, something that pleasantly surprised me when I first read the screenplay'

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The Verdict

arguments

In The Verdict, Leysen plays Jan De Cock: ‘It’s an interesting role because I defend someone who’s in a position that’s practically impossible to defend, since he took the law into his own hands and shot someone. That’s not something we can condone as a society but my character still tries to do everything he can to defend this man.’

‘I’m a big fan of films with trials and courtroom procedures. If they’re made well, they can be both very theatrical and edge-of-your-seat material,’ the actor continues. ‘The eventual outcome of The Verdict’s courtroom battle isn’t what interests me necessarily but rather the fact that each side had good arguments, something that pleasantly surprised me when I first read the screenplay.

I think it’s something that will get people talking. The film doesn’t try to push the audience in one specific direction but suggests different ways of looking at the same case.’

Since Jan Verheyen’s probably the closest thing to a blockbuster director that Flanders (and even Belgium) has, Leysen was aware of the director before he started working on The Verdict: 'I had seen some of his films but what I was most impressed by is how Jan has managed to surround himself with an exceptionally talented crew who think with and work alongside him, so working with them was extremely pleasant.’

honesty

Though he’s got more than 140 credits to his name and has worked with names ranging from Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu (who gave him his first major French-language role in Trahir) to Fanny Ardant (who recently directed him in Cadences obstinées, her second feature as a director) that doesn’t mean the Hasselt-born thespian is someone who’s easily satisfied: ‘I’m not necessarily happy with the roles I’ve done. If you count the number of roles that I’m proud of, you would get about 10 titles. And this has nothing to do with the size of the role, either; a small part that was performed well can be very satisfying.’

Even for The Verdict there was initially some hesitation on Leysen’s part: ‘Jan was immediately sure that I could do this role, something I wasn’t necessarily convinced of before we started. But he’s a very precise director. I tried to not make a whole show of my character’s courtroom appearances and be honest — for as far as honesty can exist in a courtroom environment — and address the jury honestly. Thankfully, Jan and I were on the same wavelength about the approach to my character.’

His co-stars in the film, Veerle Baetens and Koen De Bouw, are famous stars at home: ‘I’m sure it’s something that’s important for financing and promoting the film but once you start shooting, you’ll find they’re just actors that want to do a good job and neither of them lets their reputation influence the work they do. In that sense, as actors, we were all equal before the law,’ says Leysen, laughing.

The humble actor wouldn’t call himself a famous Belgian and even admits to ‘work hard to avoid that status. The one thing that would be an advantage would perhaps be a bigger choice of roles.

But I’ve been lucky enough to do theatre and TV as well as films in several countries, so what I’ve done has been too much of a hybrid thing for me to become really famous for one thing. In any case, it is not something I want to pursue and there’s no logic to it, as some mediocre people are very famous and some very talented people are not.’

As for the size of the production, surely one of the biggest in Flanders this year, he says: ‘I’m not sure if the crew on The Verdict was actually smaller than on a film like François Ozon’s. The means of the film and some of the names attached to it definitely made it clear that this was a project that’s meant for a large audience and not some obscure experimental work. But those things actually don’t matter that much for me personally. The final result is either a good or a bad film.’

local films

The Flemish actor has kept returning to his home country for roles in different projects, though the last couple of years, his Belgian cinema experience has been limited to supporting roles in Frenchlanguage films such as Stijn Coninx’ Sister Smile and Joachim Lafosse’s Private Lessons. ‘I must admit I don’t actively lobby for roles in Flemish films,’ says Leysen. ‘Perhaps people think, since I work abroad most of the time, that I’m never available or maybe that I’m too expensive. But I’m interested in all kinds of roles.’

Being based in France and often on the road, Leysen doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to see all the exciting new films that come out of Flanders but what he does manage to see he’s ‘very impressed by. There’s a welcome tendency, like in Bullhead, to find universal themes through specifically local stories. If you completely deny the local specifics of a story, very often you end up in a sort of no man’s land that no one recognizes.’

‘In cinema, the material that you work with is very different from the theatre because the texts are rarely literary and the words are more often colloquial,’ Leysen continues. ‘So films are more often rooted in a recognizable reality. When you play Hamlet, it’s irrelevant whether he comes from [the Flemish village of] Poperinge or somewhere else. But there are films like Bullhead in which the story is very specifically rooted in a place and this also expresses itself in the language. People used to be ashamed of their accents but now they’ve become more comfortable with it, which is great.’

Dutch-language roles do remain something special for the actor: ‘I love doing them because they are a bit like holidays. It’s always a joy, also in theatre, to do a role in Dutch because learning your lines in a foreign language remains extra hard work. I’m currently preparing for King Lear and doing Shakespeare in French if you’re not French is not a walk in the park! When I see with what suppleness my French colleagues handle the language during rehearsals, I realize I have to put in more work than they do. So a Dutch-language role is a treat. I think I’m a more relaxed actor. The only country or place where you really live as an actor is in your language, so that makes working abroad always a bit more of a challenge.’  The Verdict

JOHAN LEYSEN (°1950)* (2013) – THE VERDICT (2012) - THE SPIRAL (TV SERIES) (2010) – THE AMERICAN (2009) – SISTER SMILE (2008) – ÉLÈVE LIBRE (2008) – SUMMER HEAT (2005) – SOMEONE ELSE'S HAPPINESS (2003) – GRIMM (2002) – MOONLIGHT (2001) – THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (2000) – LE ROI DANSE (1994) – LA REINE MARGOT (1992) – DAENS (1988) – THE MUSIC TEACHER (1988) – THE ABYSS * selected filmography

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JAN

ONE ANGRY

IN FICTION. THE FACTUAL INSPIRATION CAME EARLY IN 2009, WHEN 10 DRUG DEALERS AND PEOPLE TRAFFICKERS WERE RELEASED ON A TECHNICALITY FROM A BELGIAN JAIL. CAMERAS WAITING AT THE PRISON GATES BROADCAST IMAGES OF THEIR HAPPY, SMILING FACES TO THE NATION. THE VERDICT

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HAD TWO STARTING POINTS, ONE IN FACT AND ONE

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JAN VERHEYEN'S NEW LEGAL DRAMA THE VERDICT

PREMIERES AT THIS YEAR'S MONTREAL WORLD FILM FEST AS PART OF THE OFFICIAL WORLD COMPETITION. TEXT IAN MUNDELL PORTRAIT NYK DEKEYSER

'A lot of people were shocked by that, asking how it was possible, and I had the same reaction,' Verheyen recalls. 'There was no question of guilt or innocence – they did it! – but they had to be released because of a procedural error. And that stuck with me.'

The fictional inspiration came during his thriller Dossier K., when a corrupt public prosecutor justifies himself by saying that the law is not always the same as justice. 'I thought that was a great line,' Verheyen says. 'It made his character interesting: he wasn't just a cardboard villain, he did what he did because he believed in something.'

These two ideas were enough to start Verheyen on the path to a story. But as a self-confessed film geek he had a third motivation. 'I've always liked courtroom dramas,' he says, citing classics such as Witness for the Prosecution and 12 Angry Men. 'Even the more recent John Grisham films, however tacky they may be, as soon as they are in that courtroom... My God! I realised that something like that had never been done in our film history.'

watertight process

Usually Verheyen joins a project when it is already in development, but this time he decided to write the script himself. 'Firstly, because I was fascinated by the whole idea, and secondly because I wanted to see if I was up to the challenge, if I could lengthen my attention span long enough to go through the process of writing, rewriting, checking, going back to the sources,' he says.

This process had to be watertight. 'Considering the subtleties involved and the potential for controversy, I did not want to be caught out on details. I wanted to have everything right.'

The first storylines he came up with focused on the injustice of the situation, but then he started talking with lawyers who specialise in procedure. 'They helped me make it more nuanced,' he says. 'The film evolved from a pamphlet to something where, I hope, people come out of the theatre and start having a serious discussion.'

The Verdict centres on Luc Segers, a man who loses his wife and young child in a violent encounter with a criminal, Kenny De Groot. When a procedural error sets De Groot free, Segers takes matters into his own hands. He tracks De Groot down and shoots him. Then he demands a trial by jury.

'In the end the film asks: what would you do?' Verheyen explains. 'Not only what would you do if you were Luc Segers, but more importantly: what would you do if you were on that jury?'

screen presence

While the substance of the argument plays out in the courtroom, the way Segers ends up on trial is vital to the drama. 'Something has to happen to him that is so emotionally devastating that, as an audience, you are willing to go with him to the dark side.'

The risk is that people read this as a conventional vigilante film, such as Death Wish or Harry Brown. 'I like genre films, but I didn't want to indulge myself too much. It needed to be more

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The Verdict

than that,' Verheyen says. Equally the slick, urban feel he wanted for the first part of the film had to blend with the more realistic drama of the courtroom. 'Finding that balance was difficult as well.'

Verheyen had Koen De Bouw in mind to play Segers from the outset. 'He is the kind of actor who can dominate a film,' he says. 'In the second part of the film he has virtually no dialogue, and still it is his film. And that is typical for Koen. He has an incredible screen presence.'

When it came to casting the legal roles, Verheyen tried to avoid manipulating the audience. It would be too easy to make Segers' defence lawyer a nice guy and turn those opposing him into villains.

For the defence, he chose Johan Leysen, a distinguished but sometimes distant presence on screen. 'Johan has authority and empathy, but he is not the most huggable actor around,' he says.

'On the other hand I wanted the lawyer who represents Kenny De Groot to be someone who you could like. That was Veerle Baetens.'

The role of the prosecutor was written with Jappe Claes in mind, partly because it was his line in Dossier K. that started Verheyen thinking. 'For me Jappe will always be the prosecutor,' he says.

'Because of his physique, he is possibly the least likeable of the three lawyers, but I think Veerle compensates for that.'

important balance

All three get substantial speeches in court to argue their points of view. 'It isn't written like film dialogue,' Verheyen explains. 'There are long sentences with a lot of clauses, which for an actor is not simple, but when it works, it works really well.'

He realised that such long, complicated speeches would be demanding to perform. 'I knew I couldn't ask them to do this 15 times, that there is a certain build up,' he says. 'When you have a five-page speech, you cannot say: I just need a close up of line 15 on page three. So I tried to be helpful to them.'

nter view

Producer Peter Bouckaert is interested in films that occupy the middle ground between commercial and art‑house cinema. 'If we make a film with large market potential it needs to be of a certain quality and to have an added value – a layered story, for example, or a challenging subject. If we do a first-time film or a film about a difficult topic, we are not in it just to be seen by a few hundred people at a couple of festivals. We want to reach an audience.'

The Verdict fits the bill, combining crime and courtroom drama with a story that questions the working of the legal system. 'It has a built-in marketing power, but is not an easy subject,' he says. 'Half of the film takes place in court, so there is a lot of dialogue. There is a fantastic cast but it's not a film you can compare to other Jan Verheyen films.'

This is the fifth film Verheyen has made with Bouckaert and Eyeworks Belgium, following the thrillers Missing Persons Unit and Dossier K., romantic drama Cut Loose and rom-com Crazy About Ya. 'What I like about Peter is that he is a creative producer,' Verheyen says. 'He has a creative vision. He has good taste, which always helps. He makes a distinct creative contribution to the film.

And you don't have to watch your back the whole time, he doesn't have a hidden agenda.'

It's a relationship that Verheyen hopes to continue, either with one of his own projects or something from Bouckaert's stock. 'There is a film that I want to write myself, and a number of things in development at Eyeworks, where I have a first-look deal,' he says.

Meanwhile he plans to direct episodes in the new season of TV crime drama Missing Persons Unit, also produced by Eyeworks.

i

FIRST LOOK AT EYEWORKS

www.eyeworksfilm.be

One way he did this was to shoot the court scenes with two cameras, one operated by DoP Frank van den Eeden, the other

by Ruben Impens, also an experienced cinematographer. 'We knew that, in the editing, we'd need a lot of angles in order to cut it dynamically, and with the two cameras that worked really well,' Verheyen says. 'It has a degree of realism that I really like. It is realistic, but it's still a movie.'

The trial was filmed in a court house in Bruges, which the production took over for more than a week. Extras in the crowd and particularly on the jury were asked to sign up for the whole shooting period. 'They were like a real jury. They were there every day, they listened to all the witnesses, they listened to all the arguments. Then, on the very last day, we distributed voting cards and asked them what they would do,' Verheyen recalls.

'I was a bit concerned that there would be a landslide for letting Luc go, but that wasn't the case. The jury was eight for acquittal, four for imprisonment, and with the audience it was even closer. I thought that was an interesting experiment.'

That balance is important in a film which aims to stimulate debate as well as to entertain. 'I have no pretensions about changing the world, but what I do like is a good discussion,' Verheyen says. 'I love it when you come out of a movie theatre and you have something to talk about.' 

'I like genre films, but I didn't want to indulge myself too much. It needed to be more than that' JAN VERHEYEN (°1963)* (2013) – THE VERDICT (2010) – CRAZY ABOUT YA (2009) – DOSSIER K. (2008) – CUT LOOSE (2007) – MISSING PERSONS UNIT (2005) – GILLES (2003) – TEAM SPIRIT 2 (2002) – ALIAS (2000) – TEAM SPIRIT (1996) – EVERYTHING MUST GO (1996) – THE LITTLE DEATH (1992) – BOYS * selected filmography

21

TE X T IAN MUNDELL

short i ssimo

22

HOUSES WITH SMALL WINDOWS Bülent Öztürk Fiction, 15' A young Kurdish woman has shamed her family and therefore has to die at the hands of her own brothers. According to tradition the killing must be compensated so yet another victim is made.

Bülent Öztürk was born in Turkey and came to Belgium as a student refugee in 1995. He attended film school in Brussels, returning to Turkey to shoot his graduation film, a documentary about the inhabitants of a supposedly deserted village. He followed this with Waiting, a documentary about survivors of the earthquake that hit eastern Turkey in October 2011.

Houses With Small Windows also began as a documentary project. Öztürk set out to explore arranged marriages among Turkey’s Kurds, using his mother’s experience as a way into the story. After just a couple of days shooting, however, his mother was unable to continue. Confronting the moment in her childhood when she was effectively given to another family was just too traumatic.

So Öztürk decided to take a more oblique approach, through fiction. The story he chose to tell is dramatic. A young woman is subject to an honour killing for an adulterous relationship and a six-year-old girl is given over in ‘compensation’ by the family of the man she loved. But his way of telling the story is elusive, focusing on the periods of waiting and preparation for this exchange in women as property.

The rural setting makes the story seem timeless, bridging the gap between his mother’s experience 60 years ago and the present, where custom remains unchanged. What comes over is a sense of sadness rather than outrage, and above all the feeling of an idyllic childhood shattered. Öztürk’s next project, Blue Silence, will also be fiction, developing the poetic approach to storytelling and cinematography begun in his documentaries and this fiction debut.

Houses With Small Windows has its world première at the Venice Film Festival in August. It is produced by Clin d’oeil Films.  www.houseswithsmallwindows.be

WOLF’S MILK

DUST BREEDING

Hans Vercauter Fiction, 15'

Sarah Vanagt Experimental documentary, 50'

When Marcus gets out of jail he is surprised to see his older brother Simon waiting for him. Then he is angry, lashing out.

There is a debt to pay.

Writer-director Hans Vercauter graduated from the RITS film school in Brussels in 2002, going on to build a career in commercials. Working for clients in Belgium and abroad, he gained a reputation for humour and the creative use of 3D animation.

But there is nothing funny about Wolf's Milk, his first professional short. Marcus and Simon seem to hate each other, yet they are resigned to keep company for the sake of the family. Their parents are waiting to welcome Marcus home, along with Ana, Simon's wife, and young son, a nephew barely born when Marcus went away.

Marcus is haunted by the deaths that led to his imprisonment, but he is also keeping a secret. No-one knows what it is, except Simon. As day turns into night, the brothers become locked in a battle of wills over whether or not the truth should come out.

Wolf's Milk may have none of Vercauter's trademark humour, but there is a touch of the effects wizard in a sequence where Marcus flashes back to the moment that sent him to jail. Quietly inserted into the realism of the drama, it opens a window on the character's psychological turmoil.

The film is also full of famous faces. Marcus is played by Wouter Hendrickx, whose recent credits include The Misfortunates, Brasserie Romantique and The Verdict.

Simon is Ben Segers, a busy TV actor in the award-winning comedy show What If ? and series such as Code 37 and Quiz Me Quick. Marijke Pinoy and Johan Van Assche, also well known from TV, appear as the parents, while Ana is played by Wine Dierickx (With Friends Like These, Madly in Love).

Produced by Caviar, Wolf's Milk rolls out internationally at the Montréal World Film Festival, where the film is shown in Competition. 

A close reading of surfaces at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia parallels the lawyers’ detailed examination of photographs, which may or may not point to war crimes.

Sarah Vanagt is drawn to moments when people test new ways of dealing with their past. ‘I find it fascinating to see how these moments find their shape, or not, and what kind of tensions are created,’ she says. This has led her to film children’s games in African conflict zones and, in The Wave, the excavation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War. Her interest in the tribunal in The Hague began when she met someone who worked there. He explained that its legal procedures, based on the spoken word, were having trouble accommodating with visual evidence. ‘I thought that was interesting, as a filmmaker as well. How do we deal with images of war and atrocity within this setting?’

She started to look at the work of the tribunal and the way in which proceedings were televised. But the key to her artistic response was the idea of making pencil or crayon rubbings of the surfaces in the courtroom: the tables and chairs, the glass on the translators’ booth, the tiles on the floor.

‘I don’t know where the idea came from,’ she says. ‘Maybe it has a symbolic meaning, the movement of a hand trying to erase a difficult past and then a new texture appears.’

It was only after she had this idea that she started to delve into the tribunal's visual archive. ‘Then I started to see links with the visual material and the way it was as abstract as my rubbings.’

In the final film, images of Vanagt making the rubbings are edited together with footage from the court, showing the lawyers and Radovan Karadžić, defending himself, examining visual evidence, trying to tease meaning out of vague smears of pixels.

Dust Breeding had its international première at FIDMarseille in July.  www.balthasar.be

23

MIA UNLOCKS THE CITY

24

MIA APPEARS TO BE ABOUT A LITTLE GIRL WHO BECOMES SEPARATED FROM HER MOTHER IN THE BIG CITY. BUT THERE ARE OTHER WAYS OF SEEING THINGS, ACCORDING TO DIRECTOR WOUTER BONGAERTS. 'MIA IS A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD WHO TRIES TO FREE HER MOTHER FROM THE CLUTCHES OF AN OVERPOPULATED CITY,' HE SAYS. 'ON HER QUEST TO DO SO, SHE FINDS THE SECRET THAT MAKES THE WORLD TURN.' TEXT IAN MUNDELL

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

team work

After a number of internships at animation studios Bongaerts already had experience of the team work involved in making a cartoon, but this was his first time at the helm. ‘I wanted to keep everyone motivated, for everyone to contribute to the film and feel that they were really part of it, but at the same time give it my own direction,’ he says.

Mia

'I think my strength as a writer and as a director is to be vulnerable in my stories and to make them feel honest. I want to make films that are sincere. If I can do that, it's mission accomplished'

an i mation

That point at which the world turns, and how it turns, is a secret that should not be revealed too soon. ‘The viewer should discover the secret at the same moment as Mia discovers it,’ he adds.

However, it is giving nothing away to say that the secret is closely connected to the way the film looks. ‘A lot of the time I feel that shorts either have a good emotional core or have an interesting visual concept, and I wanted to combine the two and have the best of both worlds,’ Bongaerts explains. ‘Finding that balance was pretty hard, but I think we managed to pull it off.’

Bongaerts graduated from the Media, Arts & Design Faculty in Genk in 2010 with the short film Mouse for Sale, about a lonely mouse trying to attract the attention of customers in a pet shop. This charming short won the Flanders Audiovisual Fund’s first animation VAF Wildcard, an award that provides funding towards the winner’s first professional film and a mentor to help them on their way.

Mia is the result.

Having devised the central idea, Bongaerts wrote the script for Mia with Bert Vandecasteele, a friend and screenwriter now based in Berlin. As a mentor, he chose Tom Van Gestel, a freelance animator who specialises in production design, from decor to characters. ‘He’s very talented and has very high standards. It almost intimidates me, but I needed this guy to give me feedback, because when he’s happy I know it’s really good.’

Van Gestel led him through the design phase of the film, in particular the production of a series of stills that establish Mia’s world and also hint at its secret. ‘I wanted to give the city an eerie feeling,’ Bongaerts says of the images, which are full of strange perspectives and angles. ‘You feel that there is something wrong with the city, but you don’t know what it is.’

By this time the project also had a producer in Viviane Vanfleteren of Vivi Film, who sent the script and the stills out to animation studios around Belgium. As a result, Creative Conspiracy in Ghent signed up to make the film.

‘I was really happy to work with them because I always found their work very clean, very professional, even on short commercials,’ Bongaerts says. ‘Each department has its own specialist and that shows in the work. That was also fun for me, because at every stage there was someone different for me to work with, who could really advise me and with whom I had a close connection.’

DOMINIQUE ABEL, CHANTAL AKERMAN, YAËL ANDRE, JEAN-JACQUES ANDRIEN, HERMAN ASSELBERGHS, STÉPHANE AUBIER, VINCENT BAL, KADIR BALCI, NIC BALTHAZAR, TOM BARMAN, LUCAS BELVAUX, MAHMOUD BEN MAHMOUD, NABIL BEN YADIR, SOFIE BENOOT, ALAIN BERLINER, PHILIPPE BLASBAND, MANU BONMARIAGE, JEAN BRISMEE, PETER BROSENS & JESSICA WOODWORTH, JEAN MARIE BUCHET, JAN BUCQUOY, HÉLÈNE CATTET, LYDIA CHAGOLL, HARRY CLEVEN, ANDRÉ COLINET, STIJN CONINX, GILLES COULIER, VANJA D'ALCANTARA, JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE, LUC DARDENNE, ROBBE DE HERT, ERIC DE KUYPER, THOMAS DE THIER, LIEVEN DEBRAUWER, BAVO DEFURNE, OLIVIER DEKEGEL, DOMINIQUE DERUDDERE, MARC DIDDEN, MARTINE DOYEN, PIERRE DROUOT, FABRICE DU WELZ, PIERRE DUCULOT, FRÉDÉRIC DUMONT, GEOFFREY ENTHOVEN, FRÉDÉRIC FONTEYNE, BRUNO FORZANI, GÉRALD FRYDMAN, SAM GARBARSKI, JONAS GEIRNAERT, JEAN-NOËL GOBRON, NOËL GODIN, MANU GOMEZ, FIONA GORDON, YVES HANCHAR, MARION HÄNSEL, HANS HERBOTS, MARY JIMENEZ, DIMITRI KARAKATSANIS, THIERRY KNAUFF, PETER KRÛGER, HARRY KÜMEL, JOACHIM LAFOSSE, ERIK LAMENS, BOULI LANNERS, PATRICK LE BON, BORIS LEHMAN, ANNIK LEROY, ROLAND LETHEM, FRANÇOISE LEVIE, ANNE LEVY-MORELLE, BÉNÉDICTE LIENARD, DOMINIQUE LOREAU, GUILLAUME MALANDRIN, MARIE MANDY, OLIVIER MASSET-DEPASSE, URSULA MEIER, GENEVIÈVE MERSCH, CHRISTIAN MESNIL, THIERRY MICHEL, SARAH MOON HOWE, YOLANDE MOREAU, KOEN CARTE BLANCHE TO 125 BELGIAN FILM DIRECTORS MORTIER, RICHARD OLIVIER, CLAUDIO PAZIENZIA, LUC PIEN, MANUEL POUTTE, NICOLAS PROVOST, INÈS RABADAN, JAWAD RHALIB, MANU RICHE, HENRI ROANNE, MICHAELROSKAM, SOPHIE SCHOUKENS, RAOUL SERVAIS, OLIVIER SMOLDERS, FRÉDÉRIC SOJCHER, DOMINIQUE STANDAERT, ALEX STOCKMAN, STEPHAN STREKER, CAROLINE STRUBBE, GUY LEE THYS, JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT, FIEN TROCH, TOM VAN AVERMAET, DOROTHÉE VAN DEN BERGHE, GUST VAN DEN BERGHE, RUDI VAN DEN BOSSCHE, JACO VAN DORMAEL, FELIX VAN GROENINGEN, PIETER VAN HEES, ERIK VAN LOOY, FRANK VAN MECHELEN, HILDE VAN MIEGHEM, HANS VAN NUFFEL, FRANK VAN PASSEL, SARAH VANAGT, WIM VANDEKEYBUS, LUCKAS ROYAL BELGIAN FILM ARCHIVE - BRUSSELS 2013 www.cinematek.be VANDER TAELEN, WALTER VERDIN, JAN VERHEYEN, JULIEN VREBOS, MARC-HENRI WAJNBERG, MICHA WALD, WILLEM WALLYN, THIERRY ZENO

˜ we proudly present our ˜

75 anniversary programming team th

16.11 > 31.12

an i mation Mia

Yet it sometimes felt strange. ‘A lot of the time when I was directing I felt that everyone was working except me,’ he recalls. ‘But I was able to animate a part of the film, for a couple of weeks, and I was happy to contribute again with my own hands.’

own ideas

On balance, he feels comfortable in this new role. ‘Directing feels natural to me, but I do want to get some more experience,’ he says. ‘I’d really like to direct some new shorts, or a series or commercials, but I’d also be happy to be part of a team and learn more about the different aspects of animation. Then, when I come back to directing, I’ll make better decisions.’

Either way, he will continue working on his own ideas. ‘I think my strength as a writer and as a director is to be vulnerable in my stories and to make them feel honest,’ he says. ‘I want to make films that are sincere. If I can do that, it’s mission accomplished.’ 

www.vivifilm.be creative.be

SCHOOL OF GENK Mia is the result of a lot of hard work by Wouter Bongaerts and the team at Creative Conspiracy, but it also owes something to the Media, Arts & Design Faculty in Genk, where Bongaerts studied. ‘The philosophy of the school was that, when you graduate, you will be useful in a studio from day one,’ he says. ‘I really liked that mentality, because if you want to find a job in animation that’s the way to do it.’

But at the same time, the school encourages its students to find their inner auteur. ‘The faculty has a nice balance between commercial and artistic. It teaches you the basics and how things work technically, but it also challenges you to find your own style. And that’s exactly what happened with Mia. So in that sense, the fingerprint of the school is in the film as well.’

27

28

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TRA édition française

EN CAVALE Quand Caroline Strubbe remporte son prix d'écriture à Cannes pour Lost Persons Area, elle a un secret inavouable. « Le film a eu du succès mais je me disais : 'Je ne prends aucun plaisir au processus, je me demande vraiment si j'ai envie d'être réalisatrice.’ » Mais pas question pour elle d'abandonner, car Lost Persons Area ne raconte que le début de l'histoire. Elle veut la raconter en entier.

Heureusement, I’m the same I’m an other a été pour elle une expérience plus positive. Le film est sélectionné pour le Festival International du Film de Toronto.

PAR Ian Mundell PHOTO Bart Dewaele « Pour la première fois, on s’est amusés, » admet Caroline Strubbe. « J’étais très soulagée de savoir que c’était possible. » En abandonnant la caméra-film pour passer au numérique, elle a pu travailler avec une équipe plus réduite, qui, chose importante, croyait en sa méthode. « C’était une équipe beaucoup plus jeune que la précédente, ils adoraient cette manière de travailler. » Le fait que l’histoire soit inachevée tient à

la méthode de Strubbe. « Ma manière de tourner est très organique, » expliquet-elle. « Je n’ai pas de découpage, je tourne de manière chronologique et la caméra suit l’action des acteurs, qui peuvent se déplacer où ils veulent, un peu comme dans un documentaire. » Plutôt que fixer à l’avance le style du film, elle le laisse émerger de l’interaction entre les acteurs et le lieu, en n’utilisant que la lumière ambiante. « La caméra

capture l’énergie des acteurs dans la scène, le style en découle. » Le film qu’elle tourne en 2008, originellement conçu comme une trilogie, a été comprimé en un seul, combinant présent et flashbacks. « J’ai commencé à tourner, mais toutes les scènes étaient trois fois plus longues que prévu, » se souvient-elle. « J’ai tourné les flashbacks, mais il ne restait plus de temps ni de pellicule pour tourner les autres parties.

INTERVIEW

« Au début, j'ai dû me battre, car c'était mon premier long et tout le monde veut t'apprendre à faire ça ‘dans les règles’.

Maintenant, je fais ce que je veux. » I'm the same I'm an other

J’ai dû arrêter, j’ai commencé à monter la matière que j’avais et ça a donné un film complet. » Se retrouver avec un tiers du film escompté aurait pu être gênant, mais le résultat, Lost Persons Area, est sélectionné pour la Semaine de la Critique à Cannes et récolte un prix. « Heureusement, il y a eu ce moment fort à Cannes, qui m’a permis d’être plus libre. Au début, j’ai dû me battre, car c’était mon premier long et tout le monde veut t’apprendre à faire ça ‘dans les règles’. Maintenant, je fais ce que je veux. » Elle décide de combiner les deux autres parties de la trilogie en un deuxième film, mais cette fois encore les personnages s’affirment et s’approprient l’histoire. « Le processus s’est répété. Le film était mieux sans la troisième partie, je finirai donc par réaliser la trilogie que je voulais faire depuis le début. » Lost Persons Area raconte l’histoire d’un couple passionné mais replié sur lui-même, dont la fille de neuf ans, Tessa, laissée à elle-même, s’invente un monde merveilleux dans le no man’s land industriel où la famille vit et travaille. « C’est un film qui parle du fait qu’on est marqué par ce qu’on vit dans l’enfance, qu’il faut vivre avec, que notre

relation avec nos parents détermine nos relations futures. »

une résonance personnelle

I’m the same I’m an other reprend l’histoire au moment où Tessa fuit la maison familiale avec Szabolcs, un ingénieur hongrois qui travaille pour son père. Ils disparaissent, rejoignent l’Angleterre en bateau et louent un appartement dans une station balnéaire à l’abandon. Dans cet espace clos, Szabolcs et Tessa testent la limite de leur relation.

Le titre est tiré d’un poème de Gianluca Manzi, lu par le grand trompettiste de jazz Chet Baker lors d’un de ses derniers enregistrements. « En rencontrant quelqu’un, on change, même si on reste qui on est, » explique Strubbe.

Tout comme Lost Persons Area, cette histoire a pour Strubbe une résonance personnelle. « Elle évoque la recherche d’une figure paternelle. J’ai toujours voulu être adoptée par une autre famille.

Je voulais que quelqu’un me dise : ‘Je veux vraiment être ton père, viens dans ma famille.’ J’ai vécu de tels moments dans ma vie, de très beaux moments. » On pense au syndrome de Stockholm - où une personne s’identifie à son

ravisseur - ou à d’autres relations inégales. « Pour moi, cette histoire parle aussi du rapport entre hommes et femmes, même si Tessa n’est qu’une petite fille. Elle illustre la condition de la femme. Dès un très jeune âge, les filles adoptent un certain rôle... » Kimke Desart reprend son rôle de Tessa. À 11 ans, elle paraît nettement plus âgée que dans le premier film, mais pour Strubbe, c’est un avantage plutôt qu’un problème. « Il est important pour moi que le film montre cette ambiguïté d’une enfant qui devient une jeune femme, » explique-t’elle. « À un moment, Tessa doit d’une certaine manière séduire Szabolcs, et cette ambiguïté n’est pas facile à jouer. Kimke l’a fait sans problème. J’étais soulagée car c’est un des thèmes du film, ce côté séducteur des filles, que les hommes interprètent souvent mal. » Szabolcs (Zoltan Miklos Hajdu) doit pour sa part démêler la relation dans laquelle il s’est fourré. « Il a peur d’être aimé, peur que cette fillette attende quelque chose de lui. C’est un jeu où on rejette, on revient, puis on finit par accepter. Ils acceptent les rôles qu’ils jouent, en ce sens c’est une sorte d’histoire d’amour. » Son personnage diffère de celui de

INTERVIEW

Lost Persons Area. « Dans le premier film, Szabolcs est un type bien, alors qu’ici il oscille entre ange et démon. Il est limite et finit par faire le bon choix. »

caméra numérique

Strubbe filme selon le même principe que dans le premier film, en laissant les acteurs dicter le style et le rythme.

La différence principale, c’est le décor, beaucoup plus confiné que dans Lost Persons Area. « Tessa ne quitte pas cet appartement très étroit, les acteurs étaient plus contraints dans leurs mouvements. » La caméra numérique lui permet de laisser plus encore de liberté aux acteurs. « On pouvait tourner beaucoup et capturer le bon moment, » dit-elle. Elle écrit toujours en cours de tournage et modifie des éléments quand la situation évolue. « Il faut avoir une équipe qui apprécie cette manière de travailler.

C’est un peu comme de l’improvisation musicale, il faut bien connaître ses notes.

Je connais très bien mon scénario pour l’avoir travaillé pendant cinq ans. » Son directeur photo, Nicolas

I'm the same I'm an other

Karakatsanis, n’étant pas disponible pour le tournage, c’est David Williamson, un jeune réalisateur très demandé en tant que directeur photo, qui le remplace derrière la caméra. « Il y avait beaucoup plus d’interaction avec l’équipe. Tout le monde s’intéressait au film, pas seulement à son propre job. Nous avons passé beaucoup de temps ensemble, toute l’équipe a contribué au processus.

C’était pareil après le tournage avec mon monteur, David Verdurme. Notre collaboration a été très intense. Ou avec mon producteur Tomas Leyers, qui accepte le concept et comprend que la manière dont on travaille détermine ou influence forcément le résultat final.

C’est, je pense, une qualité assez rare chez les producteurs aujourd’hui. » Il ne reste plus maintenant qu’à réaliser le dernier chapitre de la trilogie, Deep In A Dream of You, titre également tiré d’une chanson de Chet Baker. Dans cette troisième partie, Tessa retrouve Szabolcs plusieurs années après le dénouement dramatique du second film.

Le contenu exact de l’histoire est encore en flux. « J’ai changé en faisant ces deux

films, » dit Strubbe, « les personnages changeront donc peut-être aussi. »

ombre et lumière

Outre la complétion de la trilogie entamée avec Lost Persons Area, Caroline Strubbe a plusieurs projets en tête. Notamment un retour à Leysdownon-Sea, la station balnéaire à l’abandon dans l’estuaire de la Tamise ou elle a tourné les séquences anglaises de I’m the same I’m an other. « Les gens sont très pauvres mais incroyablement chaleureux, » dit-elle, évoquant les rencontres qu’elle a faites pendant les séances de casting de figurants. « Ils ont tant d’histoires à raconter. Je veux y retourner pour un documentaire ou pour un projet où je pourrais avoir recours à eux en tant qu’acteurs. » Un autre projet de documentaire porte sur trois femmes artistes ayant en commun le suicide, plus précisément leur décision de se donner la mort en sautant dans le vide. « Je cherche à comprendre ce qui les unit, » dit Strubbe, expliquant qu’un facteur commun semble être la jalousie de leur partenaire. « C’est un aspect de cette problématique qui me fascine. » Pour prendre le contrepied de cette noirceur, elle a aussi écrit une comédie relatant les quiproquos et déboires qui émaillent le premier weekend où un père a la garde de son enfant en bas âge.

Alors que la mère prend ses premiers jours et nuits de liberté en cinq ans, l’enfant s’échappe par la porte d’entrée et s’enfonce dans la ville. Des chemins se croisent, la confusion monte, mais tout s’arrange à la fin. « C’est une comédie soft, légère, » dit Strubbe, citant You and Me and Everyone We Know de Miranda July et After Hours de Martin Scorsese. « Je veux travailler avec les acteurs, sur le dialogue, le contraire de ce que je fais pour l’instant, » poursuitelle. « Maintenant que j’ai bouclé le scénario, je suis curieuse de découvrir le style qui en résultera. Comment réaliser une comédie en tournant de cette manière ? »

RENCONTRE

SEUL DANS LA FOULE Pour se préparer en vue de son rôle dans le drame judiciaire Le verdict, qui sera présenté en compétition au festival de Montréal, Koen De Bouw s'est entraîné... à ne rien faire. « J'ai pensé aller au tribunal pour observer comment ça se passe, » dit-il, « mais c'est aussi le premier jour au tribunal pour le personnage que j'incarne. La meilleure façon de me préparer, c'était de ne pas y aller, pour que le premier jour de tournage soit aussi ma première journée au tribunal. » PAR Ian Mundell PHOTO Bart Dewaele Il ressent un frisson quand la caméra entre en action et que la foule de figurants commence à le prendre à partie. « Même en tant qu’acteur, c’était parfois dur d’être assis là en me sachant innocent, ou en me disant que si j’avais fait quelque chose, c’était pour une bonne raison, pendant que des gens me hurlaient dessus alors qu’ils ne savaient pas ce qui s’était passé. » se rappelle-t-il. Cette sensation perdure avec la progression des scènes d’accusation. « Tout ce qu’on peut faire c’est rester assis et se taire pendant que d’autres parlent... Ça a été une expérience éprouvante. » De Bouw joue le rôle de Luc Segers, un

homme qui perd sa femme et son jeune enfant lors d’une rencontre violente avec un criminel. Quand le tueur est libéré suite à une erreur de procédure, Segers prend les choses en mains. Il pourchasse l’homme et l’abat. Puis il met le système judiciaire au défi de le libérer lui aussi.

Segers est le genre de personnage troublé que De Bouw aime incarner à l’écran. « C’est un rôle subtil. Il faut pouvoir exprimer beaucoup d’un simple regard, sans une parole, et je sais que j’en suis capable, » dit-il. « Un tiers du film se passe dans une salle d’audience.

Cet homme est simplement assis là, mais il faut qu’on sente sa souffrance. »

De Bouw cite une référence inattendue pour décrire sa méthode. « C’est un peu comme l’effet Buster Keaton, » dit-il, évoquant la scène dans Steamboat Bill Jr. où quand une façade d’immeuble tombe sur lui, Keaton reste debout, indemne, dans l’espace laissé par la fenêtre. « C’est pour moi une image très marquante. Elle illustre un peu la manière dont je travaille en tant qu’acteur. Le reste du monde est en mouvement mais j’essaie d’être le plus serein possible.

Les scènes de tribunal en sont un bon exemple, quand tout bouge autour de Segers et qu’il reste immobile. » Cette façon de faire exige une grande

RENCONTRE

attention aux détails. « Quand je joue, je 'joue' aussi peu que possible, ce qui n’est pas évident. Chaque geste doit être là pour une raison, même quand le geste en question n’est pas censé avoir de raison. » La performance minimaliste de De Bouw dans Le verdict contraste fortement avec les scènes déclamatoires de Jappe Claes, Veerle Baetens (Alabama Monroe - The Broken Circle Breakdown) et Johan Leysen (The American) dans les rôles judiciaires principaux. « Bien sûr, les discours d’avocats comme ceux qu’on a donnés à Johan et Veerle, c’est génial. C’est super à faire. L’acteur a de la matière à se mettre sous la dent. »

sujet

Dans les premières versions du scénario, Segers ne disait pas un mot au tribunal. Puis l’auteur-réalisateur Jan Verheyen change d’avis et lui donne une déclaration finale. C’est néanmoins modeste comparé aux autres discours prononcés au tribunal. « Ça a été un défi pour moi de le dire avec le moins de mots possible, » dit De Bouw. « Ceci dit, j’essaie toujours de réduire le plus possible mon texte. Moins on utilise de mots, meilleure sera la performance. » De Bouw a tourné deux autres films avec Verheyen. Dans Urgence disparitions il jouait le rôle d’un chef de police en

charge de la cellule des personnes disparues qui enquête sur la disparition d’une adolescente, tandis que dans Dossier K., il reprenait son rôle de l’inspecteur de police Eric Vincke de L’affaire Alzheimer (La mémoire du tueur), affrontant cette fois une bande de gangsters albanais. Son rôle dans Le verdict est différent, mais il y voit un lien. « Jan sait que quand je joue Vincke dans Dossier K. ou dans L’affaire Alzheimer, il n’est pas simplement un officier de police. Le personnage est plus riche que ce que décrit l’histoire, donc Jan sait que je peux enrichir le rôle. Je crois que c’est pour ça qu’il m’a choisi. » Il voit aussi le film comme un nouveau départ pour Verheyen. « C’est le premier film qu’il écrit lui-même, ce qui exige un autre niveau d’engagement. Et c’est un sujet qui le concerne. Ce film tombe à pic pour lui, » dit De Bouw. « J’ai senti sur le plateau qu’il se développait en tant que réalisateur, c’est pourquoi il a pu faire ce film maintenant. Il a un savoir-faire qu’il n’avait pas il y a 10 ans. » Le sujet était séduisant pour De Bouw. « J’étais content de pouvoir entrer dans une histoire d’actualité, même si c’est désolant qu’elle le soit. Les journaux relatent chaque jour des histoires d’erreur de procédure, et il est très difficile pour les gens concernés de comprendre pourquoi ça leur arrive. »

« Quand je joue, je ‘joue’ aussi peu que possible, ce qui n’est pas évident. Chaque geste doit être là pour une raison, même quand le geste en question n’est pas censé avoir de raison. » Le verdict

effet

S’il s’attend à ce que Le verdict suscite un débat passionné à sa sortie en Belgique en octobre, il ne le considère pas comme un film militant. « Je ne crois pas que nous ayons la prétention de raconter une histoire qui va changer les choses, mais je ne voudrais pas non plus sous-estimer l’impact qu’elle pourrait avoir. C’est un film qui suscitera beaucoup de débats au sein de public et des médias. D’autre part l’histoire est suffisamment forte pour que le film fonctionne sans ça. »

www.hetvonnis.be

RENCONTRE

DOSSIER KOEN

Koen De Bouw poursuit des études au prestigieux Studio Herman Teirlinck à Anvers, qui le destinent au théâtre. Quand il en sort en 1987, le monde du cinéma et de la télévision est encore très fermé. « Le directeur de l’école ne voulait rien savoir du cinéma et de la télévision, » se souvient-il. « Tout l’accent était mis sur le théâtre et la danse. » Puis il se voit proposer un rôle dans un film hollandais, Han de Wit de Joost Ranzijn. Frustré d’être cantonné à des rôles de jeunes premiers au théâtre, il saisit l’occasion de jouer un anti-héros au grand écran. « C’était mon premier rôle au cinéma, très important pour moi à l’époque. C’était très impressionnant. J’étais fasciné par le fait de jouer pour la caméra, avec la caméra. C’est ainsi que je suis passé au monde du cinéma et de la télévision. » Si Han de Wit n’a pas à proprement parler marqué l’histoire du cinéma, De Bouw le considère comme le rôle décisif de sa filmographie. Il joue ensuite celui de l’inspecteur Eric Vincke dans L’affaire Alzheimer d’Erik Van Looy, qu’il reprend dans Dossier K. de Jan Verheyen. « Ce sont de bonnes histoires, de bons films, dans lesquels j’ai pu jouer des rôles principaux. Vincke est un beau personnage mélancolique. J’ai pu lui donner une autre dimension, au-delà de l’intrigue policière. » Il cite aussi The Intruder de Frank Van Mechelen, qui raconte l’histoire d’un père qui recherche désespérément sa fille en fugue. « C’est un personnage qu’on peut comparer à Luc dans Le verdict. J’aime jouer des personnages un peu perturbés, ou même très perturbés, mais qui n’en sont pas moins des hommes ordinaires. » Parallèlement aux rôles sombres qu’il incarne, De Bouw s’essaie aussi à la comédie. « Je suis heureux du fait que les gens découvrent aussi mon côté humoristique, » dit-il. Il joue dans des comédies populaires comme Germaine ou romantiques comme Madly in Love et Brasserie Romantique. « Il y a 10 ans, personne n’aurait prédit qu’on ferait un jour des comédies romantiques en Flandre. C’est un genre que nous venons de découvrir. C’est nouveau, il ne faut pas hésiter à expérimenter. » De Bouw choisit ses rôles sur base de la force de l’histoire. « Quand l’histoire est intéressante, les personnages le sont aussi, » dit-il. À l’horizon, des rôles comiques et d’action pour la télévision, dont un retour à la série Urgence disparitions distribuée dans plus de 90 territoires.

Au grand écran, on le verra dans le nouveau film de Hilde Van Mieghem, Speechless, tiré d’un roman de Tom Lanoye, et dans Double Face, troisième film avec l’inspecteur Eric Vincke. Aucun réalisateur n’a été annoncé pour ce projet à ce jour. Et à plus long terme, il a déjà signé pour travailler avec Erik Van Looy sur un long métrage dont le tournage aura lieu en 2015.

On le verra prochainement dans les salles obscures en Belgique dans la comédie Los Flamencos de Daniel Lambo, qui raconte l’histoire de trois frères qui préparent une attaque de banque pour honorer leur mère décédée. De Bouw joue à nouveau le rôle d’un policier, mais différent de tout ce qu’il a fait jusqu’ici. « C’est un homme à la fois très triste et très drôle, » dit-il. « Je ne sais pas vraiment à quoi m’attendre. C’est un de ces films qu’on joue sans avoir la moindre idée de ce que ça donnera à l’écran. On s’est bien amusés sur le tournage, ce qui est déjà important. Quand l’ambiance est bonne sur le plateau, en général le film est bon. »

SOUS INFLUENCE

PAR Ian Mundell PHOTO Bart Dewaele

Alors que ses études de cinéma touchent à leur fin, Bart Van den Bempt doit répondre à l’un de ses professeurs demandant à ses étudiants ce qu’ils comptent faire par la suite.

Van den Bempt se souvient avoir lancé « J’ai d’abord envie de voir le monde, et si dans 10 ans je peux faire quelque chose d’intéressant, ça me va. » C'est près de 20 ans plus tard qu’il présente son premier long métrage, 82 jours en avril, en première mondiale au Festival des Films du Monde de Montréal.

GROS-PLAN

« C’est un début très tardif, » reconnaît-il en riant. « Mais j’aime le chemin que j’ai suivi, un chemin long et tortueux, mais je me suis amusé et j’ai vu des tas de choses intéressantes. » Plus jeune, il est passionné de photographie et de jazz, mais pour raisons pratiques, il décide d’étudier la psychologie. Il était déjà cinéphile convaincu. « J’allais au cinéma quasiment tous les soirs et ce qui me plaisait le plus, c’était le cinéma européen, » ajoute-t-il, citant Mauvais sang de Leos Carax comme l’un de ses premiers favoris.

Sokurov et Depardon

Son diplôme de psychologie en poche, il passe l’examen d’entrée de l’école de cinéma Sint-Lukas à Bruxelles, un peu pour le fun, et il est pris. C’est là qu’il va découvrir des films qui inspireront son propre travail, mais surtout qui lui donneront envie de voyager. « Durant toutes ces années, le cinéma et les voyages ont toujours été liés dans mon esprit. » C’est par exemple Days of the Eclipse d’Aleksandr Sokurov qui le conduit en Asie centrale. « C’est un film très étrange, très lent, incroyablement beau. » Il admire également les documentaires de Raymond Depardon. « J’ai adoré son travail en Afrique, » reconnaît-il.

Après l’école de cinéma, Bart Van den Bempt travaille comme assistant réalisateur et ingénieur du son. « Je mettais de l’argent de côté puis je voyageais pendant des mois. J’ai notamment fait le tour du monde en bateau cargo, pendant presque un an.

Ce sont des moments essentiels dans ma vie. »

inspiration dans le voyage

Si certains de ses projets sont inspirés par le voyage, comme son documentaire sur la vie en Afrique du poète Arthur Rimbaud, la plupart ne se réalisent pas, par manque de financement ou par simple malchance. Entre-temps,

il se laisse persuader de réaliser une pub télévisée. « Sans qu’on s’en rende compte, on se réveille sept ans plus tard et on a fait des dizaines de pubs. » Il travaille ensuite pour la télévision, réalisant des reportages factuels sur tous les sujets, de la recherche d’une maison à la reproduction des animaux au zoo. Ça lui permet de payer le loyer tout en lui laissant le temps d’écrire 82 jours en avril, également inspiré par ses voyages. À bord d’un avion qui le ramène du Kirghizistan, il se demande ce qui arriverait si l’avion s’écrasait. Comment ses parents réagiraient-ils à son décès ?

L’avion atterrit sans mal à l’aéroport de Bruxelles, mais l’idée lui reste en tête.

82 jours en avril s’ouvre sur un couple belge d’une cinquantaine d’années qui se rend à Istanbul pour récupérer les effets de leur fils décédé là-bas alors qu’il voyageait en routard. C’est leur premier voyage hors d’Europe. Le père devient obsédé par le dernier périple de son fils, qu’il reconstruit au départ de son journal, de tickets et autres indices qu’il retrouve. La mère, elle, résiste. « Le film se concentre sur la façon dont ils gèrent leur deuil, chacun à sa manière, comment ils se perdent l’un l’autre pour par la suite se retrouver, » explique Bart Van den Bempt.

La Turquie est un pays qu’il connaît bien. « Du coup, je pouvais placer mes scènes dans des paysages ou des villes que je connaissais. On a tourné dans des chambres d’hôtel où j’avais séjourné quand j’avais 20 ans. » Il a également incorporé les saisons dans son récit. « À mesure que les deux personnages principaux se rapprochent, le monde se réchauffe autour d’eux, » explique-t-il.

Il filme la pluie à Istanbul, la neige dans l’est du pays près de l’Iran, le printemps à la frontière avec la Syrie. À l’écriture du scénario, il a sciemment choisi de ne pas rechercher de films de référence. « Il fallait que l’inspiration me vienne de mes propres voyages et des rencontres faites au cours de ces périples. » Il a également puisé

dans ses études de psychologie, plus particulièrement dans ce qu’il avait appris sur le processus de deuil.

Arnold et Ceylan

Mais la musique qu’il écoutait à l’époque s’infiltre dans le processus : les notes du trompettiste norvégien Arve Henriksen. « Au bout d’un moment, ça a commencé à avoir une influence sur le texte, » se souvient Bart Van den Bempt. Après une prise de contact informelle, les deux hommes se rencontrent. « Il a compris ce que j’aimais dans sa musique et comment je voulais l’utiliser. C’est lui qui compose maintenant la bande-son du film. » Le tournage approchant, Bart Van den Bempt commence à chercher des références visuelles en compagnie du directeur photo Rik Zang. Parmi les noms le plus souvent cités, les photographes Antoine D’Agata, Jonas Bendiksen et Yiorgos Kordakis, chacun avec un regard très particulier sur le monde. Du côté des exemples cinématographiques : le Wuthering Heights d’Andrea Arnold pour son traitement elliptique des émotions, et l’œuvre du réalisateur turc Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Mais l’important était de pouvoir répondre à ce qu’ils trouveraient sur place. « On s’est toujours dit : on a ça au cas où, mais on verra au moment du tournage s’il n’y a pas moyen de faire mieux. »

SHORTISSIMO

HOUSES WITH SMALL WINDOWS Le court métrage Houses With Small Windows de Bülent Öztürk est en compétition à La Mostra de Venise. Produit par Clin d’oeil Films, le film raconte l’histoire d’une jeune femme kurde condamnée à mourir de la main de ses frères pour avoir bafoué l’honneur de sa famille. Comme le veut la tradition, le meurtre doit être compensé... il y aura une autre victime.

PAR Ian Mundell Né en Turquie, Bülent Öztürk arrive en Belgique en 1995 en tant qu’étudiant réfugié. Dans le cadre de sa formation cinématographique à Bruxelles, il retourne en Turquie pour réaliser son film de fin d’études, un documentaire sur les habitants d’un village prétendument désert. Il enchaîne ensuite avec Waiting, un documentaire consacré aux survivants du tremblement de terre qui a frappé l’est de la Turquie en octobre 2011.

À l’origine, Houses With Small Windows était aussi un projet de documentaire. Öztürk voulait explorer le thème des mariages arrangés entre les Kurdes de Turquie, en s’inspirant de l’expérience de sa mère pour amorcer l’histoire.

Mais après seulement deux jours de tournage, sa mère est incapable de continuer, traumatisée qu’elle est par la confrontation avec cette période de l’enfance où elle a été effectivement

donnée à une autre famille. Öztürk décide alors d’adopter une approche moins directe et opte pour la fiction. L’histoire qu’il a choisi de raconter est dramatique. C’est celle d’une jeune femme victime d’un crime d’honneur en représailles d’une liaison adultère, et d’une fillette de six ans donnée en ‘compensation ̓ par la famille de son amant. Mais la manière de raconter l’histoire est indéfinissable : Öztürk se concentre sur les périodes d’attente et de préparation de cet échange de femmes réduites à l’état de propriété.

Dans ce décor rural, l’histoire semble intemporelle ; rien n’a changé entre l’expérience de sa mère il y a 60 ans et le présent qui perpétue la coutume. Le résultat nous remplit d’un sentiment de tristesse plus que d’indignation, et pardessus tout du sentiment d’une enfance idyllique brisée.

Le prochain projet d’Öztürk, Blue Silence, sera également une fiction, développant cette approche poétique de la narration et de la cinématographie déjà à l’œuvre dans ses documentaires et dans cette première fiction. www.houseswithsmallwindows.be

PLEASE RELEASE ME! We are so proud of the filmmaking talent we work with. And we’re hugely proud of the wide variety of films we present.

Through the Flanders Distribution Grant we are inviting foreign distributors to share our enthusiasm for Belgian Cinema Made In Flanders. They can apply for up to €25,000 (that’s over $32,000) cash to help in positioning the theatrical release of a feature-length Flemish film in their respective markets.

From dubbing to adding extra marketing pizzazz, the Flanders Distribution Grant can make a real difference.

For more info about the Flanders Distribution Grant: flandersimage@vaf.be * The Flanders Distribution Grant is a selective system. Total budget in 2013 is €389,000. Conditions apply.

flandersimage.com

distribution grant

file i

BRINGING HOME

THE WAR

IN TELLING A STORY SET DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR, DIRECTOR JAN MAT THYS WAS DETERMINED TO BRING THE PAST INTO THE PRESENT. ' IN FLANDERS FIELDS IS ABOUT A FAMILY AND THE WAY IT SURVIVES AND COPES WITH A WAR,' HE SAYS, 'BUT FROM THE BEGINNING WE WERE TRYING TO MAKE IT UNIVERSAL.' TEXT IAN MUNDELL

While Jan Matthys and his team paid close attention to detail in some areas, he felt they should avoid being bound to the past. ‘The settings and the clothing are perfectly in period but the way people talk and the way our characters behave is comparable to the way we behave and talk now.’

Much of that could be planned, but Matthys wanted to go even deeper into the common human experience. He was looking for something intangible that would draw people into these events, now slipping out of living memory.

Confirmation that this was working came during one of the battlefield sequences. Over time, the young actors and extras were finding ways to deal with the unwieldy equipment soldiers of the era had to carry. Spontaneously, one decided to carry his helmet on the end of his rifle barrel.

It was a gesture Matthys immediately recognised from an archive photograph he had seen during his research. ‘At that moment, the 100-year gap disappeared and I thought: we are doing the right thing.’

background to foreground

In Flanders Fields is an ambitious drama series of 10 50-minute episodes, timed to coincide with the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. It is an entirely Flemish production, commissioned from Menuet by public broadcaster VRT, with support from the VAF/Media Fund, the province of West Flanders and the Tax Shelter and one of the most expensive local series ever shot in the country.

The writers – Geert Vermeulen, Carl Joos and Charles De Weerdt – began by pitching it as a family story with the war in the background, but Matthys had other ideas.

‘With this theme and this budget, we were able to bring the background to the foreground and make it equal to the family story.’

The series follows a family from Ghent over the four years of the war. Philippe Boesman (Wim Opbrouck) is a doctor who first underestimates the threat of war and then tries to live in harmony with the occupying German army. His wife Virginie (Barbara Sarafian) throws herself into charitable work but increasingly finds herself at odds with the occupiers.

Meanwhile their three children, all on the edge of adulthood, are swept up into the chaos of the war.

Matthys was particularly glad to have such a youthful cast.

‘I love working with young people, and in this case I had a unique opportunity because a large part of the cast had to

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

be in their late teens and early twenties, since the soldiers were that young during the war.’

The younger son, Guillaume, is played by Wietse Tanghe, an actor Matthys worked with on his previous series, the Banff Rockie Awards winning Quiz Me Quick. The elder son, Vincent, is played by Matthieu Sys, an actor trained in Ghent and New York who gets his first leading role in the series.

Marie, the daughter of the family, is played by newcomer Lize Feryn. She is the pivotal character of the series, and while Matthys was sure from the start that Feryn was right for the part, he left nothing to chance.

‘We took months to cast her, working on scenes together,’ he recalls. ‘Mostly I was trying to see how she would grow. We were able to plan her part chronologically, so her character is 15 at the beginning of the war and 19 at the end, and during that time she loses her naïveté, her 19th Century values and her youth.’ The results confirm his instinct. ‘She was incredibly good. I think now she is ready for anything and could go international.’

extreme cold

The series was made on location around Ghent and elsewhere in Flanders. ‘We shot nothing in the studio.

Everything you see is either an exterior or inside a real building.’ While it was possible to shoot in the landscape of West Flanders, where many of the iconic battles of the First World War took place, digging trenches was not an option. There are still too many old shells, grenades and even human remains just below the surface.

Instead the production took over the site of a former sugar factory, bringing in 400 truckloads of soil to create areas for Flemish, English and German trenches – all with their own characteristics – and the no man’s land between.

Meanwhile, the remaining factory buildings were used for make-up, costumes, special effects, props and so on. ‘It was like an outdoor studio, with great logistic support nearby. It was a very good idea to do it that way.’

A great deal of attention was also paid to the costumes, with designer Kristin Van Passel able to work with original uniforms in the national military museum. ‘She made exact copies, in the same thickness and weave of wool as the originals,’ Matthys explains.

This meant that the actors not only looked right but also felt right, even agreeing to shoot on freezing nights without the

39

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comfort of modern thermal underwear. ‘They experienced the extreme cold and you see that in the condensation of their breath but also how they speak: articulation is reduced to an absolute minimum. At moments like that you are aware of how it might have been.’

The same attention was paid to the civilian costumes. For example, Van Passel talked to an old nun in order to learn how to put the right pleats in a clerical tunic. Yet in the case of Marie, costumes were also chosen with an eye on what would appeal to contemporary viewers. ‘We tried to find clothing that was both period but also wearable nowadays,’ Matthys says. ‘The way we’ve styled her, I bet that girls of her age nowadays will take some things from the series.’

improvisation

For crowd scenes, Matthys decided to invest in dressing everyone to the same high standard. ‘We had fewer extras, but they were all dressed perfectly from head to toe. That way, if I wanted to improvise and go into a crowd it was always OK,’ he says. This kind of improvisation is about adapting to unpredictable circumstances rather than letting the actors loose. It requires a crew that can react in a second. ‘If you see a horse doing something that you want to capture, you can look to the cameraman and everyone moves around. That’s what I mean by improvisation.’

The same goes for changes in light or the weather. ‘We had some summer scenes to shoot one day, but it started

JAN MATTHYS (°1968)* (2013) – IN FLANDERS FIELDS (TV SERIES) (2012) – QUIZ ME QUICK (TV SERIES) (2011) – CODE 37 (TV SERIES – 3 episodes) (2010) – THE 5TH BOW (TV SERIES) (2008) – THE EMPEROR OF TASTE

(TV SERIES – co-directed with Frank Van Passel) (2007) – CATARACT (TV SERIES) (2005) – KINDEREN VAN DEWINDT (TV SERIES) (2004) – ASPE (TV SERIES) * selected filmography

All pictures In Flanders Fields

snowing. So my wonderful assistant, Martine Temmerman, immediately looked at which actors we had, which costumes and half an hour later we were shooting winter scenes.’

Matthys is full of praise for his crew, many of them regular collaborators. ‘I knew very clearly that I couldn’t make this series without those people,’ he says. ‘It becomes like a big family or a travelling circus. That is also a kick for me. I’m so lucky that an art form exists where the only way you can make a difference is by working together.’  www.menuet.be

Jan Matthys is changing. Having established a reputation as a journeyman director, effective in any television genre, he now feels ready for something more personal. ‘Since Quiz Me Quick I’ve started to feel like an author myself,’ he says. ‘It’s as if the director Jan Matthys is coming together with the person. It’s quite late, I know – I’m 44! – but without meaning it in an arrogant way, at this moment I feel unbeatable.’

The international success of Quiz Me Quick has helped. The series follows an underdog quiz team as it strives for glory, its five members learning along the way that there is more to life than accumulating trivia. Competing at the Banff World Media Festival in June, the series won prizes for best sitcom and best entertainment programme.

‘I don’t like competitions, but the fact that it was an international jury, and also other producers and directors who were inspired by what we did... that’s what I’m proud of. They are starting to think: so, a series with five losers playing quiz games... maybe we should rethink in the future and leave the idea that we have to do established formats like police investigation series. That gives me more satisfaction than the trophy.’

This is the key to what Matthys hopes to do next.

‘When I have the opportunity to make feature films – and there is something brewing – then my niche will certainly be human stories with a lot of humour.’ Until now, he has had neither the time nor the ambition to move into cinema. ‘But it is the only thing I’ve left to one side, and now I think that I’m saving it especially for myself.’

He is attracted by the opportunity to tell different stories, in a different way. ‘It’s not about escaping the compromises of TV work, because I like compromise, it makes you creative. It’s simply because I feel ready now to tell what I think are important stories that are not always suitable for a TV series.’

The story that has caught his eye is ‘Vele hemels boven de zevende’ (‘Many Heavens Above The Seventh’), the debut novel of Flemish journalist Griet Op de Beeck. Through five characters from different generations, the book explores themes of love and longing, beauty and ugliness, family and friendship. ‘It’s a book that feels very familiar to me, in atmosphere, in feeling, in vulnerability, in its way of looking at life. I’ve waited for a long time, but I know that this is it: this will be my film,’ Matthys says. ‘I’m working with Griet on the screenplay and it’s very promising. Our enthusiasm couldn’t be greater.’

file i

BECOMING JAN MATTHYS

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Otto

Cafard

Run Boy, Run

42

FLANDERS AT WAR FLANDERS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR ARE SYNONYMOUS IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD. THIS IS LARGELY THANKS TO THE BRIEF POEM 'IN FLANDERS FIELDS', WRITTEN BY CANADIAN ARMY DOCTOR JOHN McCRAE ON THE BATTLEFIELD AT YPRES. IT QUICKLY BECAME ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR PIECES OF WRITING ABOUT THE WAR, INSPIRING THE USE OF POPPIES AS A SYMBOL OF REMEMBRANCE. FLANDERS ITSELF CANNOT HELP BUT BE MARKED BY THE FIRST WORLD WAR. THE BATTLES DEVASTATED ITS TOWNS AND VILLAGES, RESHAPED ITS LANDSCAPE AND SENT TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ITS SOLDIERS TO THEIR DEATHS. THE WAR ALSO MEANT OCCUPATION BY THE INVADING GERMANS, YEARS THAT DIVIDED COMMUNITIES BETWEEN THOSE WILLING TO LIVE WITH THE COUNTRY’S NEW RULERS AND THOSE WHO CONTINUED TO RESIST. AS ITS CENTENARY APPROACHES, THE FIRST WORLD WAR IS INCREASINGLY PRESENT IN FLEMISH FILMS, TV SERIES, CARTOONS AND EVEN COMPUTER GAMES. SOME REVISIT THE PAST, OTHERS TRACE THE WAR’S ECHOES IN THE PRESENT. ALL ARE CONCERNED TO FIND THE HUMAN STORY IN ONE OF EUROPE’S MOST INHUMAN CONFLICTS. IM

DOCUMENTARY

GAME

BRAVE LITTLE BELGIUM

HILL 60

A TV series of five 52-minute episodes, exploring the trauma suffered by Belgium during the First World War, from the 40,000 soldiers lost on the IJzer front to the thousands of civilians killed by the occupiers behind the lines. Commissioned by Flemish public broadcaster VRT.

Named after a strategically important point on the Ypres battle field, this ‘serious game’ aims to bring the player closer to the experience of soldiers in the trenches and increase awareness of the horror of war. As its designer, Eric Taelman, says: Hill 60 is a game you cannot win. The game will be distributed to a broad audience but also made available through the museum In Flanders Fields in Ypres.

Director: Mark De Geest Production company: Minds Meet

Designer: Eric Taelman Production company: DAE Studios

Cafard

file Flying Home

Madonna's Pig

In Flanders Fields

ANIMATION

12 SHORT FILMS ABOUT PEACE Each of these ultra-short animated films takes just one minute to say something about peace, using the First World War as a starting point.

Some of the films are deadly serious, such as Otto by Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef, in which a minute is the time it takes to amputate the leg of a wounded soldier. Like their award-winning short Oh Willy…, the film is produced by Beast Productions.

In Letter From A Soldier (produced by CZAR TV) Silvia Defrance uses fragments of soldiers’ letters to evoke the horror of the trenches, while in Where The Poppies Grow (Walking The Dog) Michael Palmaers connects the poppies of Flanders fields with the opium poppies of Afghanistan.

Other films take a lighter view, with satires on war and peace from Boris Sverlow in Run Boy, Run (Elementrik Films) and Roman Klochkov in Peace (Lunanime). Meanwhile in Charge! (Creative Conspiracy) Koen Vermaanen gives a playful interpretation of the truce declared in no man’s land at Christmas 1914. As well as the 12 films for broadcast, a selection of young poets will be asked to respond to the films, and their poems are to be published in a book.

CAFARD Director: Jan Bultheel Production company: Tondo Films In 1914, Jean Lemarin joins an army armoured division to oppose the invading Germans and avenge the rape of his daughter. But the heavy vehicles are ineffectual in the mud of Flanders and they are transferred to the Eastern Front, setting Jean on a journey into the darkness of revolutionary Russia. Cafard will be the feature debut of Flemish animator Jan Bultheel, previously known for kids animation series International Hareport.

TANK Director: Raoul Servais Production company: WPG/Santeboetiek & Lunanime This three-minute short from legendary Flemish animator Raoul Servais draws a message of peace from the horrors experienced by soldiers in the trenches.

FICTION

DEATH OF A SHADOW

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

This Oscar nominated short sees Matthias Schoenaerts starring as Nathan Rijckx, a deceased World War I soldier, who is stuck in limbo between life and death. To earn a second chance at life and love, he has to capture the shadows of 10,000 dying men and women.

An ambitious TV drama series of 10 50-minute episodes, following a family from Ghent over the four years of the war.

See article, p. 38-41.

FLYING HOME

MADONNA’S PIG

A ruthless young American finance executive (Jamie Dornan) comes to rural Flanders in search of a valuable racing pigeon, coveted by one of his clients. He tells the locals that he is searching for the grave of an ancestor, killed in the First World War. As he schemes to separate the bird from its stubborn owner (Jan Decleir), the grain of truth in his cover story takes on a new importance. The past has a message for him after all. A feature film in English, with a Flemish soul.

A travelling salesman (Kevin Janssens) is stranded in a remote Flemish town, unable to leave until the locals resolve a dispute over a road building project. Some argue that the town will die without the road, others — including Maria, the attractive school teacher (Wine Dierickx) — fear it will disturb the First World War dead who lie in the surrounding fields. A darkly comic feature film, in which romance blossoms and the dead walk.

Director: Tom Van Avermaet Production company: Serendipity Films

Director: Dominique Deruddere Production company: Kanakna Productions

Director: Jan Matthys Production company: Menuet

Director: Frank Van Passel Production company: Caviar Films

SILENT STORYTELLERS TEXT IAN MUNDELL

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Benny Vandendriessche (l)

and Dirk Hendrikx (r)

PORTRAIT KRIS DEWITTE

OF NARRATIVE CINEMA AND PERFORMANCE ART, TELLING A STORY THROUGH THE PHYSICAL PRESENCE OF ITS MAIN CHARACTER. The film is a collaboration between director Benny Vandendriessche and artist Dirk Hendrikx. Since the early 1990s Hendrikx has been working in the area where installation, film and performance art overlap. Whether on stage, in a studio or outdoors, his ideas always involve some physical interaction between himself and his surroundings.

‘I never saw myself as a performer, a dancer or an actor,’ says Hendrikx. ‘For me it was more like going into a trance, into a feeling or a situation. It was like I was making living sculptures, performances like poems.’

It was the physical side of Hendrikx’s work that appealed to Vandendriessche, whose background is in music videos and advertising. ‘We always had the same tastes,’ he explains.

‘Something very simple, something physically rough but at the same time very poetic and very beautiful.’

walking with grief

The starting point for Drift was simply a desire to collaborate.

Vandendriessche chose to work on a recurring figure in Hendrikx’s work, the wanderer creating rituals in a landscape. Along with cameraman Carl Rottiers, they set out to test the concept, shooting sequences in the forests of Poland, in Death Valley in the USA and on the shores of the Mediterranean in Spain.

‘We explored many things and we learned a lot,’ says Vandendriessche. ‘For instance, you don’t need big gestures to explain a character. So we started to take elements from these rituals, but instead of using the theatrical part of them we tried to look for an element of reality.’

This also laid the ground for the film’s visual approach, not simply capturing the rituals as performances but using the camera to integrate Hendrikx’s physical presence with the landscape, its animals and people. ‘I aimed to create a reality that is strong, pure and simple. I wanted to offer a powerful tactile and contemplative experience. The audience of Drift has to feel, rather than to understand.’

At the same time, the experience had to be relatively accessible. ‘We wanted to create a full-length feature film that had the potential to engage many people, not only those who have the patience to step into something that is maybe a bit more difficult.’

This meant finding a narrative that would drive their drifter onwards. ‘This man needs a reason to do the things he does,’ says Vandendriessche. ‘It had to be something big, something strong. As a storyteller, I recognised the undefined emotions in Dirk’s work and interpreted them as a story of a man walking with grief.’

tactile experience

An important stage in developing this idea was the discovery

of a filmed dance performance, rather like a fragment of silent film, in Hendrikx’s archives. ‘It’s very beautiful, because everything about love, the pushing and pulling, is already there,’ says Vandendriessche. They decided to cast the other dancer, Lieve Meeussen, as the drifter’s lost love and to use the dance film as backstory. ‘It is 13 years old, but it involves the same people. You see how their bodies have changed, but also the intimacy in the dance makes it very real.’ This also gave Vandendriessche a strong core around which to build the script.

The first part of the narrative, appearing in flashback throughout the film, explores the days leading up to the drifter’s traumatic loss. The man and his partner, who is suffering from a long illness, are waiting for something in a snowbound hospital. ‘We try to show everything that you need to know about this couple in these few scenes from their final days,’ says Vandendriessche.

After his partner’s death and the involvement of the police, the man flees. ‘When he escapes from the hospital he escapes

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REALITY BY DISAPPEARING INTO THE LANDSCAPE. IT IS ALSO AN INSPIRED COMBINATION

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DRIFT IS A TALE OF GRIEF AND LOST LOVE, IN WHICH A MAN TRIES TO ESCAPE A PAINFUL

'We kept filming until we had the one take we were always looking for, until everything fitted: the timing of the character, the timing of the dogs and other animals, the camera, the landscape. Sometimes we only did one shot a day, sometimes we did three. We wanted every shot to have some kind of magic, to be a work in itself' – Benny Vandendriessche into a parallel reality,’ Vandendriessche explains. ‘This gave us a lot of freedom. We could choose any kind of landscape.

It didn’t have to be a perfect description of a country. It could be very peculiar, but at the same time we didn’t want it to be staged. It had to be something real. We were looking for the poetic, the exaggerated, maybe even the grotesque in reality.’

filming the rituals

This is where Hendrikx’s rituals come in. He describes the process as going on a trip. The actions that emerge, such as trying to force his head into the ground or balancing a heavy stone over his eyes, are instinctive. But he does not like to talk about where these gestures come from or what they mean. ‘We decided to go beyond the symbols into

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nothingness, and not to explain,’ he says. ‘Whatever you see, it’s up to you.’

Vandendriessche disagrees slightly: ‘What he does is not easy. It’s painful. It creates a tension in the body and scars the body, but at the same time it’s very beautiful. It deals with the ambiguity between beauty and pain.’ While the gestures are not explained, they still have to touch something inside the viewer. ‘They seem to refer to something familiar to us, even if we don’t know where it comes from. This is an exaggeration of a state of being that maybe we recognise.’

Filming the rituals involved establishing a broad plan for each ‘trip’, for example for Hendrikx to enter his trance, walk into a village and turn down the main street. There would be two or three signals to tell him when to move from one place to another or one phase of the trip to another. Then he would begin. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he says.

‘You feel safe because you have a group around you, but it’s strange to do.’

A trip could be relatively short or last several hours, and for Hendrikx the ritual plays out regardless of the camera.

Sometimes the crew would be with him from the start, sometimes it would wait to intercept him along the way. In the case of the scene shot in the village, Vandendriessche spent hours on the spot where he wanted to capture Hendrikx’s arrival so that the presence of a crew was no longer a novelty for the villagers. ‘That way, when he arrives, it’s not about the camera, it’s about him.’

delivering an experience

Working in this way required a great deal of preparation and patience. ‘We kept filming until we had the one take we were always looking for, until everything fitted: the timing of the character, the timing of the dogs and other animals, the camera, the landscape,’ says Vandendriessche.

‘Sometimes we only did one shot a day, sometimes we did three. We wanted every shot to have some kind of magic, to be a work in itself.’Even with all this planning, they were not entirely sure that the film was in the bag when the shooting was over. ‘We had a very developed idea of how we wanted to treat physical actions, images, landscape and the presence of animals in the film, and we stuck to it,’ recalls Vandendriessche. ‘But still we were not sure that it was going to work. In the edit we discovered that it had worked.’

In fact, the silent storytelling worked so well that they were able to remove some of the dialogue intended to explain explicitly what is going on. ‘We’ve tried to create a film that delivers an experience, like a tactile experience, instead of a narrative tension,’ Vandendriessche says. ‘We tried to create a kind of intrigue, a reality that suggests much more than it explains.’

Hendrikx agrees. ‘You feel time in this film. You immediately create another layer in what you see and what you feel,’ he says. ‘For me, the whole film is a fiction film made without telling the story. I’m very proud of that.’  www.intifilms.com

All pictures Drift

HOUND FOOTAGE The decision to shoot Drift in Romania was partly about the landscapes the country had to offer. There are forests, mountains and arid plains. There are towns and villages, and vast abandoned factories. But most important of all, there are dogs. Millions of stray dogs.

‘In one of the earlier versions of the script there was one dog, but not this presence we found in Romania,’ says Vandendriessche. These stray dogs, rejected by people but unable to return to the wild, became an important element in the film, echoing the drifter’s position caught between nature and human society.

Some of the dogs that can be seen in Drift are actual strays, others were provided by dog sanctuaries.

‘The dogs stayed with us and it was clear to them immediately that this was now their group, their pack,’ says Vandendriessche.

Incorporating the dogs into the film was not a problem.

‘I was always told making a film with animals was the hardest thing, but we never had to tell these dogs what to do. They just knew where to go,’ says Hendrikx.

‘Everything these dogs do is instinctive, but so too are the actions of the main character.’

‘We didn’t demand anything of them, just their presence and their dog-like behaviour,’ adds Vandendriessche.

‘Sometimes they have perfect timing, perfect reactions to Dirk. You feel they are trying to comfort him. Then at other times they ignore him completely and don’t give a damn. It’s very ambiguous.’

DOVE STORY TEXT IAN MUNDELL

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PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

DOMINIQUE DERUDDERE'S LATEST FILM INVOLVES PIGEON RACING, A SPORT WITH A LOW PROFILE IN HIS PRESENT HOME TOWN OF LOS ANGELES. 'ONE DAY I WAS MEETING AN EXECUTIVE FROM A MAJOR STUDIO,' HE RECALLS, 'AND SHE ASKED ME WHAT I WAS WORKING ON. I TOLD HER, AND SHE SAID: "HOW DO YOU RACE PIGEONS? DO THEY FLY IN CIRCLES?" I JUST HAD TO USE THAT IN THE FILM!'

Flemish soul

Colin is played by Jamie Dornan, a former Calvin Klein model who is now building an acting career on TV and in film. Deruddere was particularly impressed by his performance as a serial killer in The Fall, a drama made for the BBC by rising Flemish director Jakob Verbruggen.

‘He has an angelic look, but I saw in The Fall that he could play hard and evil, and that’s what I needed in the beginning of the film, before Colin discovers the other side of himself. I needed someone who was capable of doing that switch very delicately.’ He tested the Northern Irish

actor’s American accent by showing screen tests to the film’s US co-producers. ‘They didn’t know who he was, and they thought he was American!’

To play the pigeon fancier’s granddaughter, Isabelle, he cast Charlotte De Bruyne, previous seen in Patrice Toye’s Little Black Spiders. ‘She was magnificent. She just walked in and before she opened her mouth I was already thinking that she was the one,’ Deruddere recalls. ‘She is very beautiful, in a natural way, but it was her whole presence that convinced me.’

The pigeon fancier, Jos, is played by veteran Flemish actor Jan Decleir (The Alzheimer Case), with Josse De Pauw and Viviane De Muynck as colourful supporting characters.

There are also some well-known faces in the international roles, with Anthony Head (Merlin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) playing Colin’s authoritarian father and Ali Suliman (Paradise Now) playing the sheik.

‘They are very good actors who just came for a day because they liked the story so much,’ Deruddere says.

‘Even though they had just two scenes in the film, they felt they could do something with them.’

The film is calculated to have international appeal, but Deruddere hopes it will please local audiences as well.

‘The film is in English, but it has a Flemish soul,’ he says.

‘Flemish people will need a little flexibility to get around that, but for an international audience I hope it will be an interesting spot in the world to put under the microscope.’

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Flying Home is not only about pigeon racing, of course, but a pigeon is the key to the plot. Colin, an ambitious young New York finance executive, needs to clinch a deal with a wealthy Dubai sheik, who has a weakness for pigeon racing. They make a bargain: the sheik will sign if Colin can get him a particular pigeon, the perfect bird to win the prestigious Barcelona international race. This bird has been trained in Flanders, but the owner refuses to sell at any price.

Posing as a school teacher searching for the grave of an ancestor killed in the First World War, Colin travels to the little Flemish village where the pigeon fancier lives and starts to look for something that will separate the bird from its owner. But in the process he falls under the spell of the place and of Isabelle, the pigeon owner's spirited granddaughter.

‘It’s about how important it is to be with the ones you love,’ Deruddere explains, ‘but first you have to determine who you love.’ For Colin, this also means searching his conscience. ‘It’s about trying to find out who you are and where you belong, and what the important things in life are.’

Deruddere has made films in Belgium, France, Germany and the USA, but since 2007 he has been a full-time resident of California. The inspiration for Flying Home came from that voluntary exile, from looking up one day and seeing a flock of pigeons overhead. ‘That’s a very Belgian sight, particularly in the summer,’ he says. ‘I saw them flying around and thought I must be dying of home sickness or hallucinating. But apparently there was a Mexican pigeon fancier living not to far away and he explained the sport to me.’

This piqued his curiosity. ‘As I started doing some research I found that we do have the best pigeons in the world and that there is a sheik who is a passionate pigeon fancier, and the wheels started turning. But I’m sure I would never have written this story or made the film if I had stayed here in Flanders.’

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'It's about trying to find out who you are and where you belong, and what the important things in life are'

European heart

Although based in the USA and at ease working with American material, Deruddere still feels rooted in Europe.

‘I cannot write like an American and I cannot tell a story like an American,’ he says. ‘What comes from my heart is European, like this story.’

He has several new US and European projects in the pipeline, but none are far enough advanced to make public. However, he thinks that his next film could well be Dipanda, a project that dates back several decades.

The story unfolds in the Belgian Congo in 1960, the year the African colony finally became independent. ‘As the Belgian colonial regime tumbles down, a man has to choose between two continents and between two women who come into his life,’ Deruddere says. ‘As in Flying Home, he has to decide who he is.’

Plans to shoot Dipanda in Burundi in the 1990s were frustrated by violent unrest in the country. ‘I never got to make that film, and now in a way I’m happy that I didn’t.

The script was pretty good then, but now it is much better.’ 

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OUR MAN IN HOLLY WOOD When Dominique Deruddere moved to the USA in 2007 he expected to be there for a year. He had a film to make — it was fully financed and cast — and he had taken his family along to share the adventure. But then Hollywood’s screenwriters went on strike for six months, bringing the industry to a standstill, a hiatus that became permanent when the global financial crisis hit.

The film was never made, but the Deruddere family had settled in and wanted to stay. ‘Some other American projects looked like they might go ahead, so I thought: if I’m waiting, I might as well wait here,’ he says. And he hasn’t been idle. ‘I know I have to be productive. If I have to wait, I wait writing.’

Deruddere has also become Flanders’ unofficial ambassador to Hollywood, on hand to advise young film makers such as Michaël R. Roskam who are also exploring opportunities in the States. ‘I think I can help these guys, although they find out a lot of things by themselves of course. But if they want to know something they can always call me.’

His first piece of advice is to get a good agent. ‘Get a really good agent. That helps a lot.’ Beyond that, young directors should thoroughly research the producers who approach them with offers. ‘It’s always about slowly getting to know one another and seeing if you can work together.’ And never forget that it is a business. ‘I’m not saying that Hollywood is the enemy, but you have to be very careful how you choose your friends. Most of the time, they are only in it for the money.’

CASTING JOSSE

All pictures Flying Home

Josse De Pauw has been in almost all of Dominique Deruddere’s films, sometimes only in supporting roles but taking centre stage for the Oscar-nominated comedy Everybody’s Famous! The actor has become something of a lucky charm. ‘Most of the films with him in kind of work, and the ones where I forget to put him in, they bomb!’ Deruddere laughs.

They first worked together on the short film A Foggy Night, which eventually became part of Deruddere’s 1987 debut feature Crazy Love (Love Is A Dog From Hell). ‘I was looking for an actor who would do what needed to be done, which was to make love to a corpse,’ he recalls. All the established actors refused.

‘And then Josse said: “I’ll do it.” And he did a great job in that film.’

The two became firm friends, a relationship that feeds their creative partnership. ‘He’s very open-minded and we just have a great way of working together,’ Deruddere says. ‘He understands what I’m writing about, almost without any explanation, because he knows me so well. I barely need to direct him at all.’

In Flying Home De Pauw plays the priest who helps Colin research the fate of his grandfather during World War I. The character is partly based on De Pauw’s performance in a one-man show about legendary Belgian soccer coach Raymond Goethals, partly on a priest Deruddere met while scouting locations for the film. ‘I thought: this is the guy! I just have to bring Josse over and let him have dinner with this priest... And that was it!’

DOMINIQUE DERUDDERE (°1965)* (2013) – FLYING HOME (2007) – A CHICKEN IS NO DOG (2005) – THE WEDDING PARTY (2004) – EVERYBODY’S A KILLER (2000) – EVERYBODY’S FAMOUS! (1998) – HOMBRES COMPLICADOS (1994) – SUITE 16 (1989) – WAIT UNTIL SPRING, BANDINI (1987) – CRAZY LOVE * selected filmography

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TREE SPIRIT

WHEN LIESBETH DE CEULAER FIRST SAW THE REDWOOD FORESTS IN CALIFORNIA, THE VISUAL POWER OF THE IMMENSE, ANCIENT TREES CAPTURED HER IMAGINATION. THAT ALONE WAS ENOUGH TO INSPIRE HER AS A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER. 'I ALWAYS THINK IT'S A PITY THAT DOCUMENTARY IS CLASSIFIED AS A WAY TO PASS ON INFORMATION, WHEN IT CAN BE A CINEMATOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE AS WELL,' SHE SAYS. 'IT'S MUCH MORE THAN JUST FINDING A GOOD SUBJECT. IT'S ALSO ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING IT, ABOUT EMOTIONS.'

TEXT IAN MUNDELL

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

doc-series Behind the Redwood Curtain

Once back from her American road trip she started to read about the forest and learned about the loggers, environmental activists, scientists and Native Americans who call it home.

‘After just a couple of days of research I knew that I wanted to make the film. All these stories lit a fire in me. I wanted to know more.’ The result is her debut feature, Behind the Redwood Curtain.

The idea of making a film in America was not at all daunting.

De Ceulaer had worked as an assistant to Flemish documentary maker Sofie Benoot on Fronterismo, shot along the border between the USA and Mexico, and Blue Meridian, which followed the Mississippi River from Illinois to Louisiana. And her own graduation film from the Sint-Lukas film school in Brussels, The Best Act on the Isle, had been shot on Vancouver Island.

In order to carry out further research, she self-financed a return trip to California. Over three to four weeks she made contacts among environmental activists and with people from the logging companies, all of whom were keen to help. The others she wanted to include in the film were slightly harder to convince. The scientists were simply very busy with their research, while the Native Americans had their own way of doing things.

‘They still live in isolation and are a bit mistrustful,’ De Ceulaer explains. ‘I had to propose the project to the tribal elders, which was stressful. There are no written rules, and a younger person can’t decide certain things, it has to go to an older person. It’s very complicated.’

wealth of stories

In the end she found willing participants from all communities, and returned to Europe to write her script and look for funding. She took advice on likely producers, but made the unusual decision to work with Minds Meet, a company previously known for fiction films such as Lost Persons Area and Blue Bird. ‘I saw Tomas [Leyers] on TV and he had some interesting things to say about making films and not being confined inside a box,’ she says of the company’s co-founder.

‘And that’s the feeling I have with Minds Meet: every film is

different for them. And they are very enthusiastic.’ She made two more research trips to California, and then three trips to film. ‘The first time I was very focused on the visual aspects, how to make beautiful images,’ she says. ‘The characters weren’t used to the camera then, but by the end they were much more open, inviting us into their homes and so on.’

While the film contains a wealth of stories, she had to stay focused when it came to editing. ‘It was clear what the subject was. Sometimes you can wander off a bit with one character, but it always needs that strong link to the trees and living in the forest. Anything that took us on too big a detour had to be cut.’

someone’s vision

The finishing touch was the addition of short sequences introducing the forest and then each character. These were shot with maquettes, scenic models made by Emma De Swaef, an animator known for her work with fabric in films such as Oh Willy...

‘I have seven characters and I want to show them honestly, but they will always be seen through my eyes,’ De Ceulaer explains. ‘So using these maquettes was a playful way of telling the audience that they are not watching reality but someone’s vision. All of these characters take us to their vision of the forest, but actually I’m taking everyone to my vision of the forest.’

Behind the Redwood Curtain had its première at the Docville fest in Leuven, were it won the Jury Prize for the best Belgian Documentary. It was then picked up for a theatrical release in Brussels.

De Ceulaer already has another film project in mind, but says it is too early to reveal any details. However she wants to go further in exploring the border between fiction and documentary, and the use of techniques such as animation and models. ‘But I feel there always has to be a documentary base,’ she says. ‘It starts with me being interested in a subject, researching it and discovering it.’  www.mindsmeet.be

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CHASING

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TEXT LISA BRADSHAW

WHETHER IT’S A SOUNDTRACK OR A BALLAD

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

SUNG TO THE OBJECT OF ONE’S DESIRE, MUSIC AND LOVE OFTEN GO HAND-IN-HAND ONSCREEN. MARINA, THE NEW FILM BY FLEMISH DIRECTOR STIJN CONINX (DAENS,

SISTER SMILE) WHICH GETS ITS WORLD PREMIERE AS PART OF THE WORLD GREATS PROGRAMME AT THIS YEAR'S MONTREAL WORLD FILM FEST, IS BASED ON THE LIFE OF ROCCO GRANATA, AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT TO BELGIUM WHO BECAME A HUGELY SUCCESSFUL

SINGER

AND

ACCORDION

PLAYER WITH A STRING OF POP HITS IN ITALIAN. HIS 1959 LOVE SONG ‘MARINA’ WAS A NUMBER ONE HIT IN BELGIUM AND CHARTED ACROSS EUROPE AND IN THE US. WE TALK TO MATTEO SIMONI WHO EMBODIES ROCCO AND EVELIEN BOSMANS WHO PLAYS HELENA, HIS LOVE INTEREST. Before Marina, Evelien Bosmans portrayed the feisty 18-year-old who knows how to speak her mind in Frank Van Mechelen’s Germaine (2011). Helena has a bit of the same temperament. ‘I seem to always get cast as the girls who have big mouths!’ Bosmans laughs. ‘But the big difference between the two characters is that Germaine is from a working-class family and Helena is a rich girl. She’s very spoiled and very arrogant. She thinks she knows everything.’

One thing she knows is how she feels about neighbourhood boy Rocco. He’s cute, charming and a talented singer to boot. But he’s an Italian immigrant, and that doesn’t go over well with Helena's conservative Flemish family. The story, set in the 1950s, concentrates on Rocco’s struggles trying

MAKE-UP LEONIE GYSEL

to play music and win the girl of his dreams within a small community where the locals don’t always embrace people who are different or who come from different cultures.

Based on the real-life experiences of accordionist and singer Rocco Granata, who scored with his major hit ‘Marina’ when he was only 21, the film has much in common with the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba. But the two young actors aren’t concerned about the parallels, which they indeed see in other films as well. ‘Why are you making music? To express yourself,’ says Matteo Simoni (Crazy About Ya; High Heels, Low Tide), who plays Rocco. ‘Walk the Line and Ray are also about making music, and there’s always a girl. A girl can be a trigger to writing emotional music.’

And yet both young actors agree that Marina isn’t really a love story. It’s a story about a dogged struggle to succeed in the face of overwhelming discrimination.

parallel lives

Between about 1920 and 1980, tens of thousands of immigrants were recruited to come to the Limburg province in the northeast of Belgium to work in the coal mines. In the 1940s and ’50s, they came mostly from Italy, Greece and Spain. Rocco Granata’s family arrived in the region in 1948.

It was a hugely challenging transition for the 10-year-old Rocco, who had to go to school amid strangers and in a completely unfamiliar language.

But the worst part for him was how the locals treated the foreigners. ‘Rocco, for instance, couldn’t get a permit to play music as an occupation because he was an immigrant,’ explains Simoni. ‘Stijn kept telling me to play the role, to come at the character, from a place of disbelief. He just can’t believe how he’s being treated.’

It wasn’t a stretch for Simoni. ‘In all my scenes where I have to deal with a Flemish person – whether it was the police or the owner of a bar – it was a struggle, and I would actually get angry. I would think, what is the matter with you! How can you possibly feel that way?’

55

‘I grew up in a bit of an Italian culture. My grandfather feels Italian, and he has that way about him – how he sits at the head of the table, how he talks to his wife. He has his say’ – Matteo Simoni

Being fourth generation Italian in Belgium, Simoni escaped all of that. But the parallels with his own family are notable.

His great-grandfather immigrated to Limburg in the 1920s to work in the mines. He soon had enough of the exploitation that took place there and started his own business selling ice cream from a bicycle. His son, Simoni’s grandfather, who was born after the move to Belgium, took over the successful business. By the time Matteo was born, there was no more ice cream business and no more memories of being immigrants. ‘But I grew up in a bit of an Italian culture,’ says Simoni. ‘My grandfather feels Italian, and he has that way

about him – how he sits at the head of the table, how he talks to his wife. He has his say.’

Although Simoni has Italian roots, can carry a tune and had plenty of acting experience, he was still not a shoo-in for the role. Coninx was very hesitant because he needed an actor who spoke both Dutch and Italian. ‘I didn’t speak any Italian,’ Simoni admits.

But he wanted the role. So he went to Italy for four months.

‘I had always wanted to learn Italian, and finally I had a really good reason to commit. There was a huge prize hanging in the balance.’

but can he play the accordion?

As for Rocco Granata, he is alive and well and contributed to the script as well as helped coach Simoni in not only speaking Italian but in speaking Dutch with an Italian accent.

Simoni hoped that the 74-year-old would also teach him how to play the accordion, ‘but let’s just say that he doesn’t really have the patience to give lessons,’ Simoni says, smiling.

That didn’t stop the actor, though, who found another teacher and spent many long hours practicing the instrument. He was determined that his playing be as authentic as his language.

‘I’m playing a real person, and I have a lot of responsibility to do it as accurately as possible,’ he says.

As for Helena, she isn’t a real character but a fictionalised foil to add some sexual tension to the story. Bosmans was eager to play her both because the 1950s set appealed to her but also to act under Coninx. ‘He’s such a famous director, and I was really excited to be able to work with him,’ she says.

Germaine was Bosmans’ first film, which was directed by Frank Van Mechelen. ‘They are both so calm!’ she exclaims.

‘I worked with a lot of younger directors between the two films, and it was such a big contrast. With Stijn and Frank you have the feeling that they are in control of the whole set. That experience, you can feel it in every single thing they do.’ 

nter view

Simoni headed to the town of Tropea in the southern-most region of Italy, where he could learn the Calabrian dialect that Rocco speaks. ‘At first I didn’t understand anything,’ he confides. ‘But little by little, it got better. The funny thing was, how I felt there, to be a loner or somebody new, was also what I had to do in the movie – but then the other way around.’

That feeling, too, would get better. ‘I had this fantasy that after my months there, I would walk through the marketplace, and everyone would recognise me, and I would know them all. And that’s exactly how it was!’

While in Tropea, Simoni studied the script for Marina and concentrated on perfecting his pronunciation of the lines.

When it finally became time for his audition, he was terrified.

But he pulled it off. ‘Stijn said, “OK, I believe that you can play Rocco”. And then I went out for drinks.’

i

small town, big ambitions

www.marinafilm.be

All pictures Marina

STAGE FRIGHT Both Matteo Simoni and Evelien Bosmans work in theatre as well as film and TV. Neither has a preference, but they both admit that when you are finished with one project, you are desperately ready to work in the other genre. ‘The grass is always greener,’ smiles Simoni.

So both are excited about their current stage productions. Simoni is putting together a brand new opera with his Antwerp-based theatre company FC Bergman, which he founded with fellow actors from the city’s Herman Teirlinck acting school, including Stef Aerts (Oxygen) and Marie Vinck (Madly in Love). The opera is based on the Reynard the Fox series of medieval fables.

Bosmans, meanwhile, is playing Juliet in a traditional stage production of Shakespeare’s tragedy – but it comes with a twist. In a nod to Belgium’s problematic language divide, Juliet’s family is played by Flemish (Dutch-speaking) actors, and Romeo’s family is played by Walloon (French-speaking) actors.

57

UNDER THE INFLUENCE

58

DAVID WILLIAMSON TEXT IAN MUNDELL PORTRAIT GERT VERBOVEN

AT THE SINT-LUKAS FILM SCHOOL DAVID WILLIAMSON WAS FLAGGED UP AS A YOUNG DIRECTOR TO WATCH, WINNING A PRESTIGIOUS VAF WILDCARD AWARD FOR HIS SHORT NOW/HERE. BUT SINCE GRADUATING HE HAS ALSO GAINED A REPUTATION AS A CREATIVE CINEMATOGRAPHER, MAKING HIS FEATURE DEBUT BEHIND THE CAMERA ON CAROLINE STRUBBE'S TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL SELECTED

I'M THE SAME I'M AN OTHER.

These are some of the works David Williamson currently gets inspired by:

BOOK

nfluence

INSPIRATIONAL

i

Williamson traces his interest in film to a day in his late teens when he had a few hours to kill in Antwerp. On a whim he decided to see Mulholland Drive. ‘I had no clue who David Lynch was, and it was a revelation,’ he recalls. ‘He really got in contact with the line between fiction and reality, or different realities, and the complexity of it all. The fact that you could really think about it afterwards, that really excited me.’

He went on to study film theory at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, but found the programme too abstract and so moved to Sint-Lukas in Brussels. His idea was to explore the practice of filmmaking rather than starting a career, but that changed thanks to a partnership with fellow student Gilles Coulier. When one directed, the other took charge of the cinematography, and together they made a series of highly successful shorts.

Coulier’s Iceland won a VAF Wildcard in 2009 and subsequently screened at the Cannes Film Festival, while Williamson’s NOW/HERE won a Wildcard in 2010. They also collaborated on Coulier’s graduation film, Paroles, and his first professional short, Mont Blanc, which was selected for the Cannes short film competition this year.

‘For us, the important thing is that the camera really tries to clutch on to an actor and enters into their dynamic,’ Williamson says of their approach. His influences are films such as Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Larry Clark’s Kids. ‘They have a very dynamic camera that changes mood from one character to another, and somehow feels really organic.’

Yet their style has also been shaped by films that appear quite different but which made them think about how shots can be combined or constructed. The opening scene of Béla Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies is an example. ‘It’s one shot and it’s amazing. It feels supernatural, it feels as if it is happening at that moment and you are there.’

Invisible Monsters (Remix)

by Chuck Palahniuk

MUSIC

from the setting

Williamson’s assignment as director of photography on I’m the same I’m an other meant sharing another director’s influences. ‘Caroline doesn’t show you specific things for the film, she shows you things she likes to see if you are going to get on and to stimulate discussion,’ he says.

They watched films such as Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Banishment

by Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour. ‘By watching these things you also create a common vocabulary that you can use to communicate about what you are going to do,’ he adds.

While external influences play some role in determining how he works as a DoP, much more comes from the setting. ‘One of the things I think is most important as a cinematographer is the location in which you shoot. 90 percent of what happens is inspired by the location.’

A further feature with Williamson as DoP is currently being edited, a ‘no-budget’ version of Liebling, originally a play by actor Jeroen Perceval. After that his next assignment is Melody,

by Bernard Bellefroid, a young director from French-speaking Belgium. ‘He has completely different influences,’ Williamson says. ‘He is introducing me to French cinema from the 80s, like Maurice Pialat, and he’s also showing me Bergman, which I slept through at school.’

Alongside his work as a DoP, Williamson has also been developing his next film as a director, funded by his Wildcard award. He spent some time on a script that turned out to be too ambitious for the budget, and now has a more compact idea centred on a woman driven to extremes by her lack of faith in society.

Books are the influence here rather than films, in particular ‘Borderline Times’ by psychiatrist Dirk De Wachter, which suggests that behaviour once considered on the fringes of normality can now be found among most people. ‘There are a lot of very interesting thoughts in there about how we interact with society.’

He is also drawn to the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ was an influence on NOW/HERE, while ‘Lunar Park’ has helped shape the new project. ‘It has a feeling that reality goes from one point to a completely different point, and somehow you get lost along the way.’

But he is also taking on board lessons from Wendy and Lucy by Kelly Reichardt, a film shown to him by his Wildcard mentor, film editor Nico Leunen. ‘It shows what you can do in a minimalistic film. It’s very powerful.’ 

A Livingroom Hush

by Jaga Jazzist

DVD

Oslo 31. August

by Joachim Trier

PHOTOGRAPHY

Devil’s Playground

by Nan Goldin (book)

Online Landscape Stories www.landscapestories.net

59

Alexandre Desplat 19 OCT 2O13 Music from a.o. Twilight / Harry Potter The King’s Speech / Argo and the première of Polanski’s Venus in Fur

foto: © Xavier Forcioli

Riz Ortolani Lifetime Achievement Award Brussels Philharmonic conducted by Dirk Brossé

Tickets: www.filmfestival.be SANDTON GRAND HOTEL REYLOF

cons i

MEE TING UP WITH MESSI

Eight-year-old Ali Raad Al-Zaydawi, who plays the lead in Sahim Omar Kalifa’s short Baghdad Messi, recently got to meet Barcelona soccer superstar Lionel Messi in person. The meeting was organised

by FC Barcelona’s main sponsor, the Qatar Foundation, and Ali was flown in from Baghdad for the occasion.

Baghdad Messi sees Ali as Hamoudi, a 10-year-old, who, like the rest of his friends, is totally obsessed with football. Together, they’re eagerly anticipating the Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United. But then Hamoudi’s TV set breaks down...

Kalifa wrote the script of Baghdad Messi with Kobe Van Steenberghe, who also produced the short together with Hendrik Verthé for a team productions, who also produced the director’s previous short,

Land of the Heroes. 

61

casting call

62

PLACE OF BIRTH

LEUVEN, BELGIUM

DATE OF BIRTH HEIGHT

16 AUGUST 1986 182CM/5FT 10IN HAIR

EYES

BLOND

GREEN/GRAY

LANGUAGES DUTCH NATIVE, FLUENT ENGLISH & FRENCH ROLE MODELS

EWAN McGREGOR IN TRAINSPOTTING AND BIG FISH; HEATH LEDGER IN THE DARK KNIGHT

JOREN SELDESLACHTS Joren Seldeslachts started acting early, providing the voice of Andy in the Flemish version of Toy Story (1995) when he was only nine years old. But he did not actually appear on the big screen until he took the title role in Blinker (1999), about a boy who has adventures with his friends on holiday one summer.

A sequel followed in 2000, but several years passed before Seldeslachts made the transition to adult drama with Tamar van den Dop’s Blind (2006). The film unfolds in 19th Century Holland, and he plays a young blind man who falls in love with a woman hired to read to him. While still clean-cut, this was psychologically much darker than his previous roles.

Further work in the Netherlands followed, including small parts in Nadine (2006) by Erik de Bruyn and TBS (2008) by Pieter Kuijpers. Meanwhile, Seldeslachts appeared in Flemish TV series such as Code 37 and Missing Persons Unit.

It was only after completing a degree in marketing that he thought of studying drama full-time, enrolling at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven. He continued acting professionally, playing the troubled teen Maarten in TV series Double Life and taking a small role in Patrice Toye’s film Little Black Spiders (2012). It was also while completing his studies that he played the lead in Wouter Bouvijn’s Crossroads (2012), which won a Bronze Medal at the Student Academy Awards in Hollywood this year.

His most recent appearances include two period dramas, The White Queen (shot for the BBC in Flanders) and forthcoming First World War epic In Flanders Fields.  IM

TAKE 27 | Autumn 2013 | € 3.99 Cover Koen De Bouw by Bart Dewaele CREDITS Editor Christian De Schutter Deputy Editor + Art Direction Nathalie Capiau Deputy Editor / Digital Karel Verhelst Sub Editors John Adair, Saidja Callewaert, Katrien Maes, An Ratinckx Contributors Lisa Bradshaw, Ian Mundell, Boyd van Hoeij, Henry Womersley Photo credits P 6-7 Erik De Cnodder, P 9 Jo Voets, P 21 Thomas Vanhaute, P 40-41 Lies Willaert, P 43 In Flanders Fields © Phile Deprez, P 46-47 Kris Dewitte, P 61 Ahmed Mahmood (Asiacell Telecom), P 62 Vinck & Partners, P 66 top picture © Lies Willaert, All other stills copyrighted by the respective producers

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