Flanders (i) Magazine #31 - Spring 2015

TAKE 31 | SPRING 2015 | E 3.99

flower power

AMARYLLIS UITTERLINDEN

stars in Belgian Rhapsody THE BIG GREEN ISSUE FLANDERS TAKES THE LEAD IN ECO-FRIENDLY FILMMAKING

CAPTURING CAFARD JAN BULTHEEL’S AUTEUR ANIMATION

Raf Reyntjens R

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RAPHAEL CROMBEZ PIETER-JAN DE PUE NABIL MALLAT KOEN MORTIER DRIES PHLYPO FIEN TROCH TIM VAN AELST SARAH VANAGT WIM VANDEKEYBUS LENNY VAN WESEMAEL CECILIA VERHEYDEN JO WILLEMS

#talentmatters

EN FRANÇAIS

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C NTENTS

TAKE 31

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Talent Matters News and views from Tim Van Aelst, Koen Mortier, Fien Troch, Amaryllis Uitterlinden, Sarah & Katrien Vanagt, Jo Willems and Raphaël Crombez

i-opener The first image from Wim Vandekeybus’s new film Galloping Mind

CineFile An in-depth look at how to ‘green up’ film production – a commitment in which Flanders is showing Europe the way

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34 Lenny Van Wesemael Family history overlaps with a famous moment in Belgian history in the young filmmaker’s feature debut Café Derby

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Jan Bultheel The veteran animator combines high-tec motion capture with an auteurist approach to filmmaking in Cafard

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this is IN PRINT

YOURkids docs fiction PARTNERS IN PRIME

MIPTV 2014 MIPTV 2014 MIPTV 2014 #talentmatters

/ Every morning, Zino the rooster encourages four chickens to lay a big egg, because a big-egg-a-day keeps the butcher away!

ALSO AVAILABLE / Series 1 (39 x 7’) PITCH

CHICKENTOWN 2

ORIGINAL TITLE / CHICKENTOWN 2

ARCHIBELGE!

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/ Dimitri, a little bird from northern Europe has landed on the plain of Ubuyu in Africa. Every day he learns to overcome his fears and discovers a world full of surprises. In Ubuyu being different is an asset that he will share with Makeba the giraffe, Oko the zebra and Pili the meerkat.

PITCH

DIMITRI

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flandersimage.tv KIKA & BOB 2

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IS PUBLISHED BY FLANDERS IMAGE, THE AUDIOVISUAL EXPORT AGENCY

flandersimage.com MIPTV 2014 I BOOTH P-1.E56

CONTACT

ART COLLECTORS

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The magazine

A magazine that keeps you in the loop with regard to non-theatrical content. Digital only, available online from February 2, 2015

En annexe de cette publication vous trouverez le supplément en français

Frederik Nicolai / frederik@offworld.be troupe’s spirited efforts often outweigh INT’L SALES / Off WorldCompany / www.offworld.be their talent. president Jos

LANGUAGE / Dutch DURATION / 9 x 50’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013-2014 CONTACT / Helena Vlogaert / helena.vlogaert@caviarcontent.com

CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Frank Dencentre Engel,of PITCH / Everyday lifeVan in the

CAST / Liesa Van Der Aa, Wouter Hendrickx, Tom Dewispelaere, Veerle Baetens, Geert Van Rampelberg SCRIPTED BY / Carl Joos DIRECTED BY / Tim Mielants PRODUCTION COMPANY / Eyeworks LANGUAGE / Dutch DURATION / 10 x 50’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014 (in post-production) CONTACT / Peter Bouckaert / peter.bouckaert@eyeworks.tv INT’L SALES / Eyeworks Distribution / www.eyeworks.tv

is hell-bent on reversing their fortune, even if it means replacing Jan with a professional director.

AMATEURS

ORIGINAL TITLE / AMATEURS

CREATED/DIRECTED BYthe / Agnes Lecreux, Ben PITCH / Over last few years, theTesseur,

Steven Deworld Beul, of Fabien Drouet the contemporary arts has PRODUCTION Lundi! (FR), beenCOMPANY subject to/ Vivement drastic change.

Beast Animation (BE), Nadasdy Film Our modern-day taste is (CH) no longer LANGUAGE / French, Dutch determined by museums or critics DURATIONbut / 26 5’ + 1 x and 26’ rich collectors. byx dealers YEAR OF PRODUCTION 2013-2014 Art Collectors/ offers a look into the CONTACTdifferent / Ben Tesseur / ben@beastanimation.be processes involved in the INT’L SALES / France Télévisions Distribution / actual micro-economy of art business. www.tvfrance-intl.com

David Verhaeghe Antwerp comes to a sudden standstill PRODUCTION COMPANY Offhermetically World when the area/ is sealed off LANGUAGE / Dutch, English, world.

German, Russian, from the outside The causeSpanish is (English, Dutch, French, German subtitles) a contagious and deadly virus, which DURATIONspreads / 10 x 26’ like wildfire. Tens of people YEAR OF PRODUCTION 2015 are suddenly/ left to their own devices.

CONTACT It / Eric Goossens eric.goossens@offworld.be / brings out the/ very best in them, but Frederik Nicolai / frederik@offworld.be also the worst...

INT’L SALES / Off World / www.offworld.be

CORDON

ORIGINAL TITLE / CORDON

PITCH / Percy and his friends go on a joyful adventure where they are each a knight, princess, superhero and pirate. Each episode they encounter a

VOICE CAST / (Dutch) Sara Gracia, Anne-Mieke Ruyten, PITCH / An insight into today’s Tina Maerevoet, GrietBelgian Dobbelaere, Petersoccer Van Gucht promising national CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Jean-Marie Musique, the team, the ‘Red Devils’. Experience Christine Parisse, Federico Milellaof this Belgian fervor and suspense PRODUCTION COMPANY / Fabrique (LUX), football renaissance bothD’Images on and off Skyline Entertainment the pitch. (BE), Grid Animation (BE) LANGUAGE / English, Dutch, French DURATION / 52 x 11’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013-2014 CONTACT / Mark Mertens / mark@grid-vfx.com INT’L SALES / Planet Nemo Animation / DEADLINE 25/5 www.planetnemoanimation.com ORIGINAL TITLE / DEADLINE 25/5

HERE COME THE BELGIANS

CONTENT_MIP2014_docs.indd 1

#talentmatters CAST / Marc Van Eeghem, Stany Crets, Ludo Hoogmartens, Matteo Simoni, Evelien Bosmans SCRIPTED BY / Jef Hoogmartens, Jonas Van Geel, Steve Aernouts DIRECTED BY / Frank Van Passel

‘De

amateur production. playwright and

YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014 Led by enthusiastic

CONTACT would-be / Eric Goossens / eric.goossens@offworld.be / PRODUCTION COMPANY / Caviar Antwerp NV director Jan Delvo, the

WITH / Frieda Van/ Wijck (host) Frieda PITCH Helena De Ridder is a young CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Peter and ambitious publicVandekerckhove prosecutor. Week PRODUCTION Raconteurs afterCOMPANY week she/ De wages her own war for LANGUAGE / French, Dutch and justice.

DURATION / 4 x 52’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014 CONTACT / Peter Vandekerckhove / Superprodthe (FR), Submarine (NL)to the Port of Charleroi region LANGUAGE / English, French, Dutch info@deraconteurs.be Antwerp.

DURATION / 26 x 11’20” YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013 GRAND CENTRAL BELGE RIDDER - SEASON 1 CONTACT / EricDE Goossens / ORIGINAL TITLE / GRAND CENTRAL BELGE eric.goossens@walkingthedog.be ORIGINAL TITLE / DE RIDDER - SEIZOEN 1 INT’L SALES / Superights / www.superights.net

With thanks to the producers that supplied information.

PHOTO CREDITS Cordon ©Maarten De Bouw / Homegrown ©Frederik Beyens / De Ridder ©Johan Jacobs / Deadline 25/5 ©vtm / ORIGINAL TITLE / PERCY’S TIGER TALES (PERCY ET SES AMIS) ORIGINAL TITLE / IEDEREEN DUIVEL all other stills copyrighted by the respective producers.

PERCY’S TIGER TALES

PRODUCTION COMPANYparish / Off World nondescript hall, the

LANGUAGE / Dutch, French subtitles) Pajotters’ theatre(English company toils away DURATIONon / 3their x 52’latest

VOICE CAST / (English) Georgina Verbaan, PITCH / In Grand Central Belge,

Flanders Image / p/a Flanders Film House, challenge, which they’ll overcome by Bischoffsheimlaan 38 / BE1000 Brussels / Belgium/EU great teamwork.

T +32 2 226 0630 / F +32 2 219 1936 / E flandersimage@vaf.be

CONTENT_MIP2014_animation.indd 1

#talentmatters

CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Gilles Sofie Benoot awayCoton, in a tiny, PITCH / Tucked

PITCH / Kika & Bob travel the world to bring back Tilly, the price pigeon of Miss Haakmans, who has captured Kika’s beloved cat Tiger and won’t let him go until she has her Tilly back.

ALSO AVAILABLE / Series 1 (26 x 13’)

COMPILED AND EDITED BY Christian De Schutter / Saidja Callewaert / DESIGN Karin Pays / PRINT Wilda /

CONTENT_MIP2014_fiction.indd 1-2

CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Niko Meulemans through the PITCH / Travelling PRODUCTION COMPANY / 1st-day countryside and towns to the Belgian LANGUAGE / English (USA), Russian, Dutch, French, coast, Archibelge! takes an unusual Norwegian, Spanish, Indonesian, … look at the Portuguese, thought behind, and the DURATIONlifestyle / 25 x 7’ of people living in everyday YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2015 Belgian architecture.

CONTACT / Melanie Chabrier / melanie@1st-day.com INT’L SALES / Mediatoon / www.mediatoon.com

Lenny Mark Richard Bal, VanIrons, Wijck walksWells, alongVincent the 19thTess Bryant, Chris private Brookerrailway line of the century

CREATED/DIRECTED BYwhich / Yannick Zanchetta, same name, linked Wallonia

Paul De Blieck Flanders and which was predominantly

PRODUCTION / Walking The Dog usedCOMPANY to transport the riches of (BE),

CREATED/DIRECTED BY / Joeria Vlekken PITCH / Marianne, former journalist, PRODUCTION / Bonka Circus getsCOMPANY shaken by a tragic incident. At the LANGUAGE / Dutch, French same time, Belgium is getting ready for DURATIONthe / 9 long-expected x 49’ + 1 compilation (DutchFollow-up version) / elections.

8 x 52’ (French / 1 x 52’ (English version) seriesversion) to Deadline 14/10 (also 8x50’).

YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014 CONTACT / Catherine Castille / catherine@bonkacircus.com INT’L SALES / Bonka Circus / www.bonkacircus.com

25/03/14 11:29

CAST / Clara Cleymans, Michaël Pas, Katelijne Damen, Lynn Van Royen, Dahlia Pessemiers-Benamar SCRIPTED BY / Rik D’hiet DIRECTED BY / Lars Goeyvaerts, Tom Goris PRODUCTION COMPANY / Eyeworks, VRT LANGUAGE / Dutch DURATION / 13 x 50’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013 CONTACT / Peter Bouckaert / peter.bouckaert@eyeworks.tv INT’L SALES / Eyeworks Distribution / www.eyeworks.tv

CAST / Charlotte Vandermeersch, Peter Van den Begin, Koen De Bouw, Ruth Becquart, Marc Lauwrys CREATED BY / Ed Vanderweyden Rudy Morren, Nicholas Roelandts, Geert Bouckaert, Dirk Nielandt DIRECTED BY / Maarten Moerkerke PRODUCTION COMPANY / Menuet LANGUAGE / Dutch DURATION / 8 x 50’ YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013-2014 CONTACT / Menuet / info@menuet.be

25/03/14 11:27

25/03/14 11:23

A series of content flyers and e-newsletters presenting an overview of recent, new and upcoming audiovisual productions made in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium

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54

Cecilia Verheyden Which films, music, books, plays and artists have inspired the young Flemish filmmaker?

Sue Deeks Why Flemish TV series Salamander and Cordon have ticked all the boxes for the ‘innovative and distinctive’ British TV channel BBC Four

48 Dries Phlypo The busy producer talks about early experiences, changing perspectives and forthcoming films

44 Pieter-Jan De Pue Documentary The Land of the Enlightened provides disturbing evidence about how children survive in modern-day Afghanistan

Raf Reyntjens Father, son and grandson rebuild relationships against the backdrop of an electronic music festival in Paradise Trips

42 Hakuna Casting Need to inject a little bit of street cred into your movie? Here’s who you’re gonna call!

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ONLINE

ON SITE

flandersimage.com The website keeps you up to date with audiovisual talent and content made in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium. Read the news when it happens, browse and search in the online product guide, or get the environmentally friendly digital versions of publications such as the magazine, brochures and flyers

Flanders Image also attends several festivals and markets such as Annecy, Berlin, Cannes, Cartoon Forum, Clermont-Ferrand, Idfa, Mipcom, Miptv, Montréal, Toronto and many more

screener.be The promotional V.O.D. platform that is available to sales agents, buyers and curators around the globe interested in audiovisual talent and creations from Flanders and Brussels, Belgium

SOCIAL

THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT. Fien Troch’s new project, currently called Home, has involved its director in a whole new way of working. But, she insists, it will still be very much a Fien Troch film.

“The script is finished,” says writer/director Fien Troch shortly after returning from the Torino Film Lab where the screenplay for what will be her fourth feature won the Arte International Award. But there will certainly be changes. ”The main characters are teenagers and I realise that, when they play the scenes I give them, the things I write are not the way teenagers talk or communicate. I’m not a teenager anymore!”

Troch is 36 and has two children, both still some way off their teenage years, with her partner, top Flemish editor Nico Leunen. One of Belgium’s most exciting young filmmakers with a shelf full of awards for her three most recent features Someone Else’s Happiness (2005), Unspoken (2008) and Kid (2012), Troch has a reputation for having a fiercely individual view of the world - something she freely admits.

“They were not scripts where you could say ‘Let me tell you how to make this better’,” she says of the earlier films, “because it was very much ‘This is what I want to do.’ They were so much my world and based on an atmosphere and emotion that it was almost impossible to comment on them…”

This time it’s different. “It started with an idea and a treatment,” says Troch. “Normally, I write the script and then I write the treatment, but this time I did it in a very classical way. That doesn’t mean that the script is conventional, but the way I approached it is. I hope that the control I had with my previous films is still there - that it will still be my film and my way of working. But the way we wrote the script is very, very, very different.”

The ‘we’ is significant. The screenplay for the film currently known as Home is not only co-authored with Leunen: it will change as Troch gets better acquainted with Planet Teenager. “With my previous films, I wrote them and maybe Nico read them, my producer read them and then it stopped. But this has been a completely different way of working. In the beginning I was scared, but now I feel liberated.

“The basis of the story is two struggling generations: the adults and the teenagers,” she continues. “The story starts when a 16-year-old boy leaves a detention centre and goes to live with his aunt and his cousin. He is the

new guy in town. It’s about how he deals with this and how he is confronted with all these new impulses and new friendships, as well as maybe by the temptation to slip back into his old habits.”

As for the workshops with teenage actors, Troch says they are ongoing. “I felt obliged to discover this world of teenagers. The first way I did it was by trying to go to parties, but it’s difficult because they notice that you’re not 16 and that you’re there for another reason. They are very suspicious - as they should be, if somebody just walks up to them and says ‘Hey, tell me about your life’. So for me, the best way now to discover their world is by casting them and talking to them. That way, they know why they are there.”

Home is a recent title for the project, which was previously known as Syria. “I still like the old title,” insists Troch, “but it was difficult because the film is not really about Syria at all.

I liked the idea, like [Terry Gilliam’s] Brazil, but people were confused. I realised that, if I wanted to avoid people only talking about my title, not my film, I might as well change it now. Then I’ll see later on – maybe after the shoot.”

Fien Troch on flandersimage.com www.unspoken.be www.kid-film.be

DEATH OF A CYCLIST. Koen Mortier’s next movie Angel will be about the downfall of a promising young cyclist, he says, but it’s not a sports film.

Cycling has always played a major role in Koen Mortier’s life.

He owns four bikes: two racing cycles and two mountain bikes. “I’m Flemish,” he says. “My father’s generation was all about cycling and they gave it to their kids. I remember having a bike when I was three or four years old – and an Eddy Merckx shirt. That was normal for my generation.”

But, although Angel, the new film for which he recently received development funding from the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF), will be about the death of a professional cyclist, it won’t really be about cycling. Loosely based on a book

by Dimitri Verhulst (who wrote the novel on which The Misfortunates was based), the film is about a fictional cyclist at the end of his career who is slipping away from reality and normal life. This story echoes the life and death of Frank Vandenbroucke, a hugely promising young Flemish racer whose career fell apart.

“My neighbour who is really into cycling saw Frank in his first race,” Mortier says. “He broke away from the pack after about one or two kilometres and, on a four-kilometre circular course, lapped all the others and won the race.

Frank never really achieved his full potential, however, because he couldn’t handle the expectations of success.”

Jérémie Renier will play the lead role opposite FrenchSenegalese actress Aïssa Maïga, with shooting expected in October 2015 once the Senegalese rainy season is over.

“Frank’s life was about extreme highs and extreme lows.

A lot of cyclists die very early… there’s a lot of suicides and a lot of accidents of course – and a lot of accidents with dope.”

Cycling, meanwhile, will also be the subject of Mortier’s next movie as a producer for his company, Czar: Coureur, which marks the directorial debut of former pro cyclist Kenneth Mercken. “This one really is about cycling,” says Mortier. “It’s about the real heart of the sport, especially the dark side.”

Koen Mortier on flandersimage.com Coureur at Torino Film Lab

MAKE ’EM LAUGH. Ace Flemish TV director Tim Van Aelst targets the big screen.

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TIM VAN AELST (IN RED) ON THE SET OF SAFETY FIRST

Television writer/producer/director Tim Van Aelst, who recently won an International Emmy for the TV series What If…, is in early pre-production on his big-screen debut, based this time on another of his prize-winning TV series, Safety First.

Van Aelst describes the film as “a new dream that we all wanted to do.

We’re a small team, and everybody’s very excited because it’s a new adventure for all of us. If you’re working with a lot of ambitious people, this is the next step!”

Safety First, which first aired on Flemish TV station vtm in November 2013, is a classic sitcom – think The Office, but with more filmed inserts. “It’s about a security company with four security guards who excel at incompetence but survive through friendship,” says Van Aelst. “I think the reason it reaches out to such a broad audience is because of the storytelling and because it has more than just a couple of gags. It’s film; every episode is a different location. For example, they do a theme park, a theatre, they go to a school, a festival for students… wherever they are hired, they go.”

So where are they going to go in the movie? “We’re writing it at the moment,” says Van Aelst, “and we should be finished sometime in February. We’ll be shooting over the summer and, come December 2015, it should be out in theatres. It’s more than just a straightforward comedy movie. But am I going to tell you the story? Absolutely not!”

TALENTWATCH

SO BEAUTIFUL,.

SO BLONDE….

Belgian Rhapsody marks the big-screen debut of actress and singer Amaryllis Uitterlinden. And she is determined it is just the beginning.

Amaryllis Uitterlinden is briefly back home in Antwerp in the midst of a busy tour promoting new film Belgian Rhapsody. Amaryllis is not a name anyone is likely to forget, but it is definitely the one she was born with.

“When I recorded a solo album a couple of years back,” she says, “we were thinking about changing my stage name, and decided if we could find a name that was as suitable for me and what I do as ‘Amaryllis’, then we’d change it. We never found anything, so I kept it.”

Well-known in Flanders as a singer and a stage actress, Amaryllis is finding the experience of promoting her first film strangely familiar. “It feels like we’re on tour,” she says.

“We’re in a little van driving around the country doing our thing, going out meeting people and trying to get them excited about the movie.”

The movie in question, which marks Amaryllis’s bigscreen debut (she is a familiar face on Flemish television), is a musical comedy in which for once both parts – the comedy and the music – are equally present. It marks the return home of director Vincent Bal, who has been working in the Netherlands for the past decade. The film is set in the fiercely competitive world of amateur brass bands – a cultural phenomenon common to both parts of Belgium – and focuses on the play-off between the Flemish Sint-Cecilia band and their great rivals, the French-speaking En Avant from Wallonia. What triggers the story is the death of Sint-Cecilia’s ace trumpet-player,

PORTRAIT LALO GONZALEZ

"We have all of the clichés in the film, but we laugh at each other in both directions" Willy, who dies after hitting one final high note in the semifinal. This leads to the band’s attempts to lure away Hugues, En Avant’s irresponsible but very talented trumpet-player and would-be composer. Underlying all this is the famous rivalry between Belgium’s two language communities, hinted at by the film’s original title, Brabançonne, which is the name of the Belgian national anthem.

“We have all of the clichés in the film,” admits Amaryllis, “but we laugh at each other in both directions. The stereotype of a Flemish-speaking person is that we’re cold and ambitious, while the French-speakers are supposedly warmer, more easy-going and enjoy life a little bit more. They’re all clichés, but I think it’s good to make fun of them.”

Although Flemish is her mother tongue, Amaryllis is “89%” at home in French, and switches effortlessly between the two languages in the film in which she plays Elke, the daughter of the Sint-Cecilia band leader who is instrumental in persuading Hugues to switch sides, falling in love with him in the process.

Inter-community rivalry is a tricky subject for any film to tackle, but Belgian Rhapsody pulls it off by advancing the plot as much through songs as through dialogue. This is done, not by stopping everything for a big production number, but rather by having the characters slide seamlessly into song. The tunes are all Flemish or French popular songs, a technique pioneered by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. Few of the them, however, are likely to be familiar to non-Belgian viewers, with the exception of Plastic Bertrand’s 1977 Europe-wide hit ‘Ça plane pour moi’, with a drunken rendition of which Hugues wrecks a TV show.

Amaryllis auditioned for the film with ‘Zo mooi, zo blond en zo alleen’ (So Beautiful, So Blonde and So Alone), a Belgian evergreen, and her rendering of it evidently so impressed Bal that he uses it twice in the film, once as a kind of prologue, once as part of the plot.

Slipping into song comes naturally to Amaryllis. “You know,” she says, “I’m a peculiar creature: in real life, I sing almost as much as I speak. For me, there’s not a big difference between speaking and singing. But what Vincent reminded me of in every single take, is that sometimes you let yourself go as a musician. He’d pull me back and say ‘Don’t forget

you’re not singing the song; you’re in the moment, in the scene. Remember the words’. Even in the studio, we recorded everything in a different way than I would record an album as a musician. It’s just a whole other ball game.

In this case it’s sung dialogue – speaking and singing blended in together.”

Now 30, Amaryllis has been acting since (at least) the age of nine, when she played Annie at the Royal Youth Theatre in Antwerp. “I think it was my first time on a big stage,” she recalls. “Yes, I’d done some small things, but nothing professional. Now, when I look at little kids the same age, I think ‘Man, did I really do that when I was nine’? I was so tiny!”

She went on to be runner up in a 2000 TV talent show, De grote prijs, which brought a recording contract. She has worked since then in the theatre, and played the lead in two big musicals: Pippi Longstocking and Marguerite S, based on the love life of Antwerp painter Eugene Van Mieghem. Belgian Rhapsody is her first movie, but she is determined it won’t be her last – and equally determined that her next won’t be another singing role. “I’ve been talking about that with a couple of people and, yes, I would love to [do another movie],” she says. “I’m always going to keep singing but probably more with my own stuff. I write music, so I’m going to keep on doing that. But I’m really looking forward to making more movies. I’d prefer my next big project – not that it’s there yet, I’m just putting it out there – to be a speaking part so that there’s no confusion as to who I am. I’m an actress.”  Belgian Rhapsody on flandersimage.com

BELGIAN RHAPSODY

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WILLEMS WAY..

One of Belgium’s most successful cinematic exports, DOP Jo Willems has been working in the US for more than a decade, and recently shot the final three episodes of The Hunger Games.

Jo Willems is in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado, about to shoot a commercial for Honda. After that, he reckons he’s going to take some time off with his family, having recently spent a mind-boggling 154 days shooting the two parts of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay back-to-back.

It’s 23 years since Willems left Belgium, aged 21, to study at the London Film School, and it was in London that he started the first of a series of professional relationships which have characterised his career. “It’s funny,” he says, “but relationships that you start early on are really important to keep up. It’s kind of like karma.”

The first such relationship was with a director called David Slade, with whom Willems shot one of his first music videos – and, eventually, his first feature. “He was the first guy I had a good connection with. I moved to the States in 2000, David in 2001. Then, in 2003, I did his first movie – Hard Candy, a small film, $1 million budget,

TO THE WESTERN SHORE. Already a festival favourite and with a VAF Wildcard to help director Raphaël Crombez make his next project, Perdition County is a remarkably assured short film.

Running for just under half an hour, Perdition County is a brutal, harshly beautiful and thrilling chase story set in a hostile landscape where survival is not so much a right as a privilege. Given the attention to detail, the vintage cars, the period weapons and the considerable cast numbers, it is far from your average graduation film – although that is precisely what it is. It enabled its writer/director Raphaël Crombez to get his Masters from the Sint-Lukas film school and it recently picked up the Press prize at the Leuven International Short Film Festival. The VAF has awarded it a Wildcard to help the director with his next project. And, not surprisingly, Sint-Lukas is putting it forward for the Student Oscars.

“It was a pretty big budget for a student film,” admits Crombez a couple of days after picking up the Leuven prize (which coincided with his 26th birthday), but a very low budget for the film I set out to make, plus taking a Belgian crew, London-based actors and high-end film equipment into the middle of nowhere. I had some savings on the side and my family helped out. Then I went and found a few sponsors with my producer, Matthias Schellens from Colonel. It was certainly expensive but it was made with an abundance of good will, so you can’t really put a price tag on it.”

The setting and date are non-specific, as is the religious bigotry which propels the members of ‘The Flock” to hunt

down and kill all ‘backsliders’, regardless of age or gender.

The unnamed central character is first shown carrying out orders, shooting and scalping a terrified man as he tries to escape. But something makes him lose faith with The Flock and he spends the second half of the film helping a terrified boy and girl escape in a small boat from ‘the western shore’.

The film, says Crombez, originated from a series of illustrations inspired by the music of Krzysztof Penderecki and Johnny Greenwood (known for scores like The Master).

“That’s how the story came about: I wanted to make a costume drama in a timeless setting.” As a result, finding the right location was key, with ‘rugged’ and ‘bleak’ the chief requirements. Ireland and England’s Lake District were early possibilities, but Crombez finally settled on the Brecon Beacons, a beautiful but slightly ominous range of mountains just over the English border into Wales, which he discovered on the Internet. “I pretty much found my way around Wales on Google Maps for three months before going on a location trip – before I could afford one, actually!” he says. The same was true of props, costumes, even actors.

“The main character is played by Johnny Vivash,” he says.

“I knew him from my previous [BA graduation] short, but I also spent months on the Internet just looking for the right faces. Through Johnny I found Richard Bremmer but the rest of the cast was found through a casting director in London, Emily Tilelli from ET Casting. She was extremely generous, doing about 50 auditions in very little time and sending the results online.”

Although evidently inspired by films like There Will be Blood

with Ellen Page who was 17 at the time.”

They went on to do another much bigger budget film together, 30 Days of Night, set in Alaska which Willems credits with being the first film on which he really put his stamp. No fan of vampire movies, he nevertheless seized the chance. “I was like ‘OK, I’m being given this opportunity.

If I can make the audience believe that this is real, that this world exists – if I can take the artifice and the Hollywood out of it – then I’ve done a good job.’”

The move into the world of Katniss Everdeen marked another important turn in his career: between Catching Fire and Mockingjay, Willems made the switch from celluloid to digital and found its what-you-see-is-what-you-get technology “really liberating, because I have much more control of the image: you don’t have to rely on the lab during production. You can push yourself much further because you can see the end result on set. With celluloid, sometimes it’s ‘Am I going to take the risk on this one? Am I going this dark’? With film you double and triple check a scene with your metre; with digital it’s more intuitive and you just go for it. But, I’m not saying that I won’t shoot film again; I hope I can do at least one more film on celluloid!”

and The Assassination of Jesse James, Perdition County is very much an individual passion project. “I hope the film becomes a calling card which shows what I’m capable of,” says Crombez, “and I definitely want to make the jump to feature films. But I intend to make another short film, because I still have a lot to learn.

I want to present myself as a filmmaker who aims to expand his horizons and constantly challenge himself.

I have a lot of aspirations for the future.”

EYE WORKS. Sarah and Katrien Vanagt’s In Waking Hours is an experimental film about a 17th-century experiment.

IN WAKING HOURS

Receiving its world premiere in Rotterdam, In Waking Hours is very much a family affair, co-directed by established experimental filmmaker Sarah Vanagt and her cousin, Katrien, an academic whose speciality is the intellectual history of the Renaissance. The film that brings them together recreates a 17th-century experiment carried out by a Dr Vopiscus Plempius of Amsterdam and described in his book Opthalmographia.

“My cousin has been working for 10 years on the writings of Plempius,” says Sarah. “There is a whole chapter about the way optics work, but what is so original about his writings is that part of the book is really like a manual: he describes step by step what one should do to get to this moment where the image hits the retina.”

And that, precisely, is what In Waking Hours shows, fixing a cow’s eye in an apparatus, scraping away the membranes and revealing the delicately beautiful image that is held on the retina like a scene from some long-lost silent film. The experiment is conducted by Katrien – we see her hands and her silhouette, but not her face – and observed by some children. “For me,” says Sarah, “it’s a film about the images of childhood and the childhood of the image mixed together, [echoing] surrealist cinema; the idea that the people in the film are more like figures – I wouldn’t say ghosts, but certainly not characters, like in the films of Man Ray.” “What Plempius said,” adds Katrien, “is that in order to fully understand how the eye works, you should engage in experiments with a dark room and fresh eyes. I was curious to see if the experience was as convincing and wonderful as he promised. In a more ‘academic’ way, I wanted to show to what point early modern natural philosophy is rooted in hands-on experiments.”

Like most artist filmmakers, Sarah is used to swimming in two streams. “Most of my films are shown in film festivals before they are shown in galleries,” she says. “I usually make an installation version and a film version and that’s what will happen with this one.”

Sarah Vanagt on flandersimage.com

JOHNNY VIVASH & RAPHAËL CROMBEZ

In Waking Hours on flandersimage.com

9

balthasar.be

xxxxxx

GALLOPING MIND Galloping Mind, the new film from internationally acclaimed choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, tells the story of twins, separated at birth and raised in radically different circumstances, who meet up again aged 12, only to find they cannot escape their past. Filming took place in Hungary and on the Black Sea coast of Romania. “In all the workshops,” says producer Bart Van Langendonck of Savage Film, “they tell you to avoid children, animals and water. We’ve got all three!” 

10

Galloping Mind on flandersimage.com

xxxxxx i-opener

11

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cinefile

G R E ESHOOTS N WHEN IT COMES TO ECO-FRIENDLY FILMMAKING, FLANDERS IS SHOWING THE WAY. A YEAR INTO THE E-MISSION PROJECT, FLEMISH FILMMAKERS ARE ‘GREENING UP’ THEIR ACT AND HELPING REDUCE THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF THE REGION’S FEATURE FILMS.

13

DOP DAVID WILLIAMSON ON THE SET OF BEAVERVILLE

The world’s climate is changing: everyone (with the exception of a few political dinosaurs on the other side of the Atlantic) now accepts this. As a result, talking green has become fashionable. But acting green has been a little slower to be shoe-horned into our lifestyles. In his new book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall relates the story of a dinner party where all the guests are retired professionals. The conversation turns to foreign travel, each trying to outdo the other with a list of the exotic locations in which they have recently vacationed. Finally, one exasperated guest raises the question of air travel and its impact on the environment. There is an embarrassed silence finally broken by another guest saying, “My word, what a lovely spinach tart.”

That dinner party could have happened in Hollywood, where the prevailing liberal atmosphere makes being green almost de rigueur, especially in a country with the third highest per capita carbon footprint on the planet (one disturbing statistic to emerge from the recent Ebola outbreak is that the Houston Astrodome consumes more electricity than the whole of Liberia). But a lot of Hollywood’s ‘greenness’ is (no pun intended) hot air: Leonardo DiCaprio may have channelled much of his wealth into a Foundation “dedicated to […] implementing solutions that create a harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world”. But for most of his peers, being green amounts to little more than driving the latest-model Prius hybrid. So if Hollywood can’t ‘green up’ its act, what can tiny Flanders do?

LABYRINTHUS

under the green umbrella Well, quite a lot, it turns out. Launched a little over a year ago, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) e-Mission Project is dedicated to working with local filmmakers at all levels, from producers to catering assistants, and to doing everything possible to reduce the carbon footprint of feature filmmaking (shorts, documentaries and animation will be brought under the green umbrella at a future date). From the early days, it was clear that the Project was a trendsetter.

“I saw a presentation of the VAF initiative at a meeting of the European Film Agency Research Network (EFARN) in Stockholm in 2013,” recalls Susan Newman-Baudais of Eurimages, “and was impressed by the fact that a smaller

SCRATCH MY BACK AND I'LL SCRATCH YOURS

agency had made such good progress in this relatively new field. I was also struck by the intelligence with which the tool had been designed – it seemed practical and, in particular, transferable to other agencies. The big issue is, of course, to gain the acceptance and involvement of producers. But given the level of commitment displayed by the VAF, this looks like a challenge that can be overcome.”

"Implementing green measures involves savings for the wallet and savings for the environment" REINHOUT NECHELPUT

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN

cinefile

SIEBE DUMON

"The entire scheme is very practical. We aim to create awareness and promote long-term solutions"

to sing and dance to the slogan ‘Act Now’. “The Greens and other activists are always pushed into a little corner as extremists or tree-huggers,” says Balthazar. “I think that with actions like these that go as broad as possible, you make an impact – although you need to follow through to keep the impact going.”

the carbon calculator BLACK

15

In point of fact producers – many of whom were initially sceptical – have already been won over, both by the common-sense nature of the proposals, and above all by the fact that, in the majority of cases, it is cheaper to be green. Implementing the measures involves “savings for the wallet and savings for the environment”, says Reinhout Nechelput, who followed the guidelines on a recent production for Fobic Films (discussed in more detail below).

Belgium is not the most promising base for the new initiative: according to a March 2014 report by the UK’s ITV News, Antwerp is the ninth most polluted city in Europe, while Belgium as a whole comes 24th out of 28 in the United Nations list of EU countries rated by carbon footprint, with 10.7 tonnes per capita (in Luxembourg it’s 21.34 tonnes – even worse than the US’s 17.5 tonnes). Perhaps because of this, certain Belgian filmmakers were already ecological activists, notably Nic Balthazar (see page 18), director of Ben X and Time of My Life. He was inspired by the Friends of the Earth campaign The Big Ask to make a short film in 2008 in which he got 6,000 people together on a beach

Flanders was not the first European region to introduce a proactive green filmmaking policy. That honour goes to the southern French PACA (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur) region, whose EcoProd initiative was launched in 2009. This provided at least some of the inspiration for the VAF Project, particularly with its ‘Carbon Clap’ calculator, designed to help filmmakers reduce their carbon footprint. The French initiative continues to provide advice, training sessions and workshops, and can claim to have reduced emissions on such films as Miniscule and Rust and Bone.

Like any new idea, the Flemish e-Mission Project went through a series of predictable phases: polite enthusiasm; an initial reluctance to make the necessary changes to working methods; a gradual realisation that the scheme made sense; tentative application; a bit of arm-twisting; and finally the present situation, where everyone behaves as though it had always been part of the landscape of Flemish film.

The first moves towards the initiative came in the autumn of 2010, when Location Flanders (now Screen Flanders) organised a meeting at the Ghent Film Festival. Then nothing much happened for a while. Eventually, Head of Training and Film Education Siebe Dumon – now the point

CO2 EMISSIONS FOR A RECENT FLEMISH PRODUCTION TOTAL CO2 EMISSIONS 53.902 tons of CO2

amount of CO2 amount of CO2 amount of CO2

5.4 hectares of forest 2246 trees 7.5 households

absorbed per year (300 to 500 trees in our climate) absorbed per year emitted per year

BREAKDOWN OF CO2 EMISSIONS

TONS OF CO2

4%

goods transport

19.52

materials 12.87 36%

8% 1% 2% 0% 2%

1.89

cast & crew transport

23%

own electricity produced

1.20

electricity brought in

0.00

heating 1.10 hotels 0.67 catering 4.49 post-production

24%

12.16

TOTAL 53.902

TONS OF CO2

BREAKDOWN OF CO2 EMISSIONS by stage and by category

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

goods transport cast & crew transport materials own electricity produced electricity brought in heating hotels catering post-production PRE-PRODUCTION

PRODUCTION

POST-PRODUCTION

Part of the Carbon Calculator developed by Zero Emission Solutions. With thanks to Kim Van den Heuvel.

person for the scheme at the VAF – organised a case study at which only five people showed up.

“That’s very unusual,” says Dumon, “because normally when we organise something, there are always a lot of people who are interested. In the beginning, when I talked with producers, they weren’t happy with it. They said ‘Yeah, OK, I know it’s important, but it will be expensive and we will have a lot of work implementing green methods’ etc etc.

“So the important thing for me to take on board when developing the Project was that it wouldn’t cost them much more in money terms, and that in terms of investment of time and effort it would also be manageable. Now that we are implementing it, you can see that at the beginning they are a little bit afraid; but at the end of it they are really enthusiastic, because actually it seems that producing in a more ecological way has economic advantages, too.”

The scheme as such relies on a series of quite simple measures, which in most cases save a production as much money as they reduce carbon emissions. There is a principal at stake, certainly, but it is a case of gentle persuasion rather than enforcement. “I really believe that there is a huge problem with the climate,” says Dumon, “and I also know that the film industry isn’t the biggest polluter. But I’m convinced that everyone who can has to do something. That’s what we want to achieve with this programme: to look at what can be done by us. The core of the programme is that we don’t just want to say to the producers that they have to do it, but that we want to help them do it.”

At the implementation stage, the VAF brought in independent renewable-energy consultant Zero Emission Solutions, whose Kim Van den Heuvel has been working with the VAF since March 2013, providing coaching sessions for producers and location managers, helping with the Carbon Calculator (see page 16) and generally providing information. “We provide coaching and really help them with what they can do,” says Dumon. “We help them to work in a carbon-efficient way but without asking them to make a lot of effort themselves. That’s how we sold it; then they are happy.” “The entire scheme,” adds Van den Heuvel, “is very practical. We aim to create awareness and promote long-term solutions.”

a little arm-twisting The Carbon Calculator used by the scheme is based on the one developed by EcoProd in France, and completing it is necessary before a production can access the final tranche of its VAF funding, the scheme’s only real bit of arm-twisting. “When I thought how we as a Fund could use the power we have to make them put some effort in,” chuckles Dumon, “I thought ‘OK, we just withhold the last 10% until they have shown us what they have done and given us their carbon calculators’. And actually, I haven’t had any complaints about it. I was afraid I would be the most hated person in the Belgian film business, but it didn’t happen!”

What quickly became clear to producers was that environmentally friendly filmmaking is more good housekeeping than rocket science – and much of it is the kind of good housekeeping that any production manager should already have thought of. Turning energy-saving into money-saving was a natural. “How could anybody be against it?” wonders veteran producer Dirk Impens of Menuet Film, which can count Oscar-nominee The Broken Circle Breakdown, Café Derby (featured on page 34) and Belgica, the new Felix van Groeningen film, among its ‘green’ shoots. “It’s logical: we shouldn’t need to be forced.

A lot of it is little things, like sorting out your garbage.”

Recycling materials, particularly costumes, is part of the scheme. So is reusing catering materials or providing

reusable water bottles instead of feeding the crew with disposable plates and cutlery or having trash cans overflowing with plastic water-bottles. Paper can be saved by printing the script on both sides and allowing only one script per person.

cinefile

persuasion not enforcement

car-pooling But by far the biggest carbon footprint on any production is transport, and this has been an area where the VAF initiative has notched up impressive results. Car-pooling, reducing the distance between locations, putting cast and crew up in nearby hotels rather than letting them drive home every night… all have made substantial savings, both ecologically and financially. There has even been the added bonus of a better atmosphere on set because cast and crew spend time together at night. ”It’s more about thinking at the beginning of the production how you can combine your days of filming instead of going to Ghent one day, Brussels the next, the forest on the third day…

You combine everything,” says Dumon. “It’s a question of planning. It’s not that difficult.”

Labyrinthus, released last year, was an example of a film that was able to make savings by concentrating almost all shooting in one area of Ghent. And the recently completed TV series Voor wat hoort wat (Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours), directed by Christophe Van Rompaey (Moscow, Belgium), also made savvy use of locations.

“We had 72 shooting days for this production and most of the time we stayed in hotels very near to the shooting location,” says Voor wat… line producer Reinhout Nechelput. “The whole series is set at the coast, and the most punishing element for its carbon footprint would have been transport, because of a 100-kilometre round trip for cast and crew. Instead, we found a villa in Kapellen, north of Antwerp. We put the crew in a hotel near the location, and I’ve never had fewer kilometres in a production. Because it was supposed to be Knokke, which is a very fashionable resort, we parked two electric golf carts outside the villa.

Then, to save time and gas, we used the golf carts to ferry people back and forth to the set!”

The production also tried to keep waste to a minimum.

“We gave everyone a cup like a thermos that coffee stays warm in,’” says Nechelput. “Everyone got a water bottle with the logo of Fobic Films on it, so it was also like a gift.

To my surprise, people really used this stuff. We had a very creative, budget-friendly art department: most of what they bought was second-hand, so budget-friendly and ecofriendly went hand in hand.”

Finally, like many productions, Voor wat… aimed to have one meat-free day in every shooting week. “I was really pleased to see that the electricians and the grips all ate the vegetarian food without complaining,” says Nechelput.

“It was not an obligation: we said, ‘If you want to, you can eat meat. But we strongly advise you to eat vegetarian because of the environment.’ And they did.”

17

a balancing exercise Of course, carbon footprints inevitably sneak back in certain areas, in this case the electricity supply. Local power points were inadequate; bringing in a power cable to the Voor wat… set would have been too expensive because it would have meant building a four-metre bridge over a road, so generators had to be used. “The thing is,” concludes Nechelput, “as a production manager or a producer, you always have to research the cost, the carbon footprint, the efficiency, and then you have to make a balancing exercise. Cost is an important point, but what I noticed in a lot of cases was that cost and carbon footprint can be reduced at the same time if you put a bit more time into planning it. You can gain a lot on both the ecology and the costs.”

Black, directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, another

Flemish feature to have completed production since the scheme came into effect, proved less successful with the veggie day. But, reckons producer for Caviar Charlotte Van Hassel, significant savings were made on transport and other costs connected with getting cast and crew to the Brussels set. “There were a lot of crew members who lived in Mechelen” – mid-way between Antwerp and Brussels – “so we had full car pools from Mechelen, Antwerp and Ghent. Our main crew were about 20 youngsters and young actors and I think only two of them came by car; everyone else came by public transport. For myself, I went to the set by bike! For the costumes, we used a lot of clothes from the kids themselves and didn’t really buy a lot of extra things, just accessories. In the beginning we had plastic cups but after a while we changed it to cardboard and we tried to use one bowl per person…”

How and when did you first become environmentally aware?

I come from a long line of activists: my father was one of the guys who organised the anti-nuclear missile marches back in the 1960s and it’s still in my DNA to think that big demonstrations can change things. I also think I can claim to be the first TV presenter to make an ecological game show in Belgium – in the 1980s! It was called Ideefix, and was about how we can change ideas. Then I saw An Inconvenient Truth, which was a huge wake-up call for all of us. As a filmmaker it was incredible to see that a film could do what even becoming vice-president of the US couldn’t. I was flabbergasted! I also thought ‘My God, if we don’t stop this, then everything else we’ve tried to achieve is meaningless. It’s going to disappear.’

Is that what prompted you to make your first climate film?

THE GODFATHER OF

GREEN A TRENDSETTER IN MANY FIELDS, TOP BELGIAN DIRECTOR AND TV PERSONALITY NIC BALTHAZAR (BEN X, TIME OF MY LIFE) IS A KEEN SUPPORTER OF CURRENT EFFORTS TO MAKE FLEMISH FILMMAKING GENERATE LESS CO2 AND LESS WASTE.

We’re in a new world where the streets are no longer streets but are the digital streets of Facebook, Twitter and what have you, so I thought it would be cool to try and devise something that still originates on the streets.

That’s how we came up with the idea of making a short film that would be like a protest march, only a creative protest march. That was The Big Ask. They put it on TV and even the big Kinepolis multiplex said ‘We’ll show your clip before a film’. So the people we reached went far beyond anything we imagined.

Did it achieve anything?

I think so. In the first clip, we had 6,000 people on that beach. The second one, we had 12,000 people dancing; and in the third we had 380,000 people joining in to sing. We could actually prove we had a clip showing 380,000 people, young and old from all layers of society,

cinefile

the scheme from features to shorts, Van Hassel admits that she was initially documentaries and animation, “although a little daunted by the Carbon Calculator for animation it’s different, because it’s paperwork. “In the beginning, I was a bit a whole different production process”.

‘Aagh!’ because it seemed like a lot of But she has little doubt that, whatever work. But in the end it was really not that happens, Flanders will continue to be in difficult.” Indeed, like many producers the vanguard of eco-friendly filmmaking. with direct experience of the scheme, “I know that we are already ahead of a Van Hassel reckons that, after some lot of countries,” she says. “We are part initial hesitation, shooting in a more ecoof Cine Regio, an organisation of regional friendly way will become second nature.

European film funds. When I see what is CHARLOTTE VAN HASSEL “If you can talk to everyone about it,” done in other countries and what we do, she says, “little by little it will become standard. At the we are really in front. I really love the fact that the ‘green beginning, people find it difficult to change things, but I virus’ seems to be spreading and that the Netherlands Film think in the end they just get used to it.”

Fund and its green consultant are trying to outdo us. There For the future, says Dumon, the VAF would like to expand is a lot going on but, yes, we are still ahead.” 

getting used to it

vaf.be/en

who came out and sang about their awareness of the climate… We had our Prime Minister standing next to me saying, literally, ‘We will do the maximum’. That’s how democracy should work and that’s how the media works: when we have cameras and there’s a lot of people, politicians start to notice what you want.

You’ve claimed your latest feature, Time of My Life, was carbon neutral.

I’ve not only claimed it: we’ve proved it with numbers and you are very welcome to fact-check it. Our film took the CO2 of about three families over a year. Any big factory will do that in an hour, probably. But by putting solar panels on the roof of our production facility, we not only managed to off-set our carbon budget: we also ensured that there would be positive, renewable energy for the productions that followed.

TIME OF MY LIVE

THE BIG ASK AGAIN

What did you do to reduce the carbon footprint?

Well, for example, the head of the lighting department is a guy who is really very environmentally aware and was so happy to finally be able to work with LED lighting, but also often just with the sun and reflection. And it looked fantastic! We were overjoyed with the fact that a whole camera department was primarily busy with the quality of the film but also trying to be environmentally aware at the same time. We also managed to cut down the waste to one-third of what normal productions use. I really wanted to get rid of all that plastic that hangs around on a film set. Everyone on the set had their own mugs, and Belgian drinking water is just as good as our sparkling spa, so we had tap water on the set for everyone in nice ecobottles. But I think I pride myself most on the fact that setting some kind of framework, and maybe even an example, makes it easier for others to follow. The great thing about our government and the Audiovisual Fund is that they have really taken up the challenge and have tried to motivate other filmmakers.

19

CAFARD IS A FULLLENGTH ANIMATION FEATURE MADE USING MOTION-CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY. BUT, AS VETERAN FILMMAKER JAN BULTHEEL EXPLAINS, THIS ANTI-HEROIC SAGA SHEDDING LIGHT ON A FORGOTTEN PAGE OF WORLD WAR I HISTORY IS A LOT MORE THAN A CHANCE TO SHOW OFF THE TECHNICAL WIZARDRY OF MO-CAP. PORTRAITS BART DEWAELE

the capturing of

cafard

breaks out, competing in the World Championships. He wins, but his celebrations are cut short by the terrible news that his teenage daughter Mimi has been raped by a group of drunken German soldiers. He rushes home but finds Mimi almost catatonic from shock. Bent on revenge, he – along with his manager Victor and nephew Guido – join the ACM battalion. But the heavy steel-plated vehicles prove useless in the Flemish mud and are sent instead by the Belgian King Albert to help out his cousin the Czar on the eastern front.

anima

Cafard, the new film from Flemish filmmaker Jan Bultheel, now in the final stages of production, is Belgium’s first full-length animation auteur film since Raoul Servais made Taxandria 20 years ago. Bultheel’s last animation project, International Hareport – an engaging 6 x 26-minute fantasy TV series shown in France and Belgium in which animals have the ability to fly – may have basically been kids’ stuff. But Cafard the movie is something else again: an astonishing, potentially tragic but finally uplifting story which draws on the real-life story of a Belgian battalion sent to Russia during World War I. “It was my wife who told me about it,” says Bultheel.

“I was immediately drawn to that story because it had so much potential for drama. Those guys were like the elite of the Belgian army and then they are sent to Russia, to go travelling around the world for nothing. That must be the most frustrating thing that can happen.”

For his film, Bultheel also drew on the story of another reallife character: a world champion wrestler from Liège called Constant Le Marin, who was a member of the armoured car division, the ACM (Autos-Canons-Mitrailleuses). In the movie, he becomes Jean Mordant, a fictional wrestler from Ostend, who is away from home in Argentina when war

taking the long way round Caught out in a country being ripped apart by revolution and civil war, Jean and co see very little action and what they do witness gradually saps their belief in human goodness. “I’ve seen the whole world,” Jean writes in a postcard to Mimi, “but I didn’t see heaven anywhere.” Finally – and this also is based in fact – they “take the long way round”, returning to Europe via China, the Pacific and the United States. But Jean is too late: Mimi, her powers of resistance sapped by war-time starvation and mental trauma, has succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic which devastated Europe in 1918.

There remains, however, one thing which gives Jean the strength to live on…

CAFARD

21

a new man in a new era Cafard is the French for ‘cockroach’, those ubiquitous, indestructible little creatures that will be scurrying round Planet Earth long after we humans have left the building.

Cockroaches have a pretty low approval rating, so that probably accounts for the word’s colloquial usage in French: ‘avoir le cafard’ means ‘to be feeling blue’. In the film, Cafard is used as a semi-affectionate term for the squat little armoured cars in which Jean Mordant and his friends go to war.

“We see Cafard as arthouse but we really think we can get the youngsters, 16 to 18”, says producer Arielle Sleutel, who founded production company Tondo Films with Bultheel with the immediate aim of making Cafard, and the more general ambition of ‘making obstinate authors do their thing’. “Animation films like Waltz With Bashir and, hopefully, Cafard can open up a different audience. You can make an animation film not just for children but also to reach adults.”

“Jean is like an anti-hero,” says Bultheel. “At the beginning of the film, he goes out to avenge his daughter with a romantic, idealistic view of himself as the father, the warrior.

Then he gets tangled up in the war. He sees things, he hears things… He actually takes his revenge at one point in the film but that is not at all satisfying and, at the end, he comes back with a lot fewer ideals but with a very realistic point of view – a new man in a new era.”

It is an epic tale, but what really gives Cafard its unique flavour is the highly unusual use Bultheel makes of motion-capture (mo-cap) technology. For those who have somehow missed the past 15 years of cinema, mo-cap is what enabled Peter Jackson to bring Gollum and King Kong to life. An actor wears a suit covered in capture points whose movements are mapped into a computer; on that computer, a model is then built up into an animated figure. The movements are realistic, but the end-product can be as realistic – or as poetic – as the animator wants.

MOTION-CAPTURE STUDIO

an actor-driven film Mo-cap is usually used – as the examples above indicate – in the special effects area. But Bultheel, who had previously used the technique in theatre shows, was after something different. “The main thing about Cafard is that it’s really an actor-driven film,” he explains. “Normally, motion-capture is used for things that are not possible otherwise, and it’s always done on the basis of a storyboard. But the way we use it is almost like in theatre… We didn’t have a storyboard but we discussed the film scene-by-scene with the actors, and then they acted it like in theatre – not with a camera, not like ‘Now we are going to shoot the close-up’ and ‘Now you come in and open the door and sit down’. We played out the whole scene in one go and it’s only afterwards when I got all the mo-cap data in the computer that I put in the camera.

“Mo-cap doesn’t film,” he explains; “it’s just the registration of movement. Afterwards, you can put your camera wherever you want: you don’t shoot the person, you just record the movements and the voice. Then you can go in with the camera, the lights, the backgrounds and the props, and construct the scene layer-by-layer.”

The advantages are, says Bultheel, that you can combine animation with actor-driven filmmaking in a unique way – and that it doesn’t take nearly as long as a hand-drawn or CGI animation film. In the lead-up to Christmas, 12 people were working full-time on Cafard, a co-production ALL STILLS CAFARD

"Cafard is a film for an adult audience. In it, CGI-technology is stripped to a bare minimum.

The final result is a simple graphic universe that emphasises the dramatic action of the characters over technological wizardry"

TE AM TONDO ARIELLE SLEUTEL

After studying at HRITCS in Brussels, Arielle Sleutel began her career as a production manager and commercials producer. In 2002, she took on the role of producer for features and documentaries. Credits since then include Hilde Van Mieghem’s Love Belongs to Everyone (2005) and Dorothée Van Den Berghe’s My Queen Karo (2008); the TV series The Emperor of Taste (2007); and now the auteur animation film Cafard.

anima

between Belgium (70%), France (20%) and the Netherlands (10%). But the core crew consists of just five, plus five main actors for the original mo-cap sessions. Now, nearing the end, the texturing of the main characters takes up most of the director’s working day. Texturing, he explains, is what happens after you make a clay-like model on the computer.

“It’s just an object. Then you unfold it and you can draw or paint the colour of the skin, the eyes, the hair, the clothes: that’s texturing.”

JAN BULTHEEL

Jan Bultheel started out in the film industry as an animator, then from 1986-2001 directed literally hundreds of commercials. Since then, he has split his time between theatre – directing an animated film for the theatre performance of ‘Ricky, & Ronny & 100 Stars’ – and cinema. Bultheel began scripting and developing Cafard in 2012. He also created the animated TV series International Hareport.

back to the drawing board For Bultheel, Cafard marks a return, after 35 years in the movie business, to the craft for which he was initially trained.

“I was educated as an animation filmmaker,” he says, “but then at that time – the early 1980s – there was really no way of earning your living with animation in Belgium. So I did all the usual commercial kind of stuff.” Clients included CocaCola, PlayStation, Mercedes, Belgacom… “Then, in 2000, I quit commercials because I was really fed up with it, and automatically fell back on my first love. That’s why I made International Hareport: to get back into animation.”

Now, he is doing his best to reinvent the genre, not least by doing away with the storyboard. “I believe a storyboard can be an obstacle to true creativity,” he told Eurimages when

he applied for support. “Cafard rests on the talent of its actors and their artistic interpretation of the dramatic roles.

Forcing dialogue and actions to conform to a pre-defined storyboard limits this artistic freedom.

“Motion-capture technology is an innovative industry on the rise,” he added. “Cafard is a film for an adult audience. In it, CGI-technology is stripped to a bare minimum. The final result is a simple graphic universe that emphasises the dramatic action of the characters over technological wizardry.

“Adult animation is on the rise,” he says now. “Mo-cap is just a technique – one which we have used in a more honourable way than usual.” 

23

Film maker Patrice Toye, author and jury president Bret Easton Ellis, film makers Atom Egoyan and Sergei Loznitsa and actress Héloïse Godet

13 > 24 OCT 2O15

42 EDITION nd

www.filmfestival.be

“I had never heard of the Ghent Film Festival (…) And then, when Ghent approached me to be the head of the jury, I asked around some of my film maker friends who said it is a fantastic festival. And I’ve been to many festivals around the world, and I have to say it’s one of the best film festivals I’ve ever been to.

Even... amazing!”

(Bret Easton Ellis)

“Ghent’s World Soundtrack Awards has inspired clones throughout Europe.”

(Melinda Newman, Variety)

24 OCT 2O15 15 ANNIVERSARY EDITION th

www.worldsoundtrackacademy.com

WSA 2014 with a tribute to Francis Lai

FILM FEST GENT Leeuwstraat 40b, 9000 Ghent, Belgium – Tel +32 (0)9 242 80 60 – info@filmfestival.be

PROMISED LAND PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

WHEN THE POPE CAME TO BELGIUM, LENNY VAN WESEMAEL’S FATHER SAW A CHANCE TO GET RICH QUICK. NOW, 30 YEARS LATER, THE YOUNG WRITER/DIRECTOR HAS TAKEN THOSE EVENTS AND RESHAPED THEM INTO HER FIRST FEATURE, CAFÉ DERBY - A FUNNY, TOUCHING AND AFFECTIONATE LOOK BACK AT THE EVENTS OF THAT SUMMER LONG AGO. In May 1985, Pope John Paul II came to Belgium, waving to the crowds from the Popemobile and holding open-air masses in various places. including one just outside Ghent. “It was a huge deal,” says writer/director Lenny Van Wesemael, who puts the visit to Ghent at the centre of her debut feature, Café Derby. They were, she says, strange days. “You cannot imagine it would be like that nowadays… 150,000 people turned out to see him. They were all screaming: it was really crazy. It was like he was a pop star!”

Van Wesemael was four at the time, so her memories of it all are a little vague. But television footage of the visit is featured in Café Derby, even if the Papal drive-by is little more than a trigger for the film’s main story. This focuses

on an amiable dreamer called Georges, a market trader who goes from business venture to business venture, always with an eye to the main chance, always convinced he can sell anything to anyone.

Georges thinks his dreams have come true when he spots a rundown café on the Papal route and decides it offers the chance of a lifetime. The crowds will be hungry and thirsty, as much in need of physical sustenance as they are of the spiritual kind.

The Café Derby – blessed, obviously, with the Georges touch – is bound to be a winner. So he packs his wife and five kids into the battered family station wagon and sets off for the Promised Land… The summer of Café Derby is born.

For Van Wesemael, this story is more than just a footnote to the 1980s: it’s part of family history. Her own father did just what Georges did during the 1985 Papal visit. Did things work out in real life? “I can’t tell you that,” she says with a chuckle, “because then I would be telling you the whole story. But I can say that things didn’t go quite as planned.”

The 33-year-old filmmaker makes no bones of the fact that the origins of the film lie in her own history – she was one of five kids who appear in the film (in real life there were six) – but insists that Café Derby is a work of fiction nonetheless.

“Yeah, it’s autobiographical,” she says, “but not all the way.

My father was a strange man: he had a lot of jobs. We had a café, but he was also a salesman in the market. But that story about trying to get rich, that was what was really inspiring for me.”

The director describes the resulting script as a “drama/ comedy” about the events that took place in the summer of ‘85. “I used the reality but mixed it up,” she says.

director

real life and fiction

CAFÉ DERBY

35

“Sometimes I make it worse than it really was…

But I’m not making fun of my father. It’s more that, during the writing, I found out a lot about him, and that was really interesting for me because he died when I was 11.

I’d heard a lot of stories about him and I wanted to know who he was; I wanted to know the good things about him. And that’s what Sara, the youngest character, does: she observes her father.”

fashion, dancing and filmmaking Van Wesemael grew up in Ghent, where the film is set, and originally wanted to study fashion. Then she discovered film. “At high school, I acted in some short movies,” she says. “I thought the atmosphere on set was really magical and wanted to do it myself. I didn’t want to stand in front of the camera: I wanted to be behind it.”

So, at the age of 19, Van Wesemael went to film school in Ghent which, she says, was tough but definitely worthwhile. “I learned a lot but it was really hard; you got a lot of criticism – which is a good thing because you have to learn to deal with it.”

In the decade since film school, that lesson has sometimes come in useful. After graduation, she says, “it wasn’t always that easy. I tried to make another short film but I didn’t get the money, so I decided to do it by myself. L’origine du monde was a film that took place entirely in the toilets: little scenes, little intimate things… some love scenes. I did that without any money and I’m so happy that I did.”

Dance was another favourite activity and had already provided the theme for Van Wesemael’s graduation short, Dance With Me. “Dance is a passion,” she says, “and I think you should make movies about things that you love or hate. I danced in a group; it was very important for me at that time. It wasn’t just film for me: there were other things as well.”

Film finally won out, although dance came a close second.

After L’origine du monde, Van Wesemael made the short Dancing With Travolta, a joyous, expertly choreographed 19-minute film about a girl who is desperate to win a competition which will allow her to do what the title promises. But to have any chance of winning, she has to link up with a former, much reviled boy friend who happens to be the best dancer in town.

development process that lead to Café Derby – which Impens also produced, and which his cousin Ruben shot – culminating in a 27-day shoot in the Ghent suburb of Wondelgem, 29 years after the events shown in the film.

Six weeks is not much for a period film, let alone one with lots of child actors. “It wasn’t easy,” admits Van Wesemael, “but we were really well-prepared. Ruben [who had already shot two of her shorts] was really critical and we talked about everything. And we worked a lot with the actors before we started. Sometimes it’s really hard making a film, but sometimes beautiful things also happen.”

One of the beautiful things that happened was that moment when family history gave way to a freestanding feature film, with two key pieces of casting crucial to that process: that of Wim Opbrouck, a wellestablished actor, known mainly for his stage work but with 25 years of film and TV experience, who plays Georges; and of newcomer Chloë Daxhelet who plays Sara, not just the director’s childhood avatar but the eyes through which we, the spectators, view the action in general and Georges in particular.

Georges was, for obvious reasons, an especially difficult role to cast. “It wasn’t that easy for me because you write with someone in your head. But when I cast Wim, suddenly Georges became a character and I could let go of the real person behind it. I think it’s very important that you don’t let the reality take over the fiction.”

Finding the ideal Sara was even more tricky. “I took a lot of time casting and I saw a lot of children,” says the director. “In the end I had six children who I really loved.

I worked for, like, half a year with them so I really got to know them, especially Chloë. I took my time and it worked: she is great.”

Van Wesemael is deep into the editing process with Café Derby, which will be ready for the world to see in 2015. And then? “I want to make another movie,” she says, “but I want to take my time. I really feel that I am so much in this movie that I can’t think of anything else right now.”  Café Derby on flandersimage.com

the impens effect Dancing With Travolta, completed in 2010, marked the director’s first full collaboration with veteran producer Dirk Impens of Menuet Film (The Misfortunates, The Broken Circle Breakdown), who had been impressed with her work at film school. “He always supported me, and I worked a lot for his company doing casting and things,” she says. “He kept telling me ‘You should make a movie’.

So we made Dancing With Travolta together.”

A year or so later, she began the slow writing and

CAFÉ DERBY

director "I think you should make movies about things that you love or hate"

37 37

A CONSERVATIVE COACH DRIVER FINDS MORE THAN JUST A MUSIC FESTIVAL FULL OF BLISSED OUT RAVERS WHEN HE TAKES HIS COACH ON A TRIP TO CROATIA. IN FACT, SAYS WRITER/DIRECTOR RAF REYNTJENS, PARADISE TRIPS TAKES EVERYONE INVOLVED FOR QUITE A RIDE.

24 - HOUR PARTY

PARADISE TRIPS

director PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

PEOPLE

In Paradise Trips, the feature debut of renowned commercials and music-video artist Raf Reyntjens, two worlds collide: that of a narrow-minded, conservative coach driver called Mario Dockers (Gene Bervoets), who is in his late fifties; and his drop-out son, Jim (Jeroen Perceval), still clinging on to his alternative youthful lifestyle despite being well into his thirties. What brings them together is Jim’s son, Sunny – the grandson Mario never knew he had – and an electronic music festival in the mountains of Croatia. Mario finds himself driving the coach that takes the ravers up into the Velebit Mountains – and, in the process, takes him a long way outside his comfort zone.

Reyntjens began planning Paradise Trips some six years ago, just after he had made the short war film Tunnelrat (2008).

That starred a then largely unknown Matthias Schoenaerts, who had also featured in an earlier short, A Message From Outer Space (2004), co-directed with Roel Mondelaers.

Reyntjens had come a little late to film. In high school, he opted for sports school, mainly because it meant “not having to go to boring classes. Then, after high school, I didn’t know what to do with my life.” Two things changed all that: seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and a careers adviser who pointed out that film could be a job as well as just fun.

“When somebody told me that it was actually an option, I knew immediately it was what I wanted to do.”

39

"When I was 16, I really understood those people who looked for alternative lives in a sub-culture: it has always fascinated me, but more as an observer – to tell a story around it, rather than taking an active part in it"

Reyntjens went to the RITS Performing Arts School in Brussels, graduating in 1999. For the next half-decade he made commercials and music videos, sometimes alone, sometimes with fellow Flemish filmmaker Roel Mondelaers (“We called ourselves Raf & Roel”). He was also, alongside Michaël R Roskam (Bullhead, The Drop) and others, a member of ‘Claxon United’, a collective of aspiring young filmmakers who discussed plans, read one another’s scripts and have now (mostly) graduated to features.

Paradise Trips was developed at the Binger Film Lab, an intensive training facility in Amsterdam aimed at those who have already had some experience in film. “I wrote the first draft in 2006 but somehow it wasn’t good enough,” recalls Reyntjens. “I wanted to do too much: there were too many characters and too many crazy ideas. I couldn’t get it down to a package that would convince people, so I decided to make another short. That’s when I made Tunnelrat. After that, I reworked the script, sent it to the Binger and they selected the project.

back to school

PARADISE TRIPS

“For me, actually, that was my film school,” he says.

“I learned a lot at the RITS, but at the Binger I was fully focused and really had to go for it: there was nothing else but film. You get all these advisers, like European arthouse people but also very mainstream American script doctors.

It was amazing, but I needed some time to digest it all, so after Binger it took me another year or so to complete the script and to make it ready for production.”

Along the way, the writer/director sometimes found himself getting sucked in to the strange, seductive world of sub-cultures. “You start observing it,” he says, “but you realise that taking part is the only real way to understand it. I felt like an undercover agent, but I’m not really sure if I was an undercover agent who was part of the sub-culture and who was going to do a film, or if it was the other way around. Anyway, I feel I have now made peace with both those worlds!”

Like any such story, there are elements of the filmmaker’s own life in it, but never to the point of autobiography. “It’s quite personal,” he admits, “but I don’t travel around in a hippy van and my father is pretty open-minded. But when I was 16, I really understood those people who looked for alternative lives in a sub-culture: it has always fascinated me, but more as an observer – to tell a story around it, rather than taking an active part in it.”

director

but not a lot of them will feature in the film as characters: they’re just there and you notice them from time to time.”

Reyntjens and his crew went to Croatia to film some scenes before ‘Lost Theory’ started, then found themselves engulfed by the festival. “We built our sets and then 5,000 people turned up and just parked their vans; they didn’t even realise it was a set.”

one hell of a shoot

In the end, despite his background in music video – notably for Belgian dance legend Stromae and French star Irma – and the sub-culture-redolent title of Paradise Trips, the festival-and-music side is not the film’s main focus: it’s a background to the human relationships at the heart of the film. “It’s really about the conflict between generations,” says Reyntjens, “and it focuses on the broken relationship between a father and a son. But then you also have the grandchild who grows up in this alternative world with a hippy lifestyle but rebels against his parents. He’s quite a materialistic little boy: he just wants to play computer games! And that’s where the connection between the grandfather and the grandson happens.”

a gathering of tribes But for the film to work, the sub-culture background had to be convincingly real. “In the beginning, it was going to be this free festival in the south of Spain, with a gathering of tribes from all over Europe. But by the time the script was written the festival didn’t really exist anymore. So then the idea was to organise a festival ourselves on a smaller scale, but that turned out to be way too expensive. So then we went looking for a real event. It had to be some kind of free-spirited festival with people in camper-vans gathering from all over the world.”

They ended up in Croatia at a festival called ‘Lost Theory’ held in the mountains north of Zagreb and featuring bands with names like Peaking Goddess Collective, Transwave and Flooting Grooves (Reyntjens is not expecting the music to be a major marketing point). It turned out to be run by a guy from Belgium. “Actually,” says the director, “the guy contacted us because they’d heard of the project. Then we got together and it felt rather good, so we decided to work with them.”

Casting the extras sounds like it was fun. “We went to a lot of parties looking for people we could bring with us who would actually be featured in the film among our actors.

We even gave some of them small roles that were scripted,

The contrast between the ‘real’ world and the festival was central to the film, but didn’t quite work out as planned. The idea – partially enshrined in the title – was that everyone would leave gloomy old Belgium behind and head for the Croatian sun. But the July 2014 weather had other ideas.

“The festival was in a small village in the mountains which has some quite extreme weather conditions,” remembers Reyntjens. “Normally it is extremely hot in July, but we had three weeks of rain, which has never happened before in Croatia, so it was one hell of a shoot. We lost a couple of days and we had to shoot one day extra and shift our scenes from time to time. It was quite difficult, but we had a really good crew and they were pretty flexible.”

But the focus, Reyntjens insists once again, is on the people rather than the event. “The father is absolutely the central character,” he says. “It’s really about this conservative bus driver who opens up throughout the story to accept his son.” The father is played by Gene Bervoets, who is a well-known film and TV actor in Belgium, the son

by Jeroen Perceval. Both had important roles in Alex van Warmerdam’s Cannes competition entry Borgman, with Perceval also featured in Bullhead. “I loved working with both of them. Gene plays a character who is completely opposite to what he is himself,” says Reyntjens. “Jeroen’s character was maybe closer to him than Gene’s but he also transformed himself to an impressive degree. The kid was played by Cédric Van den Abbeele. He is 12 but he plays a 10-year-old. He never did a film before but he did a play in which he was very good and that is how we found him.”

telling a story in 30 seconds Paradoxically, Reyntjens reckons that working on commercials was the thing that helped him most when it came to working with the actors on Paradise Trips. “With Raf & Roel, we always thought it was really important that we could tell a story in 30 seconds. We wondered, if you take away the product, do you have a film that is interesting for people to see? Has it some kind of value?”

They were given a lot of freedom, he says, but it paid off for the clients at the time – and now it’s paying off for him. “The thing is, when you can do what you want to do, the result always goes down pretty well. It happens from time to time that you make an awful commercial because the process is just very difficult. But over the years you really learn how to communicate with people and to make better films. I think that my experience doing commercials really helped me to become the director that I am today.” 

41

CREDIBILITY CASTING HAKUNA CASTING CAN SUPPLY A STREET-CRED ELEMENT THAT THE BELGIAN FILM INDUSTRY REALLY NEEDS, SAY FOUNDERS NABIL MALLAT AND CHAFIC AMRAOUI. It all started a couple of years ago with Brothers, the prizewinning short film from directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, a fast-moving drama whose underlying theme was the assumptions we make about people based on their appearance, especially where skin colour is involved. Nabil Mallat made his acting debut in that, and went on to play the lead in the directors’ follow-up film, Image, a first feature with a similar theme.

On-screen – or for that matter in person – Mallat doesn’t look like someone easily thrown off balance, but he admits to having been nervous the first time he walked onto a film set. “I just didn’t feel at home,” he recalls. “I didn’t know PORTRAIT NYK DEKEYSER

"We can find you the whitest of white people or the blackest of black people" (L) NABIL MALLAT & (R) CHAFIC AMRAOUI

where I was at. You have 40 people going from left to right knowing where they have to be and you as a first-time actor - there is no one to actually help you with text or coaching or give you pointers.”

In point of fact, Mallat had been involved, with business partner Chafic Amraoui, in some early casting decisions on Brothers, although that, says Amraoui, was “under the radar”. But those two experiences – working on the casting and the sense of being out-of-place on a film set – are key to the setting up of Hakuna Casting which, its website says, is “a polyvalent collective looking for rough diamonds in front of and behind the camera: headhunting, coaching, casting…”

casting

NABIL MALLAT IN BROTHERS (TOP) AND IMAGE

big brothers Hakuna’s long-term aim is the same as the one which motivates campaigners in any country with a multicultural society: to help develop a film industry which reflects contemporary reality, especially when it comes to the crucial issue of street cred. Hakuna is “an open platform for artistic people,” says Amraoui. “We think movies in Belgium in general are not really street-cred.

If you talk about Belgian movies they are really” – he pauses, shrugs – “white…”

“Most Belgian television viewers don’t live in the city,” adds Mallat, “and when they go outside they don’t see Moroccan guys or black people or Chinese people, so the only reality they get is the one they see on television.

And on television, Belgium is white. But Brussels and Antwerp have almost the same amount of nationalities as New York…”

The training function of Hakuna is a reaction to this: non-white actors, reckons Mallat, simply don’t have the same chance to develop their skills. “We like to be the big brothers,” he says. ”A lot of people come into the movie industry and they are scared to actually ask questions and learn stuff. They learn it the hard way, but they shouldn’t have to. For example, if you have a white actor starting out and he does a bad job, they’ll just say ‘No problem, he’s just starting out’. But if it was a Moroccan, they would be, like, ‘See? We gave you a shot and it didn’t work’.”

being flemish

an ethnic corner Hakuna is keen to avoid a version of the same pigeonholing of ethnic actors it was set up to counteract, and the pair are quick to point out that the agency doesn’t just represent Moroccans. The industry “are trying to push us into an ethnic corner in that respect,” says Mallat. “If they need somebody with a long beard, they will call us. But we can find you the whitest of white people or the blackest of black people.”

Nor are their books restricted to actors. “We’re trying to make sure that Belgian production companies know about us, because we know a lot of people. And by ‘a lot of people’, I’m not talking about regular average Joes,” says Mallat. “We have dozens of break-dancers, ballerinas, singers, rappers, actors, skaters, whatever. There are a lot of databases in Belgium, but they still can’t provide streetcredible people. For example, if you make a gang war movie, nobody in Belgium dares to go to an actual gang to ask them about how they work. They don’t dare go on the streets. We do. We do really well with our mouths: we know how to talk; we find a connection with people; and that’s what makes us.” 

Brothers on flandersimage.com

Image on flandersimage.com

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Despite being born and bred in Antwerp (to Moroccan/ Lebanese parents), Mallat is used to people seeing him as somehow non-Flemish. “I was working as a shop manager for River Island, and a guy came up to me and I said, in Flemish ‘Hi sir, can I help you with anything?’ He was shocked. It was, like, ‘Ah, you speak Flemish very well’. And I said ‘Man, I’m a shop manager in Antwerp; you cannot find a job if you don’t speak Flemish!’”

Flemish people of Moroccan – or Turkish, or Chinese – origin are Flemish people just like anyone else, he insists, and movie casting should reflect this. “I believe in the fact

that you could write a script for a character called Stefan or George and just change the name to Ali or Muhammad and leave it at that.” The training provided by Hakuna is similarly aimed at levelling the playing field. Mallat and Amraoui recently worked on Black, the follow-up feature by El Arbi and Fallah, which tells a Romeo-and-Juliet story set against a background of youth gangs. This time, they were able to apply the lessons they’d learned, starting long before the first day of shooting.

“We gathered together 450 youngsters who had never acted in their lives,” says Mallat, “then we did a month of improvisation and, out of it, we got 28 actors. We coached them and then the first group, like one-third of them, were cast in leading roles in the movie.”

xxxxxx

CHILDREN

OF WAR FILMMAKER PIETER-JAN DE PUE HAS SPENT LONG PERIODS IN AFGHANISTAN ALONE,

EMBEDDED WITH THE US ARMY OR WORKING WITH NGOS. AND, WITH THE LAND OF THE

44

ENLIGHTENED, HE HAS FOUND A POWERFUL STORY TO TELL.

doc

There is no chance of getting the wrong Pieter-Jan De Pue on Skype: he’s the one whose address is given as ‘Kabul, Afghanistan’. In point of fact, De Pue is not in Kabul when we speak: he’s back home in Belgium editing his documentary, The Land of the Enlightened (working title).

But the filmmaker has spent a lot of the past decade in that distant, troubled land, where one invasion has succeeded another and where the beauty of the landscape is in sharp contrast to the difficult lives of most of its inhabitants, especially for the young smugglers who are the main focus of his film.

“We play a lot with that contrast,” says De Pue. “The beauty of Afghanistan contrasts with the harsh reality which these kids have to survive. We did a test screening recently and everybody was saying ‘I didn’t know that Afghanistan was such an amazing and beautiful country’. But at the same time people have to survive from day to day. For me, it gives an extra value to the film, an extra contrast.”

The kids in question, aged between eight and 15, eke a living out of the country’s war-torn legacy, digging up unexploded land-mines dating back to the time of the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, extracting the explosives and selling them to the lapis lazuli mines in the north-eastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. But the trail doesn’t end there: although the blue-veined gemstone is a major Afghan export, quantities of stones are also smuggled across the borders into Pakistan and China, where they are used to buy arms which feed back into the latest version of the war with whose land-mines the process started. The sense of history repeating itself is hard to avoid in Afghanistan.

changing plans

"At the end of the shoot we got attacked and the whole crew had to be evacuated back to Belgium"

PIETER-JAN DE PUE

“The mining has been going on for thousands of years,” says De Pue, “because you find the stones in Egypt, in the pyramids. There were trade elements there during the time of the Silk Road. The Soviet Army had once tried to bomb the mine where we were shooting, but by bombing they opened up more veins of lapis lazuli, so the trafficking increased!”

With Afghanistan being such a difficult place to film, explains De Pue, “the story changed during shooting and we had to adapt a lot, but the line remained the same: it’s the war between the US army and the Taliban, and how different groups of children are making an economy and a means of survival out of this war. They are involved in smuggling, picking up trash – old or live ammunition from the army – and selling it. It’s one big octopus-like network of smuggling and selling – a whole economy based on the war.”

In such an economy, risk-taking and ingenuity are everyday requirements. “During the day, the village kids would watch the demining teams, trying to work out the pattern of the placing of the mines. Then, when the deminers went home, they’d start digging up the mines and other kinds of explosives themselves and sell them to the mine where they use it for mining the stones. Then we continued our story about how the gemstones cross the border and are sold for

45

weapons to come back into Afghanistan for the Taliban.”

All this goes on, he says, with the Afghan government turning a blind eye and even tacitly supporting the trade. ”Everything is so corrupt and everybody does what they want. Whenever there is a chance to make a profit, everyone co-operates with each other… even the government: warlords get support from the government to stay in power because they have influence in their areas.

So it’s all illegal but because it’s everywhere, everybody accepts it…”

the dignity of the people De Pue first became fascinated with Afghanistan when he was at film school in Belgium. “It was 2001-02, after the US went into Afghanistan,” he recalls. “I was following the news and talking a lot with Belgian journalists who were working with [Flemish TV company] VRT, especially one guy, Jef Lambrecht, who wrote a book about it. I started reading a lot about the country. I felt very attracted to the culture, to how these people lived, the dignity of these people. So I decided that, after my studies, I would go and see for myself what Afghanistan looked like.

“But of course this is not a country where you can travel like a tourist, so I approached several international organisations to do voluntary work as a photographer making photo reports about their projects. And, in return, I asked if I could travel with their vehicles and local guides. Then, the next year, I travelled a lot on my own by motorcycle, on horseback, on foot… This was also the time that I was first embedded with the US army, and saw at first hand how the war looked in Afghanistan. So that became a main element in the script that I started to write at that time.”

Things progressed reasonably smoothly, if a little slowly, on what would become The Land of the Enlightened. “I got scenario support from the VAF and finished writing the script in, I think, 2009-10. Bart Van Langendonck had been involved since 2008, just after he started Savage Film, so it was one of his first films. The Flanders Audiovisual Fund quickly came on board, as did Creative Europe. But then started the long search for more funding. Little by little, as the budget grew higher and higher as we realised the real implications of shooting in Afghanistan, we got support from the Irish Film Board” – sound mixing and postproduction will be done in Dublin in early 2015 – “and the Netherlands Film Fund, along with TV channel IKON. Then ZDF-Arte got involved from Germany, then Belgium again with some funds from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and taxshelter financing. We finally started shooting in 2010, which was the first part with the American Army. Eventually, we managed to raise about €1 million – quite a feat for a documentary these days.”

luck runs out This first period of shooting also involved careful preparation for the smuggling scenes, which De Pue had always known would have to be recreated, since accompanying an

PIETER-JAN DE PUE

doc

actual smuggling operation would have been impossible.

“The part with the Army was 100% documentary,” he says, but offering another of the contrasts around which the film is built. “You have this high-tech war with helicopters and night vision, contrasted with the caravans which are continuing to travel around these mountains as they have for thousands of years, even before the Silk Road.”

But when the company – a European crew of four and 12 Afghans – began filming the key scenes around the mine, their luck ran out. “We made the mistake of being too visible,” says De Pue. “Everybody knew where we wanted to go to, so at the end of the shoot we got attacked and the whole crew had to be evacuated back to Belgium.”

When he returned to Afghanistan in 2013, De Pue adopted a more cautious – and more effective – approach, albeit one that involved considerable difficulty and discomfort. “I was there from January to July with just me and one sound engineer and a local Afghan crew,” he says. “We made the decision that, at each location where we wanted to film, we would have a different Afghan crew. They were people who knew the area very well, local production managers, fixers - not Afghans from Kabul who didn’t know anything. That meant we could do everything that was written in the script but in a more flexible way, like shooting in an opium field for only a couple of hours instead of two days.”

that’s afghanistan

THE LAND OF THE ENLIGHTENED

Everything seemed to work out well, especially since filming started in winter when there was much less fighting because of the cold and the risk of avalanches. “It was a hard shoot, though, because Afghanistan is like the middle ages, especially if you go into the mountains: you have no electricity, no water, no fuel – you have to bring your own generators and your own food. When we were shooting the caravans, we were filming at 5,000 metres in the snow in winter and we had more than 30 camels, yaks and horses.

We had to walk seven days on a frozen river to get to the location where we wanted to film, and we had to send the caravan back two times to bring more food, more fuel, more film stock – even food for the animals, because there was no grass. Then the ice got thinner and the animals started to fall through it and we had to go over the mountains instead… Yeah,” he concludes ruefully, “there were a lot of problems. But that’s Afghanistan!”

Now, with the film almost complete, De Pue is on the lookout for a different title, “Maybe something to do with a swallow, because there is one scene in the film with a little swallow and there’s this kid talking about the girl he loves – the only tender moment in the whole film.”

De Pue is also trying to figure out a way of showing the film to the people it’s about. “That’s one of the big challenges,” he says. “When the Soviet Army was there, they screened propaganda films in the mountains, so I think I should be the next one after them to show my film about the Soviet Army and about the remains of the war for the kids who were involved in this story.” 

47

A NOT-SO-PRIVATE

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

producer

FUNCTION

ONE FEATURE DUE TO OPEN IN BELGIUM IN JANUARY AND ANOTHER, BIGGER-BUDGET ONE SCHEDULED TO GO INTO PRODUCTION JUST TWO MONTHS LATER: THAT WOULD COUNT AS BUSY FOR MOST PRODUCERS. NOT SO FOR 38-YEAR-OLD DRIES PHLYPO OF A PRIVATE VIEW, WHO HAS NOTCHED UP 40 OR SO CREDITS TO DATE. The latest of Dries Phlypo’s films to wrap is the Ghent-set cross-cultural comedy Marry Me!, directed by Kadir Balci.

The one about to go into production, Vincent and the End of the World, is the new film from Christophe Van Rompaey (Moscow, Belgium; Lena). Starring French actress Alexandra Lamy (Ricky, J’enrage de son absence), it is pencilled in for a March 23 start – “although that may shift a bit depending on locations, actor availability, etc”, concedes Phlypo.

The young producer’s work diary has filled up pretty much in parallel with that of Belgium as a whole – and Flanders in particular – where a variety of incentives have made it a little less of a struggle to get projects funded and made.

“It’s never easy,” says Phlypo. “But what we have seen from 2002 onwards – the tax shelter being created and, in 2004, the independent film fund that the VAF created – is that we no longer had only two or three feature films a year; all of a sudden there were 10 features produced.” And that, he says, made the Flemish part of Belgium a more attractive territory to co-produce with.

MARRY ME!

Phlypo’s first paddle in the co-production pond was with Bonkers, Martin Koolhoven’s hit comedy about a resourceful nine-year-old who loves elephants, co-produced with Dutch company Lemming Film in 2005. “The film went quite well,” he says modestly. “It was a big success in the Netherlands, did rather well in Flanders too – and went really well on the festival circuit [it won six Best Film prizes at various children’s film festivals, from Amsterdam to Montevideo]. Since 2004, we’ve done one or two projects with Lemming a year.”

changing to social comedies But for all his familiarity with the mechanics of international co-production – and with Vincent due to take things up a notch or two – Phlypo still feels more at home with films that engage with local social reality, especially since he began his partnership with Jean-Paul Van Rijckeghem at A Private View, a company which the latter had founded a decade or so earlier. “We are now equal partners but when I started in 2004, I was a production assistant. We started to change

49

BRASSERIE ROMANTIQUE

the company because before – from the moment it started until 2004 – it was a company that produced mainly youthoriented films. In 2004, we started to shift towards this type of, let’s say, social comedy: comedies with lots of drama involved, the type of films we still do at the moment.”

Unusually for a producer – and probably uniquely for one still in his thirties – Phlypo has had experience in all branches of the film industry except directing, in which he has (so far) shown no interest. He began while still at high school, where he helped run the film club, screening arthouse films in his native Bruges. When the film club grew, it opened a one-screen cinema in a local theatre. “I worked there during my studies, which were in Social Work,” he says, “so I’m basically a social worker! But I got more and more involved with organising all kinds of cultural events, like with silent films being arranged by techno DJs…”

one thing leads to another Phlypo’s career in the early 2000s was a classic case of one thing leading to another. He ran a children’s cinema called ‘The Big Television’, and worked as youth co-ordinator for Cultural Capital Bruges 2002. “Then, at the end of that, I was asked by a friend to take on a film which his producer didn’t have the time to do. It was called The Eye of the Sea and it was made by Dany Deprez, who had started A Private View with Jean-Claude. Afterwards, I started working with a couple of film festivals until Els Dietvorst asked me to work for her as a production manager – something for which I didn’t have any experience at all! But she said. ‘You’re pretty OK at organising all kinds of stuff so you will be OK at that as well’. I said ‘Let’s go for it’.

“It was a feature film [The March, the Burden, the Desert, the Boredom, the Anger], which we were going to do for a budget of about €150,000. Then Els said ‘Could you be the producer as well, because we don’t have one!’ It was

a real adventure: a low, low-budget feature film involving immigrants and people who were illegally in the country who were also the screenwriters.” The film was being backed by a Belgian non-profit organisation, which began to get cold feet. “The president of the non-profit said, ‘It’s too risky: we want to stop the production’. That was two weeks before shooting and I had already invested maybe two or three months of my time in it. So I said ‘I don’t want to stop now.

We are going to go ahead with it’. He said ‘OK, under one condition: you are solely responsible for any overspend’.

He was a lawyer and made me sign papers. But as I didn’t have any assets myself at that time…” Phlypo shrugs.

learning by doing This, for anyone interested in Becoming a Producer 101, is called the ‘learning by doing’ approach. And it seems to have worked well enough for Phlypo, who has gone on to produce a series of critically acclaimed films including Oxygen (2010), Brasserie Romantique (2012) and, as co-producer, Dunya & Desie (2008), Lena (2011) and the prize-winning documentary Waiting for August (2014), on which his sister Hanne was the lead producer.

Marry Me!, due out in January, is precisely the kind of film you’d expect Phlypo to produce: a story about the confusion created by a wedding between two people who come from very different communities, each with its prejudices about the other. “It’s a comedy,” he says, “but with lots of drama involved. It’s about this young couple: a Turkish bride, 26 years old, for whom it’s her second marriage; and a 24-year-old Flemish guy, for whom it’s his first.”

The script is by A Private View’s Van Rijckeghem and the director, Kadir Balci. It’s set in Ghent where all three of them live, and where there is a large Turkish community. Balci had previously made Turquaze (2010), which had a similar

producer

theme, and was reluctant to tackle another cross-cultural movie. “He said ‘No, I want to make something else; I would really like to do a genre film or something. I want to be a Flemish director, not just a Turkish director!’ But the more he heard of the project, the more he liked it. Then Jean-Claude said to him: ‘Well, let’s just start interviewing some mixed couples and let’s see whether there is enough drama and material to work with.’ So they started doing that and realised quite quickly that there was quite a lot to tell a story with.”

saving the planet If the gestation period was long on Marry Me!, for Vincent… it was even longer. Phlypo had previously worked as lineproducer on director Van Rompaey’s breakthrough film, Moscow, Belgium, and had co-produced his follow-up, Lena. “I think it’s a brilliant script, again written by JeanClaude who co-wrote most of the films that we’ve done

MOSCOW, BELGIUM

as a majority producer. We started the project just after Moscow, Belgium but it has taken us five years to get it off the ground.

“The film is about 17-year-old Vincent who believes that people are destroying the planet – he’s not far wrong – and has done some rather questionable things to hamburger restaurants, won’t get into a car because of the CO2, is a strict vegetarian and is even terrorising his own family…

The only way he can think of to save the planet is to start an ecological revolution by committing suicide. Then along comes his aunt who lives in Paris. She decides to take him on a road trip to the South of France to give him back some meaning in his life …”

The aim with Vincent, says Phlypo, “is to make a film in Belgium that is received as Belgian – or Flemish – and to

OXYGEN

do a film that will be received in France as a French film.

What we didn’t expect in the beginning is that it would be that difficult to pull off this type of film in France.” But the funding is now finally in place and shooting starts in March, with Phlypo as confident and articulate as ever about its prospects. If never letting go is the mark of a good producer, what other qualities does he think are required?

“It depends,” he says. “I have an advantage in that I’ve teamed up with a partner who is also a producer and a writer for most of our films. That means that, on an artistic level, we’re both involved in making choices – deciding which project we will do and which we won’t. I think our main goal is to try to accompany writers and directors in making their film. It is really about accompanying, in the best way, your artistic crew.” 

"What we have seen from 2002 onwards is that we no longer had only two or three feature films a year; all of a sudden there were 10 features produced" Marry Me on flandersimage.com Brasserie Romantique on flandersimage.com Oxygen on flandersimage.com Moscow, Belgium on flandersimage.com

51

CECILIA

CECILIA VERHEYDEN’S PATH TO BECOMING A FILM DIRECTOR BEGAN WHEN SHE SAW

DOGVILLE IN HER LATE TEENS AND WAS STRUCK BY THE WAY LARS VON TRIER STRIPPED AWAY SO MANY CINEMATIC CONVENTIONS. “DOGVILLE IS ONLY A STORY AND NOTHING MORE,” SHE RECALLS. “THAT REALLY TOUCHED ME. IT MADE ME WANT TO TELL STORIES, NOT IN THE SAME WAY BUT ABOUT THE SAME THINGS – ABOUT PEOPLE AND THE WAY THEY INTERACT.”

VERHEYDEN

TEXT IAN MUNDELL PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

INSPIRATIONAL THESE ARE SOME OF THE WORKS CECILIA VERHEYDEN IS CURRENTLY INSPIRED BY:

grandmothers

TRUE LOVE

BY DOMINIC SAVAGE FOR THE BBC

BOOK ‘DE LAATKOMER’

BY DIMITRI VERHULST

MUSIC ‘SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN’

BY SIXTO RODRIGUEZ

under the influence

Cecilia Verheyden enrolled at the RITS film school in Brussels, but did not have the usual student experience of discovering the classics of cinema history. Instead, she was influenced by contemporary films such as Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, Walter Salles’s Central Station and the work of the Dardenne brothers. “It’s movies that are made now, about things that are happening now, and that say something about people who live now, that inspire me most,” she says.This continues to be the case, with her most recent inspirations including Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Tom Ford’s A Single Man. After graduation, Verheyden did internships and became a director of extras, particularly on TV series and movies by Jan Verheyen such as Missing Persons’ Unit, Dossier K. and Crazy About Ya. Between assignments, she made commercials and started work on her first short films.

Then there was the idea of working with Steven Spielberg, a plot hatched with former RITS classmates Senne Dehandschutter and Raf Roosens. Together they went to Hollywood with the optimistic notion of getting the great man’s opinion on a movie script. More realistically, they planned to shoot a documentary about the way Hollywood functions.

The resulting series, Climbing Spielberg, was already being broadcast when they finally got a message that the director would like to meet them. They returned to Hollywood with the promise of a five-minute interview, but in the end talked with him for 40 minutes. Verheyden admits to being more inspired by Spielberg as a person than by his films. “He’s very honest, and he does what he does for the love of making movies and telling stories.”

TV

Verheyden’s directing break came when Jan Verheyen invited her to work on the long-running crime series Missing Persons’ Unit, which in turn led to sketches for the comedy series What If..? and then a drama series of her own, Vriendinnen (Girl Friends). This follows the lives of two women from 1945 to the present day, encompassing both their personal stories and their experience of changes in society.

While not the writer of the show, Verheyden felt a very strong connection with the story, which is set in her home town of Leuven. “Actually, it’s the story of my grandmothers. They had the same lives as my main characters,” she says.

Each episode in the series jumps forward by five years, with a bigger jump and a cast change between 1960 and 1970. This presented all sorts of challenges. “Every episode had different costumes, different art direction, different light. Every episode was its own world.”

Inspirations ranged from the films of Bert Haanstra to Annie MG, a musical drama series about the life of Dutch children’s writer Annie M.G. Schmidt. US drama Mad Men also gave her ideas, although with only a modest budget she could not afford to be over-inspired.

DVD MY GIRL BY HOWARD ZEFF

ART GERHARD-RICHTER.COM

13 million YouTube views In parallel with this TV career, Verheyden has become a much sought-after director of commercials involving hidden camera stunts. This began with a Carlsberg advert, daring a couple to sit in the middle of a cinema full of heavily tattooed bikers. As Carlsberg and other clients came back for more, the stunts became more complex and her experience grew in meeting the challenges. ‘A lot of clients and agencies don’t know how to do these stunts, so they say: ‘Do your thing, we believe in you.’ I get a lot of freedom.”

Her latest advert involved closing down several streets in Los Angeles for an elaborate stunt to convince people that an app on their phones allowed them to hack the city, unlocking cars, opening cash machines and controlling street lights. The resulting four-minute film, to promote the Ubisoft game ‘Watch Dogs’, has had more than 13 million views on YouTube.

Verheyden’s next project will be her debut feature, Behind the Clouds. Based on a popular stage play by Michael De Cock, it concerns two people who were lovers in their twenties, who lose one another, then meet again in their seventies. They live this last love with the same intensity as their first, yet altered by a lifetime of experience.

Adapting it for the screen, Verheyden and De Cock have opened up the play, bringing in storylines about the daughter and granddaughter of the female lead. But it is too early to talk about inspirations. “I like the story, but I have to make it mine,” Verheyden says. “I want to have the feeling that it’s a story that only I can tell.” 

PHOTOGRAPHY ALECSOTH.COM

THEATRE ‘BECKY SHAW’ BY GINA GIONFRIDDO, FROM HET KIP THEATRE GROUP

53

fans

THE 10-PART CORDON, FEATURING A DEADLY PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN THE MIDDLE OF ANTWERP, IS THE LATEST LOCALLY PRODUCED TV SERIES TO FIND FAVOUR WITH BBC FOUR, HOME TO “INTELLIGENT, INNOVATIVE AND SURPRISING CONTENT” – WHERE IT WILL AIR THIS YEAR.

FOUR FOR FLANDERS Extreme wide shot. Night. Lights, reflected in the dark water, twinkle from the tops of cranes or in the windows of buildings around the harbour. Two men with flashlights, speaking an Asian language, sprint between the stacked shipping containers. A security patrol drives past in a 4x4. The two men flatten themselves against the steel side of a container.

The danger over, they run to the front of a container, check the number and raise the lever to open the door…

The night-time gloom, the bleak urban setting, the flashlights, the urgency… it could be the opening scene of the latest ‘Scandi noir’ series seeking to keep viewers pinned in front of their sets for weeks to come. But the harbour is not in Scandinavia: it is that of Antwerp, the business and trading heart of Flanders. And the scene opens Cordon, the latest Flemish TV series to attract the attention of the BBC’s home of cutting-edge drama, BBC Four.

When they open the container to free a family of Asian migrants, the two men unwittingly release a deadly virus which will soon paralyse Antwerp, leading to sections of the city being cordoned off under strict quarantine – using, ironically, stacked-up shipping containers to make the barricades. Those on the inside will remain isolated from their city and their loved ones, bringing out the best in some, the worst in others. It is a story given added urgency by the recent Ebola outbreak. And, inevitably, politics – and prejudice – play their role.

No air date has yet been set for Cordon – a 10 x 50 minutes drama series produced by Eyeworks Film & TV Drama.

54

CORDON

SUE DEEKS

It was first shown on Flemish channel vtm in March 2014, and recently won a prize for cinematography at a festival in São Paulo. When it airs, says the BBC’s head of acquisitions Sue Deeks, it should prove a worthy successor to Salamander, a politics-cum-bank heist series, also from Flanders (produced this time by Skyline Entertainment), which was broadcast on the channel in February 2014.

“BBC Four viewers really responded to Salamander, a pacey, edge-of-the-seat conspiracy thriller,” says Deeks, “and we hope that they will be as taken by the equally gripping but very different Cordon when we air it next year. Both series are perfect examples of high production values, terrific performances and compelling, intelligent storytelling. Furthermore, they both have beautiful European city settings, which we know BBC Four viewers find a real pleasure to see in such detail.”

Cordon will air in a slot effectively created for – and by – the Danish godfather of modern crime series The Killing, the first episode of which aired on BBC Four on 22 January, 2011. It was subsequently described by then Editor Richard Klein as “a game changer”. Not only was it hugely popular – Series 2 and 3 regularly played to audiences of over a million on a channel whose viewer profile had previously been described as ‘niche’. More to the point, it put paid to the belief that British televiewers wouldn’t accept subtitles. Saturday night on BBC Four will never be the same again.

Although generally seen as a home for crime series in general and ‘Scandi noir’ in particular, the Saturday night slot, says Deeks, is governed by “no policy or preference.

We are looking for high quality, compelling drama, whichever country it may come from. Although several of our series are from Scandinavia, we have also shown series from France, Italy, Australia… and of course Belgium.”

BBC Four, the current channel Editor Cassian Harrison recently told The Guardian, “has a unique place in the BBC portfolio offering intelligent, innovative and surprising content with a distinctive depth, wit and verve”.

Both Salamander and Cordon, he says, “are brilliant examples of televisual storytelling and a real testament to the growing skills and standards of the Belgian television community”.  Cordon on flandersimage.com

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PHOTO CREDITS P 4 Bart Dewaele P 9 Maximiliaan Dierickx (Crombez, Vivash) P 11 Danny Willems P13 Tom Verbruggen / De Werelvrede P 18, P 23 Bart Dewaele (Arielle Sleutel) P 22 Mark Devos (motion-capture studio) All other stills copyrighted by the respective producers PRINT / wilda.be SUBSCRIPTIONS By post / €10 / year (three issues) Info / flandersimage@vaf.be This magazine is also available for free via the App Store, and can be consulted on issuu.com More news and features on www.flandersimage.com

PUBLISHED BY Flanders Image/VAF Flanders Film House Bischoffsheimlaan 38 / B-1000 Brussels Belgium/EU T +32-2-226 0630 / F +32-2-219 1936 E flandersimage@vaf.be Flanders Image is a division of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) SPECIAL THANKS TO / Albert Bimmel, Dirk Cools, Albert Bimmel, Dirk Cools, Myriam De Boeck, Pierre Drouot, Siebe Dumon, Katrien Maes, Erik Martens, Karla Puttemans, An Ratinckx, Jan Roekens, Koen Salmon, Dirk Schoenmaekers, Katrijn Steylaerts, Liesbeth Van de Casseye, Tom Van der Elst, Karen Van Hellemont, Barbara Van Lombeek, Marijke Vandebuerie, Leen Vanderschueren, Sander Vanhellemont, Helga Vinck + all the filmmakers and producers who helped on this issue.

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