Flanders (i) Magazine #32 - Summer 2015

TAKE 32 | SUMMER 2015 | E 3.99

PAINT IT BLACK

STREET TALK WITH ADIL EL ARBI AND BILALL FALLAH

FELIX VAN GROENINGEN BUSTS SOME MOVES IN BELGICA

Wim Willaert

THE MAN BEHIND THE BEARD

EMMY OOST

CONJURES UP AN APP

MARTHA CANGA ANTONIO VEERLE BAETENS ABOUBAKR BENSAÏHI KRISTOF BILSEN RUBEN DESIERE PAMELA LEU JEROEN PERCEVAL THOMAS POOTERS ISABELLE TOLLENAERE LAURA VANDEWYNCKEL PASCAL VERMEERSCH AN VROMBAUT

#talentmatters

EN FRANÇAIS

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i-opener Jaco van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament finds God living in Brussels, falling out with his wife and becoming disenchanted with mankind

CineFile Seven filmmakers who had their short films selected for Cannes recall the experience and offer advice to those following in their footsteps

Felix van Groeningen The Oscar-nominated director talks about his new film Belgica, a tale of two brothers set in the heady days of the dance-music boom

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38 Aboubakr Bensaïhi and Martha Canga Antonio These two talented newcomers play the star-crossed lovers in Black, a Romeo & Juliet story set in contemporary Brussels

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Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah The ‘brothers from another mother’ talk about Black, a love story set against a backdrop of gang violence on the streets of Brussels

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Talent Matters The latest from Veerle Baetens, Ruben Desiere, Jeroen Perceval, Laura Vandewynckel, An Vrombaut and Wim Willaert

C NTENTS TAKE 32

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

54 52 48 44 42 40

Pamela Leu The founder of sales company Be For Films reflects on the growing international profile of Flemish films and picks her personal favourites

Thomas Pooters The rising young Flemish editor checks off the films, the music and above all the people that have inspired him in his work

Emmy Oost The producer discusses her upcoming projects, which range from features via an interactive documentary to a mobile phone App

Isabelle Tollenaere The prize-winning documentary Battles reveals how the remains of the events which scarred the face of 20th-century Europe live on in surprising ways Pascal Vermeersch The Belgian animator talks us through the making of Phantom Boy, the eagerly awaited follow-up to A Cat in Paris

Kristof Bilsen How the Kinshasa-set documentary Elephant’s Dream was made and what it tells us about being a modern-day Belgian

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TALL TALES.

4

Belgian-born animator An Vrombaut loves all kinds of animals. But she has a special penchant for the ones with the very long necks.

It has always been animals for An Vrombaut. The animator and children’s book author, who received a Special Mention from the Children’s Jury in this year’s Berlinale Generation Competition for her short film The Tie, grew up in a house full of pets. Not surprising, then, that animals are the main protagonists of her films and books - usually rather small animals with ambitions to become bigger, like the little wolf who visits the moon in her graduation film of the same name, or the cute kitten in When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Tiger.

Closest of all to her heart, though, is her latest wouldbe hero, the small giraffe in The Tie who encounters all kinds of trouble as he tries to get up there with the big guys.

Vrombaut is best known for the TV series 64 Zoo Lane, first broadcast on the BBC’s CBeebies channel in 2000 and subsequently seen around the world. Each episode starts with Lucy, who lives next door to a zoo, sliding down the neck of Georgina the Giraffe to meet up with all her animal friends and hear their stories.

The inspiration for Georgina is a model giraffe Vrombaut made when she was a child, and the fascination with these gentle, gangly creatures has stayed with her ever since: her colourful website describes her as a “lover of all things giraffe…”

“My mother was always crazy about animals,” says the animator, who grew up in Belgium but now lives in North

London, “especially dogs. The wolves in Little Wolf are based on my mum’s dog, which is how it all started: I was just drawing, drawing, drawing. I’m quite tall myself, so perhaps that’s partly why I identify with giraffes. But now I’ve done a short film about them maybe I’ve finally got them out of my system.”

Vrombaut trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, then came to the UK to work on The Thief and the Cobbler, the legendary unfinished film by acclaimed animator Richard Williams, before going back to school at the Royal College of Art, where she graduated with an MA in Animation.

Having spent the past 15 years working on “the older end of pre-school” (ages four to six), Vrombaut admits to occasional hankerings after a less protected universe.

“The next thing I do, I want to make it a little bit scarier,” she says, “because I remember a programme I used to watch when I was little that was quite scary: this bear got kidnapped by a witch from space and you wouldn’t find out until the next day if he was OK.” Vrombaut would consider working again with Ghentbased animation house Lunanime, who produced The Tie. “They’ve co-produced A Cat in Paris and now Phantom Boy. But I would also look to see if there was anybody in the UK who would want to co-produce it.”

What she envisages, she says, is something “in the vein of Song of the Sea”.

It is, however, early days: “When I left to study in the UK, there weren’t really any opportunities for animators in Belgium,” she says, “but I think now there’s a lot more happening. What would be great would be to do a coproduction. I’ve worked on co-productions with France and South Africa, but never the UK and Belgium, which for me would be the logical next step. Everything is so global now: I don’t think there are huge differences between animators, and they all move around anyway.

They go wherever the work is.”  www.vrombaut.co.uk

THE TIE

The Tie on flandersimage.com

Best-known for his on-screen roles, Jeroen Perceval is at home on both sides of the camera.

Storytelling runs in the family, says Jeroen Perceval, whose father Luk is a renowned Belgian stage director. “But directing has always been my dream,” says the younger Perceval, an actor who has played Matthias Schoenaerts’s former childhood friend in Bullhead and is soon to be seen in Raf Reyntjens’s Paradise Trips. “What I really like is telling stories: it’s what I grew up with.”

Perceval’s dream came true last summer when he made his directorial debut with the short film August, about a young boy whose idyllic childhood summer is destroyed by a couple of older boys. It’s a dark tale, and Perceval wanted the luminous weather to contrast with the sombreness of the story. “Unfortunately,” he says, “we ended up shooting in the gloomiest week in the whole of August.” Fortunately DOP Brecht Goyvaerts was able to adjust, and the film seems bathed in the gentle light of summer.

Did his experience working with directors such as Michaël R. Roskam, Felix van Groeningen (With Friends Like These) and Alex van Warmerdam (Borgman) influence his approach to the film? Not to start with, says Perceval. “But I realised several times that I was doing exactly the same thing as one or other of the directors I have worked with.”

Although he has no plans to give up the day job, Perceval’s multitasking continues with Liebling, a collective comedy

PICTURES OF GESU. Ruben Desiere’s Kosmos takes a novel approach to documentary filmmaking.

On November 4, 2013, the Belgian police battered down the doors and ended the four-year occupation of the former Gesu church and convent in Brussels. Ruben Desiere’s camera captures the moment from inside as the heavy oak door finally gives way - a shot in the best tradition of activist documentaries.

which he co-wrote; and The Ardennes, which recently finished shooting. Perceval adapted the latter with director Robin Pront from his own theatre piece and plays the role of Dave, one of two brothers involved in a kidnapping that goes horribly wrong.

Meanwhile, he is working on his feature debut as a director, of which all he will say for now is that he has “a very clear idea of what I want” and is busy with the script.  Jeroen Perceval on IMDB

#talentmatters

STORYVILLE.

But that’s not the film Desiere wanted to make. Instead, having spent time getting to know a small group of the inhabitants, mainly Roma from Slovakia, he wrote a script taken from the classic 1965 book 'Kosmos' by Witold Gombrowicz which the inhabitants then spoke.

“It’s not that I’m against documentaries of the usual sort,” insists Desiere, “but I wanted to move away from the urgency that a place like that always has. If I looked without a camera, just from my feeling of it, there was so much more to see. But as soon as I turned a camera on, I got the material you normally capture in this kind of place.

I never felt comfortable with that position. I thought, ‘Maybe we can do something else…’”

The result is Kosmos the film, Desiere’s graduation project from the KASK Film School in Ghent: an intimate, at times hypnotic portrayal of everyday life with little or no hope of a future. The film premiered in Rotterdam in January, and has won him a Wildcard under the VAF scheme to help new filmmakers fund their next film; the director resolutely refuses to be drawn on what this may be.

As for the Gesu, there are plans to turn it - ironically and inevitably - into a luxury hotel. 

5

Kosmos on flandersimage.com

TALENTWATCH

HAIR APPARENT

6

With or without his trademark beard, Flemish actor Wim Willaert has one feature (made in France) and one TV series (made in Belgium) in the can, plus multiple projects in the pipeline. And he recently discovered the joys of motion capture, playing the lead ‘actor’ (and lead Flemish voice) in Jan Bultheel’s animated epic Cafard.

Multi-lingual, multi-talented and now multi-national, Flemish actor Wim Willaert is on a roll, making it hard to believe he was once unsure whether he was ‘right’ for the movies, despite his proven abilities on television, the stage and playing with big band The Flat Earth Society.

Although he subsequently starred in features such as Ex Drummer (2007), 22nd of May (2010), Offline (2012) and a series of shorts with director Gilles Coulier (featured in this issue’s CineFile), Willaert reckons he didn’t finally pass the big-screen “examination” (his word) until Yolande Moreau’s When the Sea Rises in 2004, a decade and a half after he first appeared in public. Now, 11 years on, his diary is full well into next year, having recently acquired an international dimension thanks to a lead role in the wonderfully titled French-language film Je suis mort mais j’ai des amis, in which he co-stars with Bouli Lanners and Serge Riaboukine.

“It’s about a rock group whose singer dies and they have to decide what to do with the ashes,” Willaert explains.

“They decide to go to LA, do a concert, mix the ashes with cocaine and snort their friend on stage - or at any rate that’s my character’s idea. But something goes wrong with the plane and they have to land in northern Canada. They don’t have visas for Canada, so they are stuck in the airport. My character is claustrophobic and

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

“For me, there is no difference to the acting if I’m talking French or Dutch” the thought of getting on the plane again freaks him out.

So they take a train, but it goes the wrong way - north, not south…”

Willaert is a natural for the role with his slightly hangdog looks behind which something else - stroppiness, determination, rebellion - usually lurks. Significantly, his screen-acting model is Jack Nicholson. “He’s my big hero,” he says, “because in every movie he’s in, what you see is Jack Nicholson. It’s him, but you always go with him into whatever story he tells you.”

Willaert recently discovered a whole new way of acting on Jan Bultheel’s motion-capture WWI story Cafard.

“I only had one costume: a tight black suit filled with little white dots,” he says. “You don’t have one camera but 20 infrared cameras. A scene on a train, for example, was

Much as Willaert finds little difference between acting in French and Dutch, so he makes no real distinction between films and TV. “When I have a good script and good colleagues to play with, it’s like I’m doing a movie.”

Two recent scripts to pass the ‘movie’ test are Eigen kweek, which translates roughly as ‘Home Grown’ and Bevergem, which has an official English title: The Natives. The former, the second season of which shoots in April, is about a farmer who is forced by the recession to grow weed with the help of one of his sons. “I’m the son who is, like, 45,” says Willaert. “I don’t have a wife so I get a beautiful girl from the Philippines: I’m a simple guy who wants real love but can’t find it. I’m always unhappy.”

His character in The Natives - which shot last summer - is not exactly the life and soul of the party, either. “I play a guy who is really dull,” he says. “When he opens his mouth, nobody listens. It’s a bit like one of the episodes in Father Ted, where you have a priest who’s so dull that, when he’s locked in a little room with Father Jack, Jack goes crazy.

He’s really a nice bloke who just wants to do his job of replacing the lights on the public highway.”

It’s a little difficult to reconcile these two sad sacks with the genial Willaert - but that’s what acting is about. And then there is Willaert with beard and without. On a scale of beardedness that runs from Justin Bieber to Robinson Crusoe, he is closer to the Crusoe end of the spectrum.

#talentmatters

shot with four chairs on a small stage with springs under it. Someone was shaking the platform and you immediately felt like being on a train to China. We were able to play very realistically, even though everything around us was far from real. The rhythm of the dialogue didn’t come from the animator, but from real actors playing a scene realistically.

Your imagination was easily triggered: it quickly becomes a matter of life and death, even though the costume and setting were ridiculously far from real life.”

A series of projects are currently lined up for Willaert, with more waiting in the wings. Despite claiming he is a Pisces and is thus incapable of making choices, he is certainly keen to work in France again, not so much for the language as for the ambiance. “For me,” he insists, “there is no difference to the acting if I’m talking French or Dutch. But in France and Wallonia, when it’s time to eat, everybody stops, and that’s something I love. On Flemish sets the actors go and eat, but some of the technicians can’t because they have to prepare the next scene. But in France, everybody stops and we all go to eat. And it’s really, really good food.”

The actor has had to make a few choices in his life, not least when his stage career had to be curtailed because it proved incompatible with his commitment to The Flat Earth Society. “I played the electric accordion,” he says. “I was jealous of guitar players - I play piano normally - because they can walk around like rock ‘n’ roll, so I bought a cheap accordion and connected it with a good amplifier and got myself an electric accordion.”

Any suggestion that the accordion is not a very rock ‘n’ roll instrument gets short shrift from Willaert. “You should see the way I play it,” he chuckles. But then along came more choices: TV and film commitments got in the way of touring and he had to hang up his squeeze-box.

“The Flat Earth Society is a crazy, crazy band,” he says.

“I had 16 wonderful years with it but now, the fact is, I’m an actor. I like to make music but I know that my talent is acting… A lot of movies come and I can’t do it any more.

It’s so sad!”

CAFARD

Wim Willaert on IMDB

JE SUIS MORT MAIS J'AI DES AMIS Jacky Lambert (l) - Bouli Lanners - Eddy Leduc - Wim Willaert (r)

“If I’m not shooting a movie, I just let everything grow,” he says, “so when I have a beard like this, that means I’ve had a nice holiday! But then the first movie I have to do, they have the choice: ‘Do you want a moustache, a beard…’”

That question looks like being asked a lot over the next nine months. “I’m doing a short movie next week - one week of shooting in Liège - and then in April, we do the next series of Home Grown,” he says. “Then I do the second movie of Peter Monsaert, the director who made Offline, called Le ciel flamand, and then we have the first feature directed

by Gilles Coulier called Cargo.…”

Could take the beard a while to grow back. 

7

AFTER ALABAMA. Flemish actress Veerle Baetens talks about playing troubled characters, working in France and writing her first script.

Scratch any of the characters that Veerle Baetens has played or is about to play and you’re liable to find a streak of weirdness, as in her best-known role: Alabama in The Broken Circle Breakdown. Off screen, however, far from Alabama’s tattoos and bottle-blondness, Baetens is much less of an extrovert: “I try to blend in more, to be honest,” she admits.

“I feel I’m even a little bit plain maybe, you know what I mean? I don’t like to stand out in a crowd. But when I’m on stage or in a movie…”

She makes an expansive gesture. I think the word she is looking for is ‘Wow!’ Elise, the real name of her character in Broken Circle Breakdown, is no shrinking violet, even before she reinvents herself as Alabama. And there is certainly nothing ordinary about Baetens’s performance, which won her Best Actress at the European Film Awards and helped win the film the César for Best Foreign Film.

The movie went on to sell over 200,000 tickets in France.

The bluegrass band, too, has found a life after the film, with a sold-out concert in the legendary Olympia in Paris scheduled for this autumn. All of this has brought Baetens to the attention of French directors, starting with Emma Luchini, for whom she shot Un début prometteur late last year. “Broken Circle Breakdown was a real breakthrough,” says Baetens, modest as ever. “I’d done two other casting calls in France, and I didn’t get them. But for Emma, I didn’t even have to do an audition: she just came to Brussels, we talked a bit and she said ‘OK, let’s do this’.

I think I needed Broken Circle to show what I’m capable of doing, you know? But it was very courageous of her.”

ON THE ANTI-TOURIST TRAIL..

8

Selected for this year’s Cinéfondation, Laura Vandewynckel’s animated short film Paradise tackles complex issues in a striking style.

It was the trip to Indonesia that did it. Laura Vandewynckel’s determination to make her short film Paradise arose out of a process of self-examination following a trip there during her second year of animation studies at the RITS School of Arts in Brussels. She set out for Yogyakarta full of good intentions, but found that the best of reasons are sometimes also the worst of reasons.

“I really wanted to confront my western mind-set with that of a non-western people,” she says. “I didn’t want to be ‘just a tourist’, so I added a research goal to the trip. I wanted to learn to what extent Indonesian artists deploy their art as a change generator. And if possible, fairly naïvely, I wanted to contribute to that attempt. I contacted a local political theatre and accompanied them for two months, touring with their production about women’s rights in Indonesia. I had a wonderful time, but back home I thought ‘What have

I been doing’? Had I really been an anti-tourist?

Had I not just proclaimed myself as guest and had they not just perfectly performed the role of host I imposed on them? Had I contributed at all to their experience? It was out of this questioning that I actually started the film.

It’s me, going on a trip to paradise.”

Animated in a style strongly influenced by Indonesian shadow puppets, Paradise is short, simple and very powerful. A tourist takes a plane to a semi-tropical paradise, relaxes in the sun, shows some interest in the local people who provide various forms of entertainment, then flies home and completely ignores an immigrant from ‘Paradise’ begging at the airport. All this is simply shown, “There was a big attempt not to be moralistic,” says Vandewynckel.

mother drinks and her sister does things that she doesn’t like. She gets herself out of this kind of life by studying hard and becoming a police officer, then working her way up until she becomes an Inspector. She’s a really nice character because she breaks every rule.”

The most striking project on the horizon, however, is Tabula rasa, Baetens’s first venture into writing a role for herself.

That was the starting point, explains Baetens, which is unusual for any script, let alone one for TV. “Someone said to me, ‘If there’s a character you want to play, then get together with someone you want to write with’, which was Malin. We told each other ‘OK, we just want to write something for a very interesting character’. That’s how it started, and then Christophe Dirickx came in and it just grew and grew until what it is now.”

Shooting starts for production company Caviar in the autumn, but in the meantime Baetens is really relishing being a writer. “It’s my first script and I’m really excited about it,” she says, “because it takes me away from everything I’ve done before. It’s so calm and soothing. I can sit at my desk and write, then go to Malin and Christophe and ask them what they think. And they can say ‘This is great’ or ‘This is awful’, and I can go back and make it better. On stage you have to be there and you have to do it right away. It’s the same on a film set: you can do it over but in a set period of time; with writing it’s a lot freer. I like going into these characters and squeezing and altering them.”

Until they’re strange enough, presumably. 

#talentmatters

The character Baetens plays in Un début prometteur is certainly not someone afraid to stand out in a crowd. “My character is a girl who pops up out of the blue - you don’t know where she comes from or who she is and you don’t really find out during the movie,” she says. “She’s a girl who lives in her car. She’s quite attention-seeking. She makes her living from gambling and dog races, stuff like that.”

Un début prometteur is now in post-production, and Baetens herself has likewise completed work on the Danish/ German/Belgian TV series The Team; just wrapped The Ardennes, the feature debut of director Robin Pront; will shortly start shooting Des nouvelles de la planète Mars for director Dominik Moll; and is busy co-writing a TV series called Tabula rasa with Malin-Sarah Gozin and Christophe Dirickx. “I’m a bit of a slave to my work,” she admits ruefully.

All three of her upcoming roles could have been sisters to Alabama. But working with Moll - two of whose films have been in Competition at Cannes - takes her into the higher reaches of auteur cinema. “I think his movies have this universe which is completely crazy but you dig it; you take it in and you believe it in some way or another.” In the new film, she plays an animal activist who “has some psychological problems: she doesn’t like physical contact; and she’s vegan. I can’t tell you how or why she comes into the story, but she’s pretty crazy.”

Then, in the multi-national crime series The Team - about a group of international investigators brought together by three very similar murders in Copenhagen, Berlin and Antwerp she plays a tough cop who turns out to be battling private demons. “My character is the Belgian investigator and she comes from a pretty marginal place,” says Baetens. “Her

Veerle Baetens on flandersimage.com Veerle Baetens on IMDB

Laura Vandewynckel working on Paradise

PARADISE

“I am not saying that we are the bad ones and they are the good ones: I just ask a question.“ The animation is likewise very simple, all done in stopmotion, untouched by CGI. The settings comprise simple lines, the people see-through shapes made of a kind of mesh. “My quest over the past two years - I know that’s not very long but I would like to continue with it - has been for

transparency,” she says. “Shadow puppets are very much about translucence, and I dedicated a couple of months to experimenting with translucent materials like wayang.”

Vandewynckel is currently doing a VAF internship at Beast Animation, a Mechelen-based company that specialises in stop-motion work. After this she will start her own project with the money she received from the VAF Wildcard (under the scheme to help emerging filmmakers with their next project). She would like to develop an animated documentary on a similar theme to Paradise, she says, although she is aware of the challenges of a subtle approach to a complex theme within the limited time-frame of an animated short.

“We as westerners have some ideas about how the world should be and we have a tendency to project these ideas onto other people without realising that, despite the best of intentions, our involvement often has the opposite effect,” she says. “That’s something to think about and maybe something to make a film about.”  • For other filmmakers’ Cinéfondation experiences, see page 13

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#talentmatters COPAIN IN COMPETITION AT CANNES..

RAF AND JAN ROOSENS

SELECTION FOR THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL IS A DOUBLE SUCCESS FOR BROTHERS RAF AND JAN ROOSENS. IT'S AN HONOUR FOR THEIR FILM COPAIN (BUDDY), ONE OF JUST NINE COMPETING IN THE OFFICIAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION. AND IT'S A BOOST FOR THEIR FEATURE FILM PROJECT, FOR WHICH COPAIN IS A CALLING CARD. Copain begins with four young people exploring an abandoned apartment in a high-rise. They seem close, but one of them - Fré - feels ill at ease. He comes from a wealthy background, a fact he conceals from the others.

When he finally confides in Jana, who he likes, the group dynamic changes.

The starting point for the film was an image by German photographer Tobias Zielony. "It was a picture of two boys from a bad neighbourhood, but one of them had a really friendly, upper class face," Jan recalls. "That was the spark: maybe that guy is from a better neighbourhood and he is playing with those kids from the bad neighbourhood."

The brothers developed the idea with writing team Bert Van Dael (Clan) and Sanne Nuyens (De Vijfhoek), with whom they collaborated on their previous short, Rotkop.

"It was immediately clear that there was a good connection between the four of us," says Raf. "Our vision of the script and the movies we like are the same."

COPAIN

Work on Copain stretched over several years, allowing the script and cast to evolve. For example, actors Felix Meyer and Anne-Laure Vandeputte did not look like an obvious couple and so auditioned for the parts of Fré and Jana with no expectation of being cast together. "They were completely relaxed and started sparking off each other," says Raf. Afterwards the script was adjusted to fit their differences.

Visually the film moves between on-the-shoulder camerawork when the kids are together and more static shots for Fre's claustrophobic home life. There is also play between bright sunlight and darkness in the two worlds.

Raf and Jan collaborated on every aspect of the film. "We feel that we have complementary skills, so it's a really natural process," says Jan. The only division of labour is on set, where communication has to be clear. "We make a decision that just one of us talks to the cast, but we both sit behind the monitor and discuss scenes together."

Their next project will be a feature film, working title Franco, also written by Nuyens and Van Dael. It concerns a boy whose admiration for his elder brother turns to jealousy when a girl comes between them. Later, when the elder brother dies, the younger brother tries to take his place.

With similar settings and themes, Copain is a calling card for Franco. "If you first see Copain and then you read the script of Franco, you have a really good idea of how the film will be made," says Raf. After being selected for the EAVE producers' workshop, the brothers hope to have the script finished later this year. IAN MUNDELL Jan en Raf Roosens on flandersimage.com

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THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT Director Jaco Van Dormael, who won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1991 for his first feature Toto le héros, puts the Almighty on the spot in his new film The Brand New Testament, a surreal comedy in which God (Benoît Poelvoorde) turns out to live in Brussels. When his daughter Ea (Pili Groyne, pictured) is driven out by His bad moods, God has to venture out among his creations to find her.

Caviar co-produces for Flanders, with Flemish actress Laura Verlinden in the cast and Flemish composer An Pierlé providing the score. 

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RETROSPECTIVE

HOU 侯孝賢 HSIAO-HSIEN 27.05

MASTERCLASS WITH HOU HSIAO-HSIEN & SCREENWRITER CHU TIEN-WEN MODERATED BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS

TAIWAN 臺灣電影全景 FILM PANORAMA JUNE& JULY MORE THAN 50 FILMS, GUESTS & CONFERENCES

A historical overview of Taiwanese cinéma.

Royal Film Archive of Belgium - www.cinematek.be

cinefile

THE RED CARPET DIARIES

OVER THE PAST DECADE OR SO, YOUNG FLEMISH FILMMAKERS HAVE PUT IN PRETTY REGULAR APPEARANCES AT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST FILM FESTIVAL, WHETHER IN THE OFFICIAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION OR AS GUESTS OF THE CINÉFONDATION. WE ASK: HOW WAS IT FOR THEM? AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, IS THERE LIFE AFTER CANNES?

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NAME BORN

JONAS GEIRNAERT

THE FLANDERS SEVEN

July 28, 1982

Flatlife - Jury Prize, Short Film Competition 2004 SINCE THEN Mainly television, including the animated series Kabouter Wesley, about an aggressive gnome, picked up

by Comedy Central; 11-part TV series as writer/director in development.

CANNES CALLING CARD

It was a great experience but a little overwhelming because I was just a student and I submitted my film to the Festival on the off-chance it might be selected. It was a bit hectic because the film wasn’t quite finished and I needed to get lots of things sorted out, like a 35mm copy. I was a bit busy and didn’t have the time to enjoy the festival that much.

At that time I was also applying for a job at Belgian Television so I held off on most of the other offers. I did work on a storyboard for a short film that was supposed to be integrated into a feature film by a Belgian director, but it was never made. A few years before I had set up a comedy group with some friends which performed at theatres in Belgium and the Netherlands. Shortly after the Festival, we decided we wanted to go into television.

For most students who have a successful graduation film, if they do really well they can go abroad and maybe work for a bigger studio.

But that wasn’t really my ambition. I wanted to make something for Belgian television, together with my friends. And that’s what we did.

Right now I’m writing scripts for a drama series [working title: The Day]. It’s a big project I’m writing with my girlfriend, Julie Mahieu… [Fellow Flanders Seven member Gilles Coulier will be one of the series’ two directors.] I’ve written scripts before but never anything huge like this: it’s a drama series with 11 episodes, about one hour long each. It’s the biggest thing I’ve worked on so far.

Advice to anyone selected for Cannes? Don’t forget to enjoy it like I did! If you get any opportunities, just take your time; don’t say yes to any of them before you think it over. You have plenty of time after the Festival to make up your mind what you’re going to do next.

Jonas Geirnaert on Wikipedia Jonas Geirnaert on flandersimage.com

On May 23, 1989, a young filmmaker called Steven Soderbergh climbed the steps to the stage in the Salle Lumière to receive the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize for his first feature, sex, lies and videotape. When the applause had died down, Soderbergh quipped, “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here”. None of the seven Flemish filmmakers contacted for this article has yet to get his or her hands on a Palme d’Or, although several have come close.

But, if all have experienced some symptoms of the Soderbergh effect, none would have missed the Cannes experience for the world.

The Flanders Seven - whose comments you can read in their own words on this and the following pages - are, in order of their redcarpet debut: Jonas Geirnaert, who won the Jury Award with Flatlife in 2004; Peter Ghesquière, whose film Moonglow was in the Short Film Competition in 2005; Gilles Coulier, who was selected for the Cinéfondation with Iceland in 2010 and made it into the Short Film Competition with Mont Blanc in 2013; Wannes Destoop, whose Swimsuit 46 won the Jury Award in 2011; Pieter Dirkx, whose short film Bento monogatari earned him a Cinéfondation place in 2011; Emilie Verhamme, in Competition in 2012 with her short film Cockaigne; and Leni Huyghe, whose short Matteus won

“I’m really bad with famous actors. People had to tell me ‘That was Tim Roth who just congratulated you’!”

Jonas Geirnaert

BORN

PETER GHESQUIÈRE

July 13, 1980

Moonglow, Short Film Competition 2005 SINCE THEN One short, Zondvloed (2006), then multiple credits as second unit and assistant director, most recently on The Ardennes; short film Anders ready to shoot.

CANNES CALLING CARD

It was a strange weekend. I was quite stressed, which is stupid when I look back. I couldn’t do the red carpet with my girlfriend - it was directors only - so she was quite frustrated. But it was fun all the same.

A couple of months ago I received support for a new short film and I think it’s also because of Cannes. The film is called Anders. We haven’t shot it yet because I’m working a lot as an assistant director, but I hope to shoot it in a couple of months. It’s the story of a normal guy who is born into a totally mongoloid society. He is the only one who is normal like we are and he wants to be a mongoloid like everyone else.

I really like the 1st AD job: you’re really in charge and it’s a great feeling when the set is working out well. We just finished The Ardennes [directed

by Robin Pront]; it was heavy shooting but great to do. In the summer we shot Black [see pages 34-37] and in three months we start with Le ciel flamand, the new film by Peter Monsaert who made Offline.

Sometimes when I’m on set I think, ‘I have to direct more’. That’s the reason why I’m doing the new short film. I’m hoping for a perfect combination between the two, because now directing is too small a part of it.

Advice to anyone selected for Cannes? It’s easy to get stressed but you have to enjoy it. And you have to strike while the iron is hot. A lot of people are interested in what you’re doing and it’s very important to open yourself up to all those things.

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NAME

www.peterghesquiere.com Peter Ghesquiere on flandersimage.com

“It’s a festival where the kitsch and being seen are very important, but it’s very close to good filmmaking and good stories” Wannes Destoop

cannes frenzy “My best memories of it are the reactions that I got for my film from the other participants,” says Dirkx. “Even now, if I ever doubt myself, I think back to this time and remember how they were so enthusiastic and believed in me for trying to do something different.”

One of the Seven actually found a producer for her next project. “I met a girl called Jessica [Mitchell] who was the owner of Buffalo Films, a production company in Australia,” says Verhamme, “and she co-produced the short film I made after Cockaigne, Tsjernobyl Hearts.

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her a place in the Cinéfondation in the same year (2012).

For most of them, the time since Cannes has been a gradual progress upwards, taking some into television, others into low-budget features; all are still very much in the filmmaking business, whether energetically pursuing their own projects like Huyghe, or finding satisfaction in being a first assistant for other directors, like Ghesquière and Destoop. For all of them, Cannes was like a brief moment out of time, an unforgettable memory that may not have had any direct results but which gave them a gift beyond value: confirmed confidence in their filmmaking ability.

NAME

PIETER DIRKX

February 24, 1984 CANNES CALLING CARD Bento monogatari, Cinéfondation 2011 SINCE THEN Painter as well as filmmaker; music videos; working on script for debut feature, Ginger Lake.

BORN

Cannes was really good above all for my self-confidence as a filmmaker.

My best memories of it are the reactions that I got there to my film from the other participants and also the people who made the selection.

Of course, you still have to fight for your next project just as hard after you have been selected for Cannes; they don’t just come and ask you to do something!

But when you mention Cannes, it’s a way of getting your emails read. Now I’m contacting people for my feature film and I’ve noticed that, even if I don’t always like to mention Cannes when presenting myself professionally, people do take you more seriously after you do.

I started writing my new feature just after Cannes 2011 and I’m still finishing the screenplay. I just want to take my time and make sure that I am completely satisfied with it – even though that will probably never happen!

The title is Ginger Lake. I received a grant in October of last year to write the screenplay and we’re going to apply for development as soon as we feel ready for it. It’s a psychological thriller that’s set in another world that looks exactly like ours but where the belief is that all red-headed people should be killed.

I think the Cannes experience probably helped in terms of knowing how many ways there are for this project to fail! But I also know that what people liked most about Bento monogatari was the fact that I was not afraid to fail. I took many risks with it and the experience of Cannes has inspired me to take those risks again. I think it’s better to take risks and fail than to make something safe.

Bento Monogatari on flandersimage.com

NAME

GILLES COULIER

October 30, 1986 Iceland, Cinéfondation 2010; Mont Blanc, Short Film Competition 2013 SINCE THEN TV series The Natives; working on the script of his first feature, Cargo.

BORN

CANNES CALLING CARDS

Gilles Coulier (l), Dolores Bouckaert and Angelo Tijssens (r)

I would say the most valuable thing [about the Cinéfondation and the Short Film Competition] was meeting other young people at the same point in their lives who shared a love of film. When you look at Cannes, you have a lot of young people working for the selection, watching 3,000 or 4,000 films and making sure that the best of the best are selected. They all have one thing in common: the filmmakers did what they wanted to do. That’s a lovely thing, to look at films that are made with heart.

I’ve just done a TV series called The Natives. I feel 100% good on a set.

I love to tell stories but I love to be on a set too: it’s a good habitat. It was longer, 64 days, had a bigger crew and was more professional. But my approach was the same as for a short film.

“The most valuable thing was meeting other young people at the same point in their lives who shared a love of film” Gilles Coulier

You have a lot of people going ‘Oh, you’re a TV director now’, but I don’t think like that because film is about love and about thinking at a certain point in your life, ‘This is the sort of film I want to make’.

When I read the first episode I was already working on the script of a feature film called Cargo, which is about three brothers. The father dies at sea and the three sons have to save the family business, an old fishing company.

They can’t get the business back on track so they decide to do illegal people-trafficking to England from Ostend. We’ve been selected for the Torino Film Lab, and we just submitted it to the VAF for development. I hope to shoot it at the end of the year.

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We communicated a lot by Skype and email. She helped me, read the script and gave me advice like any producer would.” Most of the Seven, however, admit to having suffered from famousfor-five-minutes syndrome when it came to finding a producer: lots of talk; few if any concrete results.

Indeed the frenzy of Cannes, which Verhamme describes as being “like a big circus”, seemed to several of the directors to lack the focus of other, less high-profile events, where spending quality time with other filmmakers is both easier and more valuable. “You start talking with other filmmakers,” says Coulier, “and it’s easy to share experiences.

That’s what I had with Antonio Piazza who won at Cannes in 2013 in the Semaine de la Critique.

He was just with me in Abu Dhabi, selected with a short film, and it’s those people, those names, that you see in other festivals.”

NAME

WANNES DESTOOP

February 3, 1985 CANNES CALLING CARD Swimsuit 46, Jury Prize, Short Film Competition 2011 SINCE THEN Music videos, various assistant director credits plus another short film, Billy the Bully (2015); writing his first feature.

BORN

Cannes was overwhelming. Swimsuit 46 was my graduation film.

I submitted it to Cannes but never for one second did I think it would be selected. Three weeks before the festival I had emails from the Critics Week, the Quinzaine and the Cinéfondation saying I hadn’t been selected. And then I think it was two-and-a-half weeks before Cannes I received a phone call saying it had been selected for the Official Competition!

Even with a prize, it’s not like you get a bag of money and a producer just says ‘Go ahead’. I had a feeling of ‘What now? What do I hope to do now because, if I make another short film, it has to be as good as my previous one and the best-case scenario is that it has to be better’? So it took a while. I started writing my new short film, Billy the Bully, two years ago and shot it last summer.

I’m now writing the treatment for my first feature film and I want to submit it to the VAF in June. I want to tell stories about people who don’t have a lot in life and have to struggle. I don’t want to do big problem pictures or big action films, I want to do big films about small stories.

I learned a lot of things and was inspired by other directors, but I’m so glad I’ve done my own short film with my own story. I won’t wait so long again to shoot another film.

Advice to anyone selected for Cannes? Just enjoy the trip! I’ve always said it’s kind of like a circus but it’s a really fun circus. It’s a festival where the kitsch and being seen are very important, but it’s very close to good filmmaking and good stories.

Wannes Destoop on IMDB Wannes Destoop on flandersimage.com Wannes Destoop and Uma Thurman

Gilles Coulier on Wikipedia

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Gilles Coulier on flandersimage.com

Even a big festival like Berlin can provide the sort of focus it’s sometimes hard to find in Cannes for all its workshops, masterclasses and parties. “The Berlinale Talent Campus is really great,” says Huyghe, “because there are 300 creative people, producers, DOPs, whatever, and you have profound conversations with them. I didn’t see so many films but the master classes, with Wim Wenders for instance, were very moving... like somebody just telling you to find your voice. It’s true and it’s important.”

Destoop (for non-Flemish speakers, this is pronounced ‘Van-ess De-stope’) at the 2011 Closing Ceremony. “The Festival people were making signs to me, ‘Get up, get up’, but the moment I get up, [presenter] Michel Gondry is talking again, then someone says to him ‘No, Michel, you have to say the Jury Prize and the name of the director’.

So I sit down again and he eventually reads out ‘Wayne Der-stupe’…”

seize the moment french protocol For those who make it that far, the awards ceremony can be nerve-wracking, thanks to French protocol and something most Flemish people will have experienced: the fact that Flemish names do not trip easily off foreign tongues.

“Do I have to stand up or not?” wondered Wannes

Some dried on stage, some said too much - and some seized the moment. “At the time of the Festival,” recalls Geirnaert, “Michael Moore wasn’t sure if Fahrenheit 911 would go out in the US because his original distributor had let him down, so in my acceptance speech I called for American voters please not to vote for George Bush.

“Cannes was awesome: what I got out of it was the motivation to continue” Emilie Verhamme

NAME

EMILIE VERHAMME

November 27, 1986 CANNES CALLING CARD Cockaigne, Short Film Competition 2012 SINCE THEN Another short, Tsjernobyl Hearts, plus a low-budget feature, Eau Zoo (festival screenings in Ghent and Turin); a second feature, Euroland (working title) in development.

BORN

Cannes is the epicentre of film, so it was great to be there. I met a lot of interesting people, and it was also very interesting to be able to assess all the master classes and the special lectures… and the films: to be able to see them for the first time in Cannes was amazing.

Cannes was awesome: what I got out of it was the motivation to continue. It’s always important to get recognition for what you do because it gives you extra motivation. But the Wildcard is a bigger push: it gives you a chance to make another film.

Usually, people make a short film with the Wildcard because it’s a very small budget. But it was very important for me to make this story and put in everything that I wanted. Some people really got it and some people were like ‘Oh God, this is way too complex’. But I was glad I made it: I learned a lot. The next one, Euroland - that’s the working title is about the different expectations of relationships and friendships between people who aren’t necessarily from the same environment.

Advice to anyone selected for Cannes? Enjoy it and be open to anything, and by that I mean just listen to everybody that wants to give you advice and talk to a lot of people… Talk to other people who are selected, to producers, distributors…

• Selected for this year's Cinéfondation is Laura Vandewynckel's Paradise (see page 8)

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That caused a bit of a stir. Afterwards, there was a reception on the beach and a lot of people came to say ‘Hi’, but I’m really bad with famous actors, I don’t know their faces.

People had to tell me ‘That was Tim Roth who just congratulated you’!”

Looking back, the Flanders Seven all pretty much agree that seizing the moment is what it was all about, and that for all its chaotic lack of focus, selection at Cannes - and a prize in particular - is a great calling card to have.

“A lot of people are interested in what you’re doing,” says Ghesquière, “so I think it’s very important to really open yourself to all these things. It was great that we were nominated there. A couple of months ago, I received support for a new short film and I think the effect remains… it was partly because of Cannes.” 

NAME

LENI HUYGHE

January 20, 1986 Matteus, Cinéfondation 2012.

SINCE THEN Two more shorts: Do You Know What Love Is and PS São Paulo; preparing a documentary.

BORN

CANNES CALLING CARD

I knew it was going to be overwhelming and it was, because there’s a whole new world that opens up for you. That was pretty tough because I’m really good with one-on-one conversations, but there you have to present yourself as the director of a short film that is screening in the Festival. I had a sort of blackout when I had to present my film onstage. But the good thing was that I saw my film on screen and I thought ‘This film is worthy to be shown here’.

I had a very short moment with jury president Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Dimitra [Karya, head of selection at the Cinéfondation] put him next to me and he said ‘You are a filmmaker, I want you to continue’.

With PS São Paulo, it was a year after I shot them before I actually did something with those images. I knew there was something there but I didn’t know how we were going to do it.

Some people don’t like it at all, they think it’s more film-schoolish than Matteus. Matteus looks much more professional. In the end, I don’t know either. All the films that I make have their story and their outcome… You know how it goes with films: you never have control of all the things.

Two years ago, when I went to the Montreal Film Festival, I saw my former nanny who was with me from birth to six but who has moved to the US. I thought I should make a portrait about her as she has a very unique life story and has built herself a sort of virtual identity. I’m going to live with her for one month and film her, follow her and build a relationship for a movie and see what comes of it.

Leni Huyghe on IMDB Leni Huyghe on flandersimage.com

Emilie Verhamme on IMDB Emilie Verhamme on flandersimage.com

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www.cockaigne.be

R AISING

THE BAR

FELIX VAN GROENINGEN’S NEW FILM BELGICA - HIS FIFTH - IS SET AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, A KEY MOMENT WHEN LOTS OF THINGS CHANGED, NOT LEAST FOR TWO BROTHERS WHO OPEN THE BAR THAT GIVES THE FILM ITS TITLE.

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PHOTOS THOMAS DHANENS

director Music has always had a role to play in Felix van Groeningen’s films, whether in the background, in the grungy bar where the two Kellys dance all night in With Friends Like These; or carrying big chunks of the storyline as it did in The Broken Circle Breakdown. In Belgica, music is going to be a constant presence - not really narrative but central to the theme of the film. “It’s set in a bar, a night club,” says van Groeningen, “and we’re going to see bands performing there, so we’re going to hear a lot of music because people are dancing all the time.” In the final film - they’re still in the early stages of editing it - there’s going to be even more, courtesy of dance music legends the Dewaele bothers, David and Stephen, aka 2manydjs.

But forget any direct echoes of Broken Circle Breakdown, van Groeningen’s best-known film internationally (it was nominated for an Oscar in 2014). For one thing, the music in Breakdown is bluegrass, while in his new film, Belgica, it’s eclectic in general and electronic in particular.

For another, says van Groeningen, “Broken Circle Breakdown was almost like a musical. The characters themselves were singing what the story was about. This film is going to be completely different, but I hope in a way also very original.”

For readers over a certain age, 2manydjs are to the dance music scene what the Sex Pistols were to punk: gamechangers, roaming across the history of popular music, sampling anyone from prog rock dinosaurs like Emerson, Lake and Palmer to Basement Jaxx and Arcade Fire.

“They’ve done remixes for… you name it, they’ve done it,” enthuses van Groeningen. “What they’re really good at is combining 20 million styles. Their taste is incredible: it’s very eclectic and it’s what I rely on, I guess. They’ve actually composed everything: all the bands you see - and these are very different bands, ranging from one guy playing blues rock on a guitar to psychedelic techno - they’ve helped me create them for the movie.”

the new in-place FELIX VAN GROENINGEN (L) AND DOP RUBEN IMPENS

Belgica is set in 2000 and focuses on two bothers: Frank, the older one, played by Tom Vermeir; and Jo, played by Stef Aerts (Oxygen). They come together to open the bar of the title, see it become the new in-place in Belgium’s music scene (this, remember, is a period during which the country was in the forefront of the new dance music), then drift apart again. So far, so van Groeningen - people always tend to drift apart in the closing scenes of his movies: Steve and Sky, Black Kelly and her friends, Alabama and Monroe…

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“I’ve been touring a lot with Broken Circle and I’ve been writing something else too, so it’s two years on and off.

It always takes about that”

STEF AERTS

22

TOM VERMEIR

“They make a great couple and, when they’re together, they make things work,” he says. “Out of this comes their dream: to open a huge bar, sort of a music venue. They do it, and it works. But step-by-step they start to lose one another again when they are confronted by the realities of life. It changes them - and changes the Belgica too.

I guess they realise that they’re different; they needed one another to get to where they wanted, but it’s not going to keep on working and they have to split up.”

Van Groeningen started writing Belgica in the summer of 2012. “In between I had been touring a lot with Broken Circle and I’ve been writing something else too, so it’s two years on and off. It always takes about that.” It’s the director’s first original screenplay since With Friends Like These (2007) and is another collaboration with that film’s co-writer, Arne Sierens. “We do every possible thing, from writing with four hands on one keyboard to writing a version separately, to him writing and me giving feedback and vice versa. It depends on where we are with the project, who has the time, who has the energy: there are really no rules. I would never want to write a film again by myself, because I know I need other people.”

Even after all this, things can change during rehearsals and on the set, too. “Sometimes we rehearse scenes and we know what it’s about, so if it’s clear for the actors, it’s clear for me,” he says. “But sometimes you start shooting and you realise ‘Fuck, it’s just not good enough,’ and then you have to rethink it while you’re shooting, which is also fun, you know! It’s like ‘OK, can you feel the tension rising, we’ve got another half an hour, let’s go!’”

director

close to home Belgica is close to home in one respect. “My father had a bar, and he sold it in 2000 to two brothers,” he says. “So this film is like a mix of my father’s stories of those two brothers. There’s something that changes - you go from a small bar to a discotheque and, for me, it reflects a change in time, too. How we went to accepting electronic music, if you want to talk about it in music terms. But I hope it talks about more than that, about how the whole mentality changed over the course of five or 10 years - something you see through the story of two people being confronted with the reality of a particular bar.”

There is, however, no escaping the music: lead actor Tom Vermeir is best-known in Belgium as the singer/ guitarist of rock band A Brand. “Arne, my co-writer, is really the guy who discovered him as an actor,” says van Groeningen. “He’d done some TV, but not big roles, and he didn’t really like it. But every time I’ve seen him on stage since then, I thought he was getting better: he’s an amazing guy. I wanted to work with him because I felt he had the right combination of being a bit of a dick - but you kind of like him I guess. He has an enormous heart.

“The other brother is played by Stef Aerts. I’ve been wanting to work with him for a very long time, too.

I discovered him doing a theatre play with his student colleagues - it was his final exam production that he did for school, and I saw some other things that he did on stage. He’s just a very, very interesting guy. He’s the cerebral type of actor but nevertheless he will throw his full body into what he does. The difference between those two brothers is that one guy is really physical, the animal type, and the other has those elements, too.

130 hours of footage Characters who behave ‘like a bit of a dick’ but you can’t help liking them are a staple of van Groeningen’s films, from Steve in his debut feature Steve + Sky via the Strobbe family in The Misfortunates to the Belgica brothers. “Yes, well, that often happens,” he laughs.

“But the Strobbes were a working-class family in the village, and [the Belgica brothers] are very contemporary guys, born middle-class, yet they find themselves, for some reason or another, attracted to night life and they’re good at it. In that sense it’s going to be more recognisable for a lot of people.”

Van Groeningen shot 130 hours of footage for Belgica - roughly two-and-a-half times his usual shooting ratio.

“We had two cameras, so that’s the reason,” he says.

“We shot mostly hand-held or with a Steadicam, but we always had both cameras on set, so we could switch very easily. It was just that kind of film: I wanted to be able to shoot fast and really go for that energy.”

Van Groeningen’s five films are all set in Belgium, and all depict familiar characters and stories. But, with the success of Broken Circle Breakdown came the predictable offers from North America, and the director admits he has been tempted. “I spent some time there and met great people, but I’ve always said, ‘If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it my way and the right way.’

I’m only going to do it if I’m convinced that it’s the right film for me to make. I have to find the right emotional connection and try to make the world mine. That’s what any director has to do.” 

www.2manydjs.com

23

Felix van Groeningen on IMDB

But in the end, he’s the guy that has it more sorted out in his mind. I thought that would be the perfect combination.”

www.blauwepeer.be

15 EDITION th

Alan Silvestri (Back to the future Trilogy & Forrest Gump)

24 OCT 2O15

TICKETS www.filmfestival.be www.worldsoundtrackawards.com

#ffgent

#WSAwards

BRUSSELS PHILHARMONIC conducted by Dirk Brossé DANIEL PEMBERTON DISCOVERY 2014

©1985 Universal Pictures International

Kuipke Ghent

GANGS OF BRUSSELS PORTRAIT JOHAN JACOBS ADIL EL ARBI (L) and BILALL FALLAH

director

SET AGAINST THE VIOLENT BACKDROP OF BRUSSELS STREET GANGS, CAVIAR PRODUCTION BLACK IS THE SECOND FILM IN LESS THAN A YEAR FROM ADIL EL ARBI AND BILALL FALLAH. AND IT PULLS NO PUNCHES. 2014 was a pretty big year for Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah.

They filmed their first feature, Image, made on a shoestring budget but seen by 75,000 people (a big success for such a small film, says Bilall). Then, just before Christmas, Adil became the ‘Smartest Man in the World’ on a TV quiz show broadcast on Flemish TV channel VIER (Four). He only went on it, he says, to have a platform to promote Image. “We didn’t have a budget for commercials and posters everywhere, so I had to do at least one thing. And, yeah, it made a difference: we got 74% more people to go to the cinemas.” It made a difference to his life, too. “When I go to Antwerp or any city in Flanders, it’s crazy… Lots of selfies, autographs even now. I thought that people would forget about it. I didn’t know the show was so popular.”

But, if 2014 was crazy, 2015 looks like going off the scale with the release of Black. Based on a popular novel by Dirk Bracke, it is a Romeo and Juliet story - think West Side Story without the songs but with 2015 street cred.

In the neighbourhood that we already shot in for Image, when we went back for Black they knew us already so we didn’t have any trouble there. But in Matonge you cannot shoot there unless you talk to them for months and months before. There needs to be trust between us and the people who are actually in charge of the neighbourhood, otherwise it’s impossible. We had locals who protected us. If there was a gang leader with a champagne bottle ready to kill us or when somebody pulled a knife, our locals took care of the problem.” “We had a lot of people who helped us,” adds Adil, “but there are always one or two local people who have no brain and start to react.”

The pair met at film school and their friendship has weathered the stresses and strains of making three films in four years (Black was shot in the summer of 2014). No fallings out? “Not with each other but against the world, man!” says Bilall.

one big family mean streets In 2010, production company Caviar adapted another of Bracke’s books, Bo, directed by Hans Herbots, and subsequently approached Adil and Bilall to direct Nele Meirhaeghe’s screenplay based on his books 'Back' and 'Black'. The film is set and partly shot on the streets of Brussels’ notorious Matonge neighbourhood, which is vibrant, noisy and colourful - not to mention dangerous.

“Fuck yeah, it was war bro,” says Bilall. “It was really difficult because, if you come with a camera in the hood, they feel like you are trying to make something negative about them.

“We are a big team with the cameraman, the composer, our producer,” says Adil. “We want to be one big family.

It’s like the brothers Dardenne or the Coen brothers: they always work together.”

Even though they not actually brothers?

“Yeah, but we are Moroccan so it’s the same thing.”

“All Moroccans are brothers to each other, you know,” says Bilall.

“Brother from another mother,” says Adil.

They could probably go on all day. But for all the backchat, Black is a serious and frequently violent film: “The movie

35

“We want to be like one big family and go on together.

It’s like the brothers Dardenne or the Coen brothers: they always work together” Adil El Arbi

doesn’t have comedy in it,” says Bilall. Like the book, it uses Brussels’ gang culture as the background to a love story - but a background that has direct impact on the story. Mavela (Martha Canga Antonio), who is black - the actress’s parents come from Angola - and is a member of the Black Bronx gang, meets and falls in love with Marwan (Aboubakr Bensaïhi), a Moroccan boy who belongs to the rival 1080. As in 16th-century Verona and/or 1960s New York, this is not an altogether safe thing to do (for the views of the young actors, see pages 38-39).

Originally, the two elements of the story - the gangs and the love story, the street life and the private life - were roughly balanced. But, as the editing progressed, the directors found the film taking on a life of its own. “When you edit it,” says Adil, “the movie decides itself what it wants to be: it became a love story and we focused more on that part of the film. It wasn’t necessarily what we intended to do in the beginning. But also the movie is much rougher than what we thought it would be. It’s a harsh love story with realistic elements.”

36

a juliet and romeo story “That’s the kind of movie it turned out to be,” adds Bilall.

“You have the summertime feeling, the energy and the violence - the harsh stuff that is happening and that’s really cool. But it’s more a Juliet and Romeo story because there’s more focus on the female character.” “Mavela is really the driving force of the story and we follow everything through her eyes,” says Adil.

Black takes the existence of gang culture in Brussels as a given, but that doesn’t mean that the directors aren’t interested in where that culture came from. “Mavela is in that gang because she’s a black girl in Belgium and black people, Moroccan people, people of other origins, they have a feeling that they come second in society,” suggests Adil. “You’re more likely to have a job if you’re white and have a Flemish name than if you are black or Moroccan.

So, yes, that 16-year-old girl is in the gang which is cool and she doesn’t see immediately the danger. Also she feels part of the group, like a family, whereas in society she doesn’t feel part of a group. That starts to change when she meets Marwan who is in a gang for the same reasons.

Before they met, they thought that the most important thing in their lives was the life of the gang. When they meet, they see there’s something else that’s more important: love for each other. So that is the turning point, the main change that happens. But if you’re in a gang, you’re not supposed to have a relationship with a person from another gang.”

At film school, recalls Adil, the point was always the same: tell stories about what you know. “We wanted to make movies - all kinds of movies like science fiction or history, big epic films, but in school they pushed us to make

director

“When somebody pulled a knife, our locals took care of the problem” Bilall Fallah

www.black-themovie.com Adil and Billal on flandersimage.com

one billion mistakes in the first one and now we only made 500 million in this one.”

But the experience of life in Belgium that they share with the characters in Black remains central to what they have done and will continue to do so. And if telling those stories means dealing with criminality and violence, they make no apology for that. “The fact is,” says Adil, “we make cinema, we’re not journalists. So if our characters are going to be gangsters and happen to be Moroccans …” He shrugs.

“When Scorsese does it, nobody questions,” says Bilall.

a more nuanced picture

ALL STILLS BLACK

movies about Moroccans, because they are never made here. If we don’t tell those stories, nobody’s going to tell them, so that’s why our first two movies are about those kind of characters.”

still learning Also, says Bilall, they want to encourage other ethnic filmmakers. “We hope other filmmakers might be motivated. Maybe when you see it on the screen, you see it in the media - it starts to have an influence.” The filmmaking journey that has led from Brothers to Image to Black is only a beginning, say the pair. “We keep on learning,” says Bilall, reflecting on the process of editing, of understanding the rhythms of a feature film. The result, adds Adil, is “way better than our first movie: we made

“The difference is that we go deeper inside the head of those characters,” adds Adil. “Mostly, in other movies where you have only white people, if you see a Moroccan he’s going to be a gangster - but only for about five minutes.

You’re never going to see him again in the movie. That’s stereotypical for us. We go deeper into the characters in Image and Black, and you start to understand why they are doing the stuff that they are doing and you feel sympathy for them. It’s a more nuanced representation.”

After the accelerated pace of the first three films, Adil and Bilall could be said to show signs of slowing down in 2015. But they are still exceptions in a world where three years between films is the norm. And it’s probably only temporary, anyway. “We have suggested some projects, including a series,” says Adil. “We would like to do a big, cool international series.” “Like what they do at HBO,” explains Bilall. “Something of that quality,” concludes Adil.

“That’s our dream; and also another movie. We have, like, 10 projects and we are waiting to see which one is going to be the first. What is great about a series is that you can go further into the story. You can have a lot of little stories on the side and more characters. It’s like a bigger world.

We want to make it with an international feeling: it’s not only made here for Flanders but has a universal appeal.”

Watch this space. 

37

STAR-CROSSED IN MATONGE MATONGE BRUSSELS

IS

AN

AREA

WHERE

OF

STREET

GANGS ARE A WAY OF LIFE. BUT FOR ABOUBAKR BENSAÏHI AND MARTHA CANGA ANTONIO, YOUNG STARS OF THE NEW MOVIE BLACK, THE FILM THEY SHOT THERE IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A LOVE STORY.

38

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

Martha Canga Antonio is 19 years old and a student at the University of Ghent. Her parents are originally from Angola. She speaks Portuguese, French, Dutch and impeccable English. Aboubakr Bensaïhi will be 19 in July and is a student at the Imelda Institute, a secondary school in Brussels. He speaks Arabic with his mother, French with his father, Dutch at school and much better English than he modestly claims. Neither of them had had much experience of acting before Black, in which they co-star. “Maybe at school,” says Martha, “but only in a musical for, like, 10 seconds.” Same for him, says Aboubakr, although he adds: “It’s always been my dream to make a movie.”

That dream came true last summer when the pair were cast as the star-crossed lovers in the new film from the prolific directing duo of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (see preceding pages), which tells a Romeo & Juliet love story updated to the present day: the lovers come, as in West Side Story, not from warring families but from rival gangs. Martha plays Mavela, a member of Black Bronx; Aboubakr is Marwan, unshakably loyal to the rival 1080 gang, named after the Molenbeek area of Brussels.

Then love comes calling.

Black is based on a popular novel by Dirk Bracke. “I first read the book in December 2013 and thought it was very good,” says Martha. “Then, in January, somebody told me they were going to make a movie about it and I was very interested, so I tried out - and succeeded.”

workshops and improvisation When it came to casting the film, the directors used every means available, from straightforward auditions to workshops and improvisation sessions, seeing 450 young actors over a period of three months. “There were three rounds and two of them were all about improvisation,” recalls Martha. “You had to imagine that you were waiting for your bus and someone came up to you and became aggressive, so you had to play someone who is scared and who doesn’t stand up for themselves. Then you had to play someone who runs the neighbourhood and isn’t scared of anybody.”

The character she ended up playing, she adds, is not really like her, “but in some things I can recognise myself.

I think a lot of people do: that’s why the book was so successful, because it’s one of the first times in Belgium that young black girls can identify with certain things - not with everything, though. Mavela is very young, and when you are young you think you know a lot - but you don’t.

And she’s also a little bit frustrated, angry, naïve. It’s very complicated to describe her; I think you have to see the film.”

For Aboubakr, the details were different - the directors came to his school, then invited him to attend some

casting

“It’s the second biggest love story in the world after Titanic!”

Aboubakr Bensaīhi casting sessions - but the improvisations were much the same because both actors were being asked to go outside their comfort zones to enter the world of gang loyalty.

“For Marwan,” he says, “it’s very important that he’s always there for his friends and he would never let them down.

He’s a boy from the street - not like me: I’m not from the street. He feels he has a lot of problems with the police but, if you know him, you can see that he has a big heart.

And,” he adds with a grin, “he’s a monster with the girls.”

a good place to live Shooting on the streets of Brussels was challenging but extremely rewarding for both actors. Loyal to his home turf, Aboubakr is keen to dispel any idea that Brussels is a violent place to live. “I am from Brussels and, for me, Brussels is not dangerous, it is a good city,” he says. But, for Martha, making the film showed her things she had not previously noticed. “I thought I knew Brussels,” she says, “but I didn’t. I discovered the Matonge neighbourhood.

I used to have my hair done because there are a lot of Africans there. I would go with my mother and then go back home. But now, I stopped and watched and met local people and listened to their stories. It was a great learning experience.”

For Aboubakr, the whole business of making a film fully lived up to his expectations. “I really liked the atmosphere

when we were filming,” he says. “It felt like we were one big family. Everybody respected each other even though there were a lot of people from different cultures working together. It was great.”

Both cite violent movies and movie stars as being among their favourites: Martha’s is the Brazilian gang movie City of God, while for Aboubakr it is actor Jason Statham. But, for all the violence in Black, it is its gentler aspects - and its love story in particular - that made the experience so memorable for them. It is, says Aboubakr, “the second biggest love story in the world after Titanic”! When they were making it, adds Martha, the emotional power of the story “was the most important thing in our lives, and the only thing we could trust”.

At the time of this interview, neither of them had seen any footage of the film but were both adamant the result would be an emotional rollercoaster, as much for them as for members of the audience.

“Oof!” exclaims Aboubakr. “I’m gonna cry…”

“Me too,” interrupts Martha. “… because it’s a dream that has come true.”

“It felt like more than just a movie,” concludes Martha.

“It was like a project that everyone worked on. Even when we were in the streets, people passing by… when we needed something, everyone helped.” 

ALL PICTURES BLACK

39

KINSHASA DREAMING AFRICA, FRANTZ FANON ONCE REMARKED, IS SHAPED LIKE A REVOLVER, AND CONGO IS THE TRIGGER. DOCUMENTARY-MAKER KRISTOF BILSEN JUST SPENT FOUR YEARS WITH

40

HIS FINGER ON THAT TRIGGER MAKING ELEPHANT’S DREAM. The project that would become Kristof Bilsen’s acclaimed documentary Elephant’s Dream took up four years of his life before finally hitting the festival circuit at the end of last year.

The film is set in Africa’s third largest city, Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It follows the lives of three civil servants - a postal clerk; a fire chief; and a station master - who stick to their posts despite rarely being paid and against odds that would deter less dedicated mortals. DRC no longer has a postal system; the trains hardly run, and certainly not to any kind of schedule; and the Fire Department is down to its last appliance, the others resting wheel-less on blocks.

The film started much closer to home. Bilsen began his studies in Belgium; worked on visual installations for a dance company and made two films, then decided he needed to learn more about documentaries and enrolled at the UK’s National Film & Television School. Along the way, he began to wonder what it meant to be Belgian.

But how did all this lead to Kinshasa? Well, says Bilsen, “it basically started with a film that I made at the National Film and Television School called The Perfect Belgian.

It was a quirky road trip with me going through the country, through the different regions. Then, researching that film, I sort of stumbled upon the whole colonial legacy. I started asking myself what is left of the old nation state in former colonies. And that brought me initially to Congo.”

observational filmmaking One decision he took early on is that he didn’t want the film to have a pre-determined agenda. “I think that that’s really the power of the NFTS: they have given me this training of being an observational filmmaker, which has to do with a kind of curiosity and openness and being humble to the subject and not saying ‘This is the concept that I have’.”

The key to understanding the film lies in its three principal characters: Henriette the postal clerk; Simon the station master; and the fire chief who identifies himself as Lieutenant’. Certainly, wider issues are touched on in the course of the film: the increasing presence of Chines money and engineers bringing with them a new form of colonialism, for instance; and the gradual privatisation of state institutions. “It seems to be like the new recipe for change and modernisation,” says Bilsen. “I guess it’s happening everywhere; Brussels Airport is, I believe, Australian-owned… It’s seen as ‘We’re not going to work with a government that is corrupt or a former government that still has colonial ways. No, we’re going to do it a different way: we’re going to use the American business model’.”

But Elephant’s Dream is essentially an intimate, characterdriven film rather than the more familiar cine-pamphlet about a failed state or a toxic colonial legacy. It is, in the final analysis, a film about human dignity in very difficult circumstances. “I’ve seen too many films where it’s kind of

visceral and poetic The title, says Bilsen, is at once “visceral and poetic”, like the film itself, with its elegantly steady gaze, and is designed to be “an open invitation to join the characters”. But, he insists, the view of them, the access we get, the terms that come with the invitation are the responsibility of the characters, the filmmaker and the filmgoer: it’s an exchange on all three levels, in that observing the characters really becomes an active process. “It’s always participatory: it’s a dialogue with the subject matter.”

It took a while to get there. “We started shooting in 2010, basically as a student piece, which was an advantage in that I didn’t have any costs: it was just me,” says Bilsen.

“In 2011, we pitched at Sheffield’s Doc/Fest MeetMarket and at the IDFA Forum. Then, in 2012, we started filming as a co-production between the UK and Belgium. The crew was basically just me shooting and directing with a sound recordist who I met at film school. We continued editing with an editor from the school - the whole crew was basically from the National Film School!”

Elephant’s Dream was finished in August 2014 and had its festival premiere at Dok Leipzig two months later, followed by IDFA [The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam], with (at the time of this interview) Hot Docs in Toronto still to come.

“I’ve seen too many films where it’s kind of a white, comfortable look at these problematic issues”

doc

a white, comfortable look at these problematic issues,” says the director. “Of course I’m still white and Belgian, I realise that. But I think I’ve tried as much as possible in the making of the film and the language of the film to go beyond that.”

a confrontational film The audience reception, says Bilsen, has been really good. “We sold out at IDFA and Leipzig. It’s a confrontational film. People are really trying to see a film that’s not about rebels, violence, poverty and anonymous Africans suffering, and they enjoyed that. But at the same time they are conflicted by seeing me on stage doing Q&As being white and Belgian. That becomes a whole discussion and I try to say ‘Just see the film, it’s not about me’. But it’s always an interesting debate, so that’s great.”

ALL STILLS ELEPHANT’S DREAM

Bilsen doesn’t see Elephant’s Dream as “a failed state film, I think it’s much more nuanced. It invites the audience into a world that - although it has this huge weight of history - is not so different from ours and thus allows for dialogue, for openness and reflection.

It’s about where we are at, where we were, and where we’re heading as human beings. The whole issue of decolonising our way of looking at Africa should include reconciliation. I hope this film helps that too.”

Next up, Bilsen is planning a very personal project.

“It’s about suicide, which is a huge issue, I guess, and especially for me because I lost my sister some years back [there is a haunting photograph of her on his website].”

He admits that the do-it-yourself intensity that went into Elephant’s Dream is something he would not be altogether sad to leave behind. “I’m kind of wondering if I’d like to work with a cinematographer this time around and see what happens with that,” he laughs, “because it’s been really, really stressful doing the whole production. It’s quite a lot on your shoulders.”  PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

www.elephantsdream-film.com

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Elephant's Dream on flandersimage.com

PHANTOM OPERATOR PASCAL VERMEERSCH IS LEAD BELGIAN ANIMATOR ON PHANTOM BOY, THE NEW FILM FROM THE TEAM THAT BROUGHT US A CAT IN PARIS. UNUSUALLY, IT WASN’T ALL DONE ON A COMPUTER.

Pay attention: this is how animation works! “It starts with the director, then a supervisor or lead animator briefs the animator. The animator roughs out the scene, figuring out the most important drawings - the key drawings - of that scene. You put notes on it where there have to be inbetween drawings and that goes to an assistant who does all of the inbetweening. So the key animator is in charge of making the key drawings of a scene. Then, after he animates them, he has to send a line test to the director to see if the acting is OK and the movement believable.”

The speaker is Pascal Vermeersch, lead Belgian animator on the new feature Phantom Boy, a co-production between Folimage (France) and the Ghent-based Lunanime, which is where Vermeersch and the film’s Belgian producer Annemie Degryse are based. The directors are JeanLoup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, who were responsible for the highly successful feature A Cat in Paris, which had its international premiere at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar the following year.

The procedures involved in making an animated feature film are so intensive and detail-oriented that it comes as something of a surprise when Vermeersch goes on to compare his work with that of an actor. “You get your instructions from the director and he says ‘OK, in this scene you need to be there and you need to be doing this’, and you go ahead. That’s what you do as an animator: you’re like an actor.”

42

a familiar arc The storyline for Phantom Boy follows a similar arc to that of A Cat in Paris, with a resourceful child helping the police capture a criminal mastermind who wants to take over the city, except the city here is New York. What is more, where Cat’s Zoe ran sure-footedly across the rooftops, Phantom Boy is an 11-year old called Leo with the ability to leave his body and fly across the city. “He is 11, he’s invisible and he’s got 24 hours to save New York,” runs the tagline.

The animation style on the new film is also similar to that

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

used for A Cat in Paris, the characters elongated and graceful, the backgrounds the distilled essence of the city in question. It is, says Vermeersch, a question of “finding a balance in making it believable, but seeing how far you can go with the characters to make those shapes. It’s a very organic style which is not always easy to do because you have to believe in the movement and at the same time push yourself to make it very graphic.” The influence of Hollywood films set in New York is everywhere, he adds, the directors being big fans of movies like Goodfellas.

And, yes, there are some bizarre sequences, like the giant

anima PHANTOM BOY

“You have to believe in the movement and at the same time push yourself to make it very graphic” octopus and the ‘Colossus’ in the earlier film. “There are definitely some similar fantasy things going on as well, but I’m not going to spoil it,” he says.

Vermeersch chose a career in animation when very little of it was being done in Belgium. “I did graphic design before I got into animation,” he recalls. “The last year of my graphic studies I was missing drawing, so I took an evening class in drawing at the Academy in Ghent, and I discovered they did a course in animation. After my studies I got my first job as an inbetweener for a short film made by Nicole Van Goethem, a Belgian filmmaker who had already won an Oscar with her short A Greek Tragedy. That was my first job as an assistant animator.”

top european animation Since then, Vermeersch’s CV reads like a checklist of top European animation: The Secret of Kells (2009); A Cat in Paris; Titeuf, le film (2010, based on the French comicbook figure); Pinocchio with Italian animator Enzo D’Alo (2012); and The Congress with Ari Folman (2013). Phantom Boy is the sixth feature he has worked on - a far cry from the days when he was starting out, when auteur animation was almost unknown. Now, it’s a viable career - or almost.

“Once in a while some commercials come along,” he says.

“I also do illustrations for Belgian television and sometimes I teach a little course for young animators at the Royal

Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. That’s about it; that’s how I fill the gaps between big productions.”

The teaching experience came in handy on Phantom Boy where, as lead Belgian animator, Vermeersch headed up a team of 14: seven animators and seven assistants. “That was very satisfying,” he says, “because I had to work with some experienced animators but also with young ones; I could push them and see the learning curve get really steep, which is very nice to do.”

With almost two decades as an animator behind him, Vermeersch has lived through a major change in his profession, which used to be all about paper and handcoloured cels, but now almost always involves a computer.

Phantom Boy, however, is consciously retro, with Felicioli and Gagnol opting for hand-drawn animation wherever possible. “They did it for the whole movie,” he says.

“That’s rarely seen these days because usually everything is directly drawn on the computer. But they didn’t want to do that.”

He’s equally at home with both methods, says Vermeersch, claiming that, in the final analysis, they are very similar.

“It’s still all hands-on animation,” he says, “but there are advantages on paper and advantages on the computer as well: it’s difficult to compare. Mind you,” he adds, ”you have no ‘Undo’ button on paper: that can be a disadvantage!”

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Phantom Boy on flandersimage.com

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

WHAT HISTORY LE AVES BEHIND

IN HER PRIZE-WINNING DOCUMENTARY BATTLES, FLEMISH FILMMAKER ISABELLE TOLLENAERE FURTHER EXPLORES THE WAY IN WHICH THE DETRITUS OF HISTORY CAN BE TRANSFORMED INTO SOMETHING NEW AND DIFFERENT.

44

On the wall behind Isabelle Tollenaere’s desk is a picture of a strange, cratered landscape. It turns out to be a photograph of a work by the artist Aleksandra Mir, who created a lunar landscape by sculpting the sand on a Dutch beach. “She wanted to be the first woman on the moon,” chuckles Tollenaere.

Although she has no such interplanetary ambitions herself, Tollenaere is equally fascinated by the strange

unexplained shapes and structures - the traces - left behind on Planet Earth, particularly by war. Her latest film premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the FIPRESCI award, and was selected for the ‘Regard Neuf’ competitive strand at Nyon’s Visions du Réel. Battles is about how everyday life resumes when the dramatic events of history have moved on, as those who come after adapt and repurpose

today’s history, tomorrow’s ruins “On the one side you have tourism, which is all about creating the idea of paradise and saying that everything is still the same,” she says, “and on the other you have a revolution which was all about change. That was the initial idea when I went there.” But what really gives the film its focus is the fact that Tunisia’s ruins aren’t just those of the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, but also the much older ones left by the Roman and Carthaginian empires. “One day I was with some tourists taking pictures of the Roman ruins,” she says. “The next I went to film the effects of the recent revolution and found all these burned-out houses and everything. It made me wonder if these traces of the recent revolution would also become monuments themselves one day - and in general what happens to all these traces of conflict.” Which lead more or less directly to Battles.

The idea for that film began with a search for something

“In Rotterdam they called Battles a ‘film essay’. For me, it’s always just a film”

doc

its traces. In the film, a bunker has become a cowshed, a bomb an everyday part of farming, a prison camp a place for tourists to play at being inmates.

Tollenaere studied documentary filmmaking at St Lukas in Brussels, graduating in 2006. Her previous film, Viva paradis, started out as a look at the impact on Tunisia, the holiday paradise, of the so-called ‘Arab spring’. “I read this article about how, during the revolution, tourism obviously took a major hit,” she says. “Then, when it was over, they organised special deals so people would start coming back.” Tollenaere tagged along: in March 2011, just six weeks after the ousting of the dictator Ben Ali, she arrived with her camera in a world where echoingly empty luxury hotels rubbed up against the traces of war.

similar in European history, but slowly took shape as a far more ambitious and intriguing project. “The film evolved a lot,” says Tollenaere. “In the beginning it was very vague, just wanting to do something with traces of recent dark history. I always knew I wanted to keep it situated in the 20th century and in Europe.”

So the film starts close to home, in Belgium. It opens with a dark screen and a slightly ominous rumbling noise which turns out to be nothing more sinister than a tractor ploughing a field. It is an image of natural beauty but also of continuity: people have been ploughing the fields of Flanders for centuries. But the tranquillity is interrupted by a dull clang as the blades of the plough strike a metal object, which turns out to be an unexploded bomb. So begins Chapter 1: A Bomb. “It started with these literal traces in the landscape, like the bomb and the bunkers, but then I thought it would also be really interesting to look at non-literal traces - how we remember history, how we interpret it. Every chapter you see, every subject, it’s very, very normal for the people living there,” says Tollenaere. “It’s only when you look at it from a distance that it becomes something extraordinary. The subject is something that all Belgians know: there are still so many explosives from World War I, so they keep on finding ammunition.”

BATTLES

45

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What follows, therefore, is something less like The Hurt Locker and more like a training film for bureaucrats.

The bomb is tossed into a trailer, taken to a government facility, measured, booked in, clamped into a specially made chamber and, very undramatically, exploded. An everyday job done by ordinary people.

Chapter 2: A Soldier seems a lot weirder, but is again quite normal for the people living it. We visit a former detention camp in Latvia where tourists can be banged up over night, shouted at in Russian (helpfully translated into English) and even pretend to escape through the nearby woods. We are never told where we are or who the people are: there are no captions and no voice-over. “I wanted it to be very ambiguous,” says Tollenaere: “real soldiers or tourists?

You get some hints that it’s a game but you don’t know for sure.” Besides, the film’s real focus is on Madara, the head guard for whom these bizarre rituals are just a job.

Chapter 3: A Bunker is set in Albania (although again the film doesn’t specify), where a farming family has turned one of dictator Enver Hoxha’s notorious bunkers into a cowshed.

“There are about 750,000 bunkers,” says Tollenaere.

“At a certain point, Hoxha had enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He feared an attack, which made him decide to build all those bunkers - one for every four people.

Even today, the landscape is littered with them. It’s something you don’t know when you are watching the film, but the grandfather was actually forced to build the bunkers.” Tollenaere admits that there is only a hint of this in the film - in the scene where the old man is sitting alone - but insists it doesn’t really matter. “Some people notice and some don’t, which is also fine. But that’s a question I want to raise in the film: is it a stable or is it a bunker? Is it something that loses its meaning or is it still there.”

The final section - Chapter 4: A Tank - shows workers in a Russian factory where almost nothing has changed since Soviet times making inflatable tanks, aeroplanes and other military hardware. The giant inflatables were widely used in WWII to fool aerial reconnaissance and are now used in training. “They still use them to distract the enemy from where the real bases are.”

from tanks to bouncy castles What enemy? “Future enemies,” says Tollenaere. “I guess Russia has a lot of enemies.” The factory, she adds, also makes bouncy castles for children’s parties.

Tollenaere had originally planned for Battles to have more chapters. But, she says, “it was only in the editing that I decided ‘OK, now I have these four and I’m not going to shoot any more’. I had two others that I thought were interesting, but I felt that I was just going to repeat myself and there were aspects that were already in the other subjects. With these four, I had all the different aspects that I wanted to tell.”

Sound - both natural sound and music - play an important role in the film. “I only use music when it’s connected to

what we are filming,” says Tollenaere, “but the soundtrack is very important and communicates a lot. It works along the same lines as what we wanted to do with the image, which is to create this twilight zone where past and present come together. Sometimes you are in doubt as to where you really are - at what moment in time, like you hear the thunder of a storm, which is like the echo of war. There’s a lot of playing with threat and innocence in the film.”

doc

an everyday job

a film is a film Battles is beautifully shot, the framing always adding something to the scene rather than just capturing it.

And this, Tollenaere admits, involved a little manipulation.

“I don’t feel obliged to follow certain rules or feel limited by the fact that I’m making a documentary film. I think it’s more important that it fits the universe I’m creating as a filmmaker.” Nor is she much concerned with all those

BATTLES

labels like ‘creative documentary’ which tend to be hung on films like the ones she makes. “I always feel that these phrases are a bit weird, actually. For instance, in Rotterdam they called Battles a ‘film essay’. For me, it’s always just a film.”

Next up for Tollenaere is another film about traces in the sand: California City which will have two other directors: Sofie Benoot and Liesbeth De Ceulaer. “It’s very nice to share this process you normally do alone with two other directors,” she says. “It’s a challenge, but very refreshing at the same time.” The film is about a hopelessly ambitious scheme to build the new Los Angeles in the Mojave desert.

“They put in electricity, water, roads, everything… but people never really came. There are about 10,000, 12,000 people living there on a piece of land bigger than San Francisco.

But it’s not so much about the broken dream of the guy who planned it: it’s more about people’s personal dreams there. It’s still a city, still an evolving place. People have lots of plans there.’ And they, too, will leave their traces… 

47

Battles on flandersimage.com

POINTS

OOST PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

OVER THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN GENRES - LIKE WITH UPCOMING TITLES EMERGENCY EXIT AND PROBLEMSKI HOTEL

In the film business, most people cast around until they find what they’re good at, then stick to it through thick and thin. Not Emmy Oost. “In my work I’m always challenged by something new,” she says. “I’m interested in a lot of things and those interests always take me somewhere.” So far, they have taken her, in her 12 years in the business, from menial jobs on film sets to producing prize-winning documentaries like Double Take. They have also seen her experimenting with interactive film and Apps (Emergency Exit), as well as prepping a six-part TV series, Barber Shop, in which society is reflected in a microcosm as different clients climb in and out of the chair.

Oh, and last year she branched out into fiction features with Problemski Hotel, adapted from the novel by Dimitri Verhulst. As if that wasn’t enough, she was determined to make the film with a director also new to fiction: Manu Riche, best known for documentaries (his last film, Snake Dance, won the Buyens-Chagoll Prize in Nyon). “It’s interesting to me,” she says, “because it is the first fiction film from a very experienced documentary director. So again I was very much interested in this crossover between genres and to see what a documentary maker would do with the novel.”

This restless curiosity and the ability to respond to challenges as and when they occur is, in a slightly roundabout way, what got Oost into film in the first place.

“I was at a wedding,” she remembers, “and I was sitting next to somebody who told me, ‘I’m doing this traineeship on a film but I can’t do it any more because I got a job offer’. And I was like ‘Oh, I don’t have a job, so I can do the traineeship’. So I started making the coffee!”

On films by directors like Tom Barman (Any Way the Wind Blows) and Felix van Groeningen (With Friends Like These), Oost went from making the coffee to being trainee location manager, then assistant location manager, production assistant and finally production manager.

producer

PRODUCER EMMY OOST LIKES NOTHING BETTER THAN TO DEFY THE RULES AND CROSS

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which had its premiere, not in a cinema, but in the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

“When I met Johan,” says Oost, “I didn’t know anything about his work. We started talking about the world in which he’s working, and I was really interested. So I was like, ‘OK, let’s try this’. I think I try to be a good match to creators - to people who have these ideas or dreams. I try to go with them in their dream and get it organised.” Which is a textbook definition of what a producer does (or should do).

Her collaboration with Grimonprez began with the short film, Looking for Alfred, which developed into Double Take.

Both re-imagine Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, with images from his films, especially The Birds, becoming a kind of crazy metaphor for the cold war era.

The film won a Black Pearl in Abu Dhabi and the Grand Prix at the New Media Film Festival; it also had a healthy international career in cinemas, which is unusual for an ‘artist’s film’.

BARBER SHOP

artists and installations Producing was an obvious next step and Oost duly took it - but not in quite the way a less restless soul might have done. Veering away from ‘traditional’ cinema, she found herself drawn to the parallel world of artist filmmakers and installations, an area of filmmaking once restricted to galleries and set apart from the world of cinema, but now increasingly a career route for filmmakers like Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and Sam Taylor-Wood (Fifty Shades of Grey).

Oost herself made the transition thanks to a meeting with Johan Grimonprez, a Belgian multimedia artist whose work on film had previously been exemplified by

learning the rules Both films taught Oost a lot about production in general and co-production in particular. “Looking for Alfred was the first film I did as a producer and it was also an international co-production - with Film and Video Umbrella in London - so I learned the first rules of co-production, which are really about choosing the right partner. That was a good preparation for Double Take, which had a much bigger budget.”

A one-year hiatus followed Double Take, courtesy of the birth of Oost’s twins, during which time she decided she didn’t want to work with just one director: she wanted to

49

EMERGENCY EXIT

“Almost everybody living in Kenya has a mobile phone so why couldn’t we make an App?”

have her own production company. So, shortly after the twins, ‘Cassette for Timescapes’ was born. Oost explains the curious name thus: “Timescapes was founded by my father who was also a producer, but in advertising and corporate films. When I decided I wanted to produce my own films, I needed a structure to do that. My father was about to retire and said ‘Look, if you want to, you can come into Timescapes and develop your own projects’.

But because I wanted to make it different from corporate and advertising, I changed the name a little bit, so now all the creative projects are under the umbrella ‘Cassette for Timescapes’.

First to fly the banner were two young directors, Tim De Keersmaecker and Elias Grootaers, who both won Wildcards - the VAF scheme for encouraging filmmakers in the early stages of their careers. The upshot was No Man Is an Island, a film about migration directed by De Keersmaecker (with Anna Luyten); and Inside the Distance, Grootaers’s film about an Armenian boxing coach. Both come very much in the ‘creative documentary’ category.

beneath the lake

50

Already in the Cassette can is Beneath the Surface, directed by Alex Debreczeni, about the ruins of a Hungarian village which lie beneath the surface of a Transylvanian lake; and The Shadow World, a new documentary by Grimonprez about the global weapons industry, set up as a co-production with the US. The two lead projects, however, are a documentary and a fiction film, the latter a first both for Oost and its director, Riche. It is based on a short 2003 novel by Dimitri Verhulst, another of whose books was adapted by Felix van Groeningen into The Misfortunates. “It’s about refugees living together in Belgium,” says the producer. “It’s built up in tableaux, so every chapter is the story of one character.

We had to find a new through-line, so we adapted the novel

producer

quite a bit, but we mainly kept the stories, the humour, the irony of refugees and their situations in Belgium.” Both she and Riche are determined to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the story. “We wanted to get away from the stereotype of the economic refugee,” she says.

The other big project also deals with refugees, but on a very different scale. The term ‘documentary’ doesn’t quite cover Emergency Exit, which Oost is producing for director Lieven Corthouts, and which will come with an interactive version and will also have a mobile phone App. “We started to develop it in 2011, 2012,” says Oost, “and the first idea was to make a normal documentary. But Lieven has lived in Ethiopia for 10 years. For Emergency Exit, he wanted to make a project in one of the biggest refugee camps in the whole of Africa. He has been there every two or three months for six weeks since 2012.

Doing the research for the classical documentary, Lieven was confronted with the problem of unaccompanied refugee children. He equally saw that there were some opportunities there. Because of the 3G network in Kenya, almost everybody living there has a mobile phone, so why couldn’t we make an App? Gradually, the idea started to develop, and now we’re making a first prototype with a Belgian research company called iMinds.”

interactive documentary Emergency Exit looks like being a ground-breaking project which, says Oost, “will be an App working in Africa, and for the western audience we are making an interactive documentary about unaccompanied child refugees in which we follow the story of six people who are looking for family. The user will follow a sort of search through this interactive project and, while doing so, will also get to know the App and how it is working - or if it is working - in the camp. The film itself is now editing, and we’re aiming to be ready for IDFA 2015. By then we also want to have a first phase of the interactive documentary ready online.”

With both projects, Oost has held fast to her belief that a producer’s job is to coax someone else’s dream into existence: Corthouts had already made a film in Africa when he teamed up with her, and it was Riche who brought Problemski Hotel to her.

“That happens with almost all the things I’m working on,” she admits, “because they’re all really auteur projects.

Maybe one day I will have a subject that I think should be taken out to the world, and then I might go to a director and say ‘Look can we explore this? Would this be something that you would want to make a film about as well..?’”

Given Oost’s track record, expect that day to come sooner rather than later.  www.timescapes.be Emmy Oost on flandersimage.com PROBLEMSKI HOTEL

Emmy Oost on IMDB

51

THIS

THING

I DO

PORTRAIT BART DEWAELE

IT DOES WITH TECHNIQUE SAYS THOMAS POOTERS, ONE OF THE NEW GENERATION OF FLEMISH EDITORS WHO INSISTS HIS REAL INSPIRATION IS HIS BOSS ON BELGICA, NICO LEUNEN

INSPIRATIONAL THE THINGS AND PEOPLE THAT HAVE INSPIRED THOMAS POOTERS EDITOR NICO LEUNEN

Thomas Pooters’s parents must be very proud of him: first he did what they asked him to, then he made a success of what he was going to do anyway. “They weren’t that keen on me doing film,” he says from the editing suite of one of the year’s highest-profile Flemish movies, Felix van Groeningen’s Belgica on which, less than two years after graduating, he is secondin-command to maestro Nico Leunen.

“My parents wanted me to do a job with a little bit more security,” he recalls, “so I made a deal with them that I would study something else first and, if I got through that without any problem, they would pay for film school.” Pooters insists the BA in Dutch and Theatre, Film and Literature and the Masters in Journalism were all for his own good. “I’m really glad they put me through it actually, because it gave me some sort of background which I could use in my job as an editor also.”

Pooters sat the entrance exam for the directing course at KASK in Ghent, only to discover that he wasn’t that keen on directing. “I realised that the thing I liked about movies wasn’t actually telling people what to do, but putting everything together afterwards. I like the creative part of directing but, as an editor, I get to be just as creative also.”

It was when he switched to studying editing at RITS in Brussels that he first met Leunen, who would become his mentor. “The first film I worked on as an assistant editor was Waste Land for Pieter Van Hees. Nico was actually a teacher of ours and I was so impressed by his beliefs as an editor that I told him I wanted to do my internship with him. He told me afterwards that he had never taken an intern before: I was the first one.” Pooters soon discovered it wasn’t all rock ‘n’ roll. “I went to Ireland with Nico to work on Moscow Never Sleeps. The only three rooms we saw were the editing suite, our hotel room and a pizza place. But I got a lot more responsibility on that project from Nico.”

Since then, Pooters has had two solo feature credits, both awaiting release - the collectively directed Liebling and Café Derby, the feature debut of Lenny Van Wesemael (interviewed in Flanders-i 31) - and he and Leunen are now wading their way through the 130 hours of film shot for Belgica.

You have to learn your trade, he says, but the best cut has much less to do with technique than with getting the feel of a scene. “The most important thing for me is emotion. When I start cutting and look at the takes, I always search for the emotion that seems right for the scene.

That’s something I learned from Nico: that emotion in a movie is much more important than story structure.” Other inspirations tick the same box. “I recently saw the film The Banishment

by Andrei Zvyagintsev,” says Pooters. “There is a moment that hit me so hard I’ll never forget it, and that’s when the wife says to her husband that she’s pregnant by another guy. The rest is just a movie, but that moment took it to another level.”

Pooters finds similar emotional impact in the music of New York singer/songwriter Charles Bradley. “He has a really inspirational story, because he only made his breakthrough when he was like 60 years old. He sings about what he has experienced in life. You feel that the emotion on stage is real and that just makes the music so much better. Like movies, actually.”

Pooters was likewise drawn to the philosophy of life laid out in Robert M Pirsig’s 1960s classic 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. Pirsig, he says, “explains that there’s an analytical way of looking at the world and a more romantic way, and the analytical way can itself be more romantic. As an editor, I have this thing I do automatically where I start analysing a movie and breaking it into little pieces. And then I can also see some sort of new beauty as part of the whole.” The impact of a film, he insists, comes from “all things together: the way it’s edited, the way it’s played by the actors, the mise-en-scène - everything together makes a moment perfect. When everything is right and comes together, then you can really make a great movie.” 

BOOK ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE,

BY ROBERT M PIRSIG

under the influence

CUTTING A FILM HAS AT LEAST AS MUCH TO DO WITH EMOTION AS

FILMS KID, DIRECTED BY FIEN TROCH

THE BANISHMENT, DIRECTED BY ANDREI ZVYAGINTSEV

MUSIC NO TIME FOR DREAMING,

BY CHARLES BRADLEY

COMEDY/THEATRE HEDEN SOUP! WIM HELSEN

53

fans

SALES PITCH I N T ER N AT I O N A L S A L ES AG EN T PA M EL A L EU (PICT URED RIGHT ) OF BE FOR FILMS PICKS HER FAVOURITE FLEMISH MOVIES.

In the spring of last year, Pamela Leu set up sales company Be For Films after what she describes as 10 happy years with Paris-based Films Distribution, where she “learned the trade and forged strong relationships with producers and distributors” before taking the decision to strike out on her own. Her aim, she says, is to handle eight to 10 features a year and to seek out young Belgian producers and directors so as to work with them from the start on their films’ international careers.

Leu already has experience with Flemish films from her days at Films Distribution, citing in particular Any Way the Wind Blows (2003) by Tom Barman and two films by Nic Balthazar: Ben X (2007) and Time Of My Life (2012).

“I have especially strong memories of Ben X,” she says. “The film won a prize at the Montreal Film Festival and the word of mouth was really decisive. It faced an uphill struggle with international buyers in Toronto, because it wasn’t selected.

In the end, we had to organise private screenings.”

54

HASTA LA VISTA

www.beforfilms.com Be For Films on Facebook

At Be For Films she is already handling three Flemish titles: The Treatment by Hans Herbots, Waste Land by Pieter Van Hees and Belgian Rhapsody by Vincent Bal, which she saw at a preview screening and, impressed by the audience reaction, decided to take on - a gamble which paid off since the film is soon due to open in France, Japan and Korea.

“But my favourite Flemish film is Hasta la vista (2011), which I discovered at the Karlovy Vary film festival,” enthuses Leu. “It’s the story of three disabled young men who set off to Spain, allegedly to visit some vineyards.

But the real reason is that they want to lose their virginity before time runs out. It really works as a dramatic comedy and is extremely moving. I laughed a lot but I also cried.”

Other Flemish films which Leu has warmed to include Ex Drummer (2007), Bullhead (2011) and The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012). She credits the last two with having opened doors for other filmmakers. “Not just festivals,” she says, “but international buyers and journalists have started to become aware of Flemish films.” But will this, she wonders, be the start of a cycle of success along the lines experienced by films from Canada, Brazil, Poland and Romania? “For my part,” says Leu, “I am sure it will.

It is a cinema that is constantly developing because of the way in which producers and directors have succeeded in making local films which also have an appeal to international audiences.”

Looking to the future, Leu expects great things from actress Natali Broods (The Misfortunates, Waste Land), particularly as she can switch easily between French, Flemish and English. “And I especially like three short films by Nathalie Teirlinck, which have done very well at international festivals like Locarno and Berlin. I look forward to reading the script for her first feature.”

Leu admits she has one major obstacle to overcome, however: the fact that she doesn’t speak Dutch. “That’s going to be the real challenge for me over the coming months,” she admits. 

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