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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
20
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
34
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
13
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
10
Talent Matters
The latest from Veerle Baetens,
Ruben Desiere, Jeroen Perceval,
Laura Vandewynckel, An Vrombaut
and Wim Willaert
C NTENTS TAKE 32
4
this is
IN PRINT
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MIPTV 2014 MIPTV 2014 MIPTV 2014
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president Jos
LANGUAGE / Dutch
DURATION / 9 x 50’
YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2013-2014
CONTACT / Helena Vlogaert /
[email protected]
CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Frank
Dencentre
Engel,of
PITCH / Everyday
lifeVan
in the
CAST / Liesa Van Der Aa, Wouter Hendrickx,
Tom Dewispelaere, Veerle Baetens,
Geert Van Rampelberg
SCRIPTED BY / Carl Joos
DIRECTED BY / Tim Mielants
PRODUCTION COMPANY / Eyeworks
LANGUAGE / Dutch
YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014 (in post-production)
CONTACT / Peter Bouckaert /
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INT’L SALES / Eyeworks Distribution / www.eyeworks.tv
is hell-bent on reversing their fortune,
even if it means replacing Jan with a
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AMATEURS
ORIGINAL TITLE / AMATEURS
CREATED/DIRECTED
BYthe
/ Agnes
Lecreux,
Ben
PITCH / Over
last few
years,
theTesseur,
Steven Deworld
Beul, of
Fabien
Drouet
the contemporary
arts has
PRODUCTION
Lundi! (FR),
beenCOMPANY
subject to/ Vivement
drastic change.
Beast Animation
(BE), Nadasdy
Film
Our modern-day
taste
is (CH)
no longer
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/ French, Dutch
determined
by museums or critics
DURATIONbut
/ 26
5’ + 1 x and
26’ rich collectors.
byx dealers
YEAR OF PRODUCTION
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Art Collectors/ offers
a look into the
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processes
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micro-economy
of art business.
www.tvfrance-intl.com
David Verhaeghe
Antwerp comes to a sudden standstill
PRODUCTION
COMPANY
Offhermetically
World
when
the area/ is
sealed off
LANGUAGE
/ Dutch,
English, world.
German,
Russian,
from
the outside
The
causeSpanish
is
(English, Dutch,
French, German
subtitles)
a contagious
and deadly
virus, which
DURATIONspreads
/ 10 x 26’
like wildfire. Tens of people
YEAR OF PRODUCTION
2015
are suddenly/ left
to their own devices.
CONTACT It
/ Eric
Goossens
[email protected]
/
brings
out the/ very
best in them, but
Frederik Nicolai
/ [email protected]
also the
worst...
INT’L SALES / Off World / www.offworld.be
CORDON
ORIGINAL TITLE / CORDON
PITCH / Percy and his friends go on a
joyful adventure where they are each
a knight, princess, superhero and
pirate. Each episode they encounter a
VOICE CAST
/ (Dutch)
Sara Gracia,
Anne-Mieke Ruyten,
PITCH
/ An insight
into today’s
Tina Maerevoet,
GrietBelgian
Dobbelaere,
Petersoccer
Van Gucht
promising
national
CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Jean-Marie
Musique, the
team, the ‘Red
Devils’. Experience
Christine Parisse,
Federico
Milellaof this Belgian
fervor and
suspense
PRODUCTION
COMPANY
/ Fabrique
(LUX),
football
renaissance
bothD’Images
on and off
Skyline Entertainment
the pitch. (BE), Grid Animation (BE)
LANGUAGE / English, Dutch, French
CONTACT / Mark Mertens / [email protected]
INT’L SALES / Planet
Nemo Animation
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DEADLINE
25/5
www.planetnemoanimation.com
ORIGINAL TITLE / DEADLINE 25/5
HERE COME THE BELGIANS
CONTENT_MIP2014_docs.indd 1
#talentmatters
CAST / Marc Van Eeghem, Stany Crets,
Ludo Hoogmartens, Matteo Simoni, Evelien Bosmans
SCRIPTED BY / Jef Hoogmartens, Jonas Van Geel,
Steve Aernouts
DIRECTED BY / Frank Van Passel
‘De
amateur production.
playwright and
YEAR OF PRODUCTION
/ 2014
Led by enthusiastic
CONTACT would-be
/ Eric Goossens
/ [email protected]
/ PRODUCTION COMPANY / Caviar Antwerp NV
director
Jan Delvo, the
WITH / Frieda
Van/ Wijck
(host)
Frieda
PITCH
Helena
De Ridder is a young
CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Peter
and ambitious
publicVandekerckhove
prosecutor. Week
PRODUCTION
Raconteurs
afterCOMPANY
week she/ De
wages
her own war for
LANGUAGE
/ French, Dutch
and
justice.
YEAR OF PRODUCTION / 2014
CONTACT / Peter Vandekerckhove /
Superprodthe
(FR),
Submarine
(NL)to the Port of
Charleroi
region
LANGUAGE
/ English, French, Dutch
[email protected]
Antwerp.
DURATION / 26 x 11’20”
GRAND CENTRAL BELGE
RIDDER
- SEASON 1
CONTACT / EricDE
Goossens
/
ORIGINAL TITLE / GRAND CENTRAL BELGE [email protected]
ORIGINAL TITLE / DE RIDDER - SEIZOEN 1
INT’L SALES / Superights / www.superights.net
With thanks to the producers that supplied information.
PHOTO CREDITS Cordon ©Maarten De Bouw / Homegrown ©Frederik Beyens /
De Ridder ©Johan Jacobs / Deadline 25/5 ©vtm /
ORIGINAL TITLE / PERCY’S TIGER TALES (PERCY ET SES AMIS)
ORIGINAL TITLE / IEDEREEN DUIVEL
all other stills copyrighted by the respective producers.
PERCY’S TIGER TALES
PRODUCTION
COMPANYparish
/ Off World
nondescript
hall, the
LANGUAGE
/ Dutch, French
subtitles)
Pajotters’
theatre(English
company
toils away
DURATIONon
/ 3their
x 52’latest
VOICE CAST
/ (English)
Georgina
Verbaan,
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Flanders Image / p/a Flanders Film House,
challenge, which they’ll overcome by
Bischoffsheimlaan 38 / BE1000 Brussels / Belgium/EU
great teamwork.
T +32 2 226 0630 / F +32 2 219 1936 / E [email protected]
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CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Gilles
Sofie Benoot
awayCoton,
in a tiny,
PITCH / Tucked
PITCH / Kika & Bob travel the world to
bring back Tilly, the price pigeon of
Miss Haakmans, who has captured
Kika’s beloved cat Tiger and won’t let
him go until she has her Tilly back.
ALSO AVAILABLE / Series 1 (26 x 13’)
COMPILED AND EDITED BY Christian De Schutter / Saidja Callewaert /
DESIGN Karin Pays / PRINT Wilda /
CONTENT_MIP2014_fiction.indd 1-2
CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Niko
Meulemans
through
the
PITCH / Travelling
PRODUCTION
COMPANY
/ 1st-day
countryside
and
towns to the Belgian
LANGUAGE
/ English
(USA), Russian,
Dutch,
French,
coast,
Archibelge!
takes an
unusual
Norwegian,
Spanish,
Indonesian,
…
look
at the Portuguese,
thought behind,
and the
DURATIONlifestyle
/ 25 x 7’
of people living in everyday
YEAR OF PRODUCTION
/ 2015
Belgian architecture.
CONTACT / Melanie Chabrier / [email protected]
INT’L SALES / Mediatoon / www.mediatoon.com
Lenny Mark
Richard
Bal,
VanIrons,
Wijck
walksWells,
alongVincent
the 19thTess Bryant,
Chris private
Brookerrailway line of the
century
CREATED/DIRECTED
BYwhich
/ Yannick
Zanchetta,
same name,
linked
Wallonia
Paul De Blieck
Flanders and which was predominantly
PRODUCTION
/ Walking
The Dog
usedCOMPANY
to transport
the riches
of (BE),
CREATED/DIRECTED
BY / Joeria Vlekken
PITCH / Marianne,
former journalist,
PRODUCTION
/ Bonka
Circus
getsCOMPANY
shaken by
a tragic
incident. At the
LANGUAGE
/ Dutch,
French
same
time,
Belgium is getting ready for
DURATIONthe
/ 9 long-expected
x 49’ + 1 compilation
(DutchFollow-up
version) /
elections.
8 x 52’ (French
/ 1 x 52’
(English
version)
seriesversion)
to Deadline
14/10
(also
8x50’).
CONTACT / Catherine Castille /
[email protected]
INT’L SALES / Bonka Circus / www.bonkacircus.com
25/03/14 11:29
CAST / Clara Cleymans, Michaël Pas, Katelijne Damen,
Lynn Van Royen, Dahlia Pessemiers-Benamar
SCRIPTED BY / Rik D’hiet
DIRECTED BY / Lars Goeyvaerts, Tom Goris
PRODUCTION COMPANY / Eyeworks, VRT
LANGUAGE / Dutch
CONTACT / Peter Bouckaert /
[email protected]
INT’L SALES / Eyeworks Distribution / www.eyeworks.tv
CAST / Charlotte Vandermeersch,
Peter Van den Begin, Koen De Bouw, Ruth Becquart,
Marc Lauwrys
CREATED BY / Ed Vanderweyden Rudy Morren,
Nicholas Roelandts, Geert Bouckaert, Dirk Nielandt
DIRECTED BY / Maarten Moerkerke
PRODUCTION COMPANY / Menuet
LANGUAGE / Dutch
CONTACT / Menuet / [email protected]
25/03/14 11:27
25/03/14 11:23
A series of content flyers and
e-newsletters presenting an overview of
recent, new and upcoming audiovisual
productions made in Flanders and
Brussels, Belgium
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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Belgium. Read the news when it happens, browse
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Flanders Image also attends several festivals and
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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
9
#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
GET YOUR COPY!
•E
XT
SCREEN FLANDERS
CO-PRODUCTION
GUIDE
RA
•
REVISED
BELGIAN
TAX SHELTER
EXPLAINED
VISIT SCREEN FLANDERS
IN CANNES @ RIVIERA A4
N E X T A P P LI C AT I O N DEADLI N E: 11 S EP TEMB ER
SCREENFLANDERS.COM I FOLLOW US
10
xxxxxx
xxxxxx
i-opener
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. 
11
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?
13
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,
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.
cinefile
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.
15
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.
cinefile
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,
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
17
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,
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)
cinefile
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
19
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.
20
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…
21
“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
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.” 
www.elephantsdream-film.com
41
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
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!”
43
Phantom Boy on flandersimage.com
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
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
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. 
YOUR
PREFERENTIAL
CO-PRODUCTION
PARTNER
VISIT US @
MARCHÉ DU FILM
RIVIERA A4
NEXT
APPLICATION
DEADLINE:
11 SEPTEMBER
SCREENFLANDERS.COM
FOLLOW US ON
end credits
TAKE 32 / SUMMER 2015 / €3,99
COVER / Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah
by Johan Jacobs
EDITOR / Christian De Schutter
DEPUTY EDITOR + ART DIRECTION
Nathalie Capiau
PHOTO CREDITS
P 4 Bart Dewaele
P 5 Danny Willems (Perceval),
Liesbeth Beeckman (Desiere)
P 7 Versus Production – Laura Hubin
P 8 Dimitri Van Zeebroeck (Baetens)
P 35-39 Jo Voets (all stills and set photos Black)
All other stills copyrighted by the respective
producers
PUBLISHED BY
Flanders Image/VAF
Flanders Film House
Bischoffsheimlaan 38 / B-1000 Brussels
Belgium/EU
T +32-2-226 0630 / F +32-2-219 1936
E [email protected]
CONTENT / Nick Roddick
PRINT / wilda.be
Flanders Image is a division of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF)
COPY EDITOR / Jo Roddick
SUBSCRIPTIONS
By post / €10 / year (three issues)
Info / [email protected]
SPECIAL THANKS TO / Albert Bimmel, Dirk Cools,
Myriam De Boeck, Pierre Drouot, Siebe Dumon, Katrien Maes,
Erik Martens, Karla Puttemans, An Ratinckx, Jan Roekens,
Koen Salmon, Dirk Schoenmaekers, Katrijn Steylaerts,
Liesbeth Van de Casseye, Tom Van der Elst,
Karen Van Hellemont, Marijke Vandebuerie,
Leen Vanderschueren, Sander Vanhellemont, Helga Vinck
+ all the filmmakers and producers who helped on this issue.
ART DIRECTION / Karin Pays
DIGITAL
Saidja Callewaert / Mathieu Van Neck
Jo Roddick / Nick Roddick
When you have finished this publication,
please give it to your library or recycle it
This magazine is also available for free via the
App Store, and can be consulted on issuu.com
More news and features on
www.flandersimage.com
Because
our audience
makes all the
difference.
TIFF Industry would not be what it is without the people it attracts.
Last year alone we welcomed over 5,000 delegates from 80 countries, and more
than 2,000 buyers. We hosted 71 professional development sessions and over 250
speakers, presented 1,200 screenings, and much more.
Early-bird registration opens May 5, 2015.
facebook.com/TIFFIndustry
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pdf - Flanders Image

Transcription

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