#16 - Spring 2010

flanders

#16 | Spring 2010 | e 3.99

Generation

WOW Nathalie Teirlinck, Pim Algoed, Gilles Coulier, Hans Van Nuffel, Bas Devos, Philip James McGoldrick, Nicolas Provost and the revival of the live-action short I Carl Joos I Chickentown I Eyetronics I And where is Gary? I www.flandersimage.com

i nside Cover: Nathalie Teirlinck As seen through the lens of Bart Dewaele

04 i-OPENER

A widescreen impression of Vanja d’Alcantara’s feature film debut Beyond the Steppes

07 i-CATCHER

Koen Mortier’s 22nd of May is approaching

08 Impens rules

2009 was the year of Dirk Impens, the producer of The Misfortunates and top TV crime series Code 37

12 i-FILE

Top festivals like Berlin and Clermont-Ferrand have recognised the revival of the Flemish live-action short. In this special report, we talk with emerging filmmaking talents Pim Algoed, Gilles Coulier, Hans Van Nuffel, Nathalie Teirlinck and Bas Devos about their new shorts

18 INTERVIEW

Philip James McGoldrick’s Siemiany is selected for competition at both this year’s Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the Berlinale’s Generation 14+ programme

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22 30

Screenwriter Carl Joos is responsible for both The Alzheimer Case and its follow-up, Dossier K.

26 INNOVATION

Born in Flanders, Eyetronics is now a leading international player in the digitisation of actors… and other human beings

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22 IDENTIKIT

30 IMAGINE

The origins of the new animated series Chickentown can be found in a London supermarket

34 INTERACTIVE

A 10-week interactive search to find a very convincing con artist

36 INSPIRATION

A deliberately poetic and oblique documentary about the plight of refugees in the west

40 INTERNATIONALs

Frederic Du Chau or the long way from Ghent to Los Angeles

46 INFLUENCE

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Who are the people Nicolas Provost was influenced by?

48 ICONS

Toronto, Montreal, Geneva… Just a few places where you might see our filmmakers shine

50 i-fans

IFFR’s Gerwin Tamsma talks about one of his favourite films from Flanders

51 i-SIGHT

'The best is yet to come', says Christian De Schutter

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40 46

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Beyond the Steppes

-opener i Vanja d’Alcantara’s feature debut Beyond the Steppes tells the heartbreaking story of a young Polish mother’s forced journey to the steppes of Central Asia in the 1940s. Deported with her baby by the Soviet Army to the deep hostile lands of the USSR, she has to work in a sovkhoz under the control of the Russian political police. When her child becomes ill, she leaves on a search to find medications with a group of Kazakh nomads. Starring Agnieszka Grochowska, Aleksandra Justa and Boris Szyc, the film is lensed by Ruben Impens. Flemish producer is Annemie Degryse for Lunanime. International sales are handled by Doc & Film. 

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37th Ghent International Film Festival (12-23 October 2010)

Send a screener (multi-region DVD) along with some publicity material (press book, some stills, CD with the soundtrack if available and an entry form) before August 1st, 2010 to Wim De Witte.

Download the entry form here: www.filmfestival.be/pdf/entry_form.pdf Ghent International Film Festival • The place to be for film music concerts.

• Prizes in cash to local distributors who release the winning films.

• Competition for European Shorts in cooperation with the European Film Academy (European director - produced in 2010).

• Other sections: festival previews / world cinema / memory of film / Almost Cinema.

• More than 110,000 visitors.

• Instigator of the World Soundtrack Awards.

More info (incl. festival regulations) on www.filmfestival.be Subscribe to our newsletter!

Ghent International Film Festival – Leeuwstraat 40b, 9000 Ghent – Belgium tel +32 (0)9 242 80 60 – wim.dewitte@filmfestival.be

www.filmfestival.be

www.worldsoundtrackacademy.com

-catcher i

22 of May nd

In 22nd of May, the second feature from Ex Drummer director Koen Mortier, we follow two hours in the life of Sam, a seemingly unexceptional fortysomething who works as a security guard in a shopping mall.

One day however, his dull life is turned upside down when the mall becomes the target of a suicide bomber. As everything around him is burning, Sam tries his best to help. He drags a woman outside against her will. She is screaming, struggling to get back inside to save her child. But Sam is already back, trying to rescue other victims.

They are strewn over the floor, covered in blood, their clothes in shreds.

But as their cries turn into screams, Sam himself is overpowered by fear and panic. First with shock, then the realisation of what happened. Without thinking, he runs, turning his back on the apocalyptic scene. He flees along the streets of a city that once felt as familiar and comforting, but is now hostile and alien.

Starring Sam Louwyck (Lost Persons Area), Steffi Peeters (Small Gods), Titus De Voogdt (Steve + Sky) and Jan Hammenecker (Ex Drummer), 22nd of May is, says the director, a film about ‘fear, impotence and guilt’. Key crew members include DOP Glynn Speeckaert and editor Nico Leunen (The Misfortunates, Altiplano). Flemish producer is Eurydice Gysel for Epidemic. ETA: Summer 2010.  www.epidemic.be

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Flanders Image Person of the Year Dirk Impens

With an international break-out success in The Misfortunates and a hit TV series at home with Code 37, producer Dirk Impens can hardly avoid saying that 2009 has been a good year. 'It has been a tremendous year. It has been an amazing year, and I am very thankful for what has happened,' he tells Ian Mundell.

Not so Misfortunate Dirk Impens was hoping to have some success, of course, and believes strongly in hard work, but the results have outstripped his expectations by a long way. On top of that, he admits to being a very superstitious person. 'Sometimes I believe it really is a question of luck,' he confides. 'That's the nature of this business.'

Impens started out managing a theatre company in the early 1980s, before becoming a film production manager and then a producer. In 1988 he co-founded Independent Productions with Marc Punt and Jan Verheyen, and set up on his own the following year with Favourite Films. He hit the jackpot with his first production: Daens, directed by Stijn Coninx, was a box office success at home and abroad, and was nominated for a Foreign-language Oscar in 1993.

Since then Menuet/Favourite Films has produced or co-produced some 25 feature films and TV series, including work by Frank Van Passel, Christophe Van Rompaey, Jan Verheyen, the Dardenne brothers, Jeroen KrabbĂŠ and Robbe De Hert. Also part of the filmography are Steve + Sky and With Friends Like These, the first two feature films from Felix van Groeningen.

The Misfortunates Embarking on the third, The Misfortunates, Impens was simply looking for a better performance than before. 'The third film should logically be a step forward in his development as a director, finding his own voice more, developing his own style,' Impens says, 'and hopefully finding a bigger audience.'

Based on an autobiographical novel by Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst, The Misfortunates tells the story of a 13-year-old boy growing up in a family of gamblers and drunks in the 1980s. While loyal to his disgraceful father and uncles, the boy slowly realises that he is doomed to become like them unless he can find a way out.

Van Groeningen was still working on the film when the call came in April to say that it had been chosen for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. 'We were completely surprised by the selection,' says Impens. 'We had to finish the film in five or six weeks, which was one big trip. We were working almost 24-7, which is fun, but it doesn't leave time for anything else.'

Things have been hectic ever since, with the film selected for other festivals, including Toronto and The Hamptons in North America, and a high-profile national release to organise. Impens was expecting around 100,000 admissions for the film in Belgium, but in early December it was already up to 400,000. 'It was totally, totally unexpected,' he says. 'Sometimes this is a beautiful business.' Finally, The Misfortunates was chosen to represent Belgium in the race for foreignlanguage Oscar nominations.

person of the year The Misfortunates

mixed blessing Tentative discussions about van Groeningen's fourth feature have also begun, although beyond saying that it will be based in Flanders, Impens will not go into details. 'I have to be careful, but I think he's found what he's going to do next,' he says.

With the success of The Misfortunates there have been offers for van Groeningen to work abroad, which Impens sees as a mixed blessing. 'This is a film that opens doors, which is really good,' he explains. 'The thing is to be in control, and to be master of your own career and to stick to the original thoughts and ideas about why you became and want to be a director. That's what I believe.'

rewarding period The sort of break-out success experienced by The Misfortunates is exactly the sort of thing that the Flemish film industry should be aiming for as it begins a new period of maturity. 'In the 1960s and 1970s it was a hobby for some people, and "Flemish film" was really an insult,' Impens explains.

'In the 1980s and 1990s we opened our minds and the Flemish film industry became part of the world. We started trying new things, and we got very professional. In the 2000s, and we are still there, it is a rewarding period when Flemish film is no longer an insult, but finds its audience. The next step, for the second half of this 20-year period, is finding an audience internationally.'

In order to achieve this international recognition, Flemish filmmakers must focus on what they do well, he continues. 'We have to continue doing what we are doing, work hard, like what we are doing, and stick together.'

'I'm not in this business for the red carpet, not for attending premieres, definitely not for being famous and popular. For money? Maybe, but there are better ways of making money in this country than films’

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Chronicle of Flemish cinema

Flemish film classics on DVD (with English subtitles) issued by the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

Mira, Crazy Love, Brussels by Night, De Witte van Sichem, De komst van Joachim Stiller, Louisa, een woord van liefde & L'étreinte, Malpertuis, Meeuwen sterven in de haven, De loteling, Verbrande Brug, De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, …

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If the success of The Misfortunates came as a surprise, Impens' other big result of 2009 was more premeditated.

The crime series Code 37, made for private broadcaster VTM, on average registered a gigantic 44.6% market share in the second half of the year. 'We definitely wanted to find an audience, there's no doubt about that,' Impens says. 'I really wanted to make a hit.'

The series revolves around Hannah (Veerle Baetens), a feisty police detective who is put in charge of the sex crimes unit in the city of Ghent. 'In this business you don't need very much,' says Impens. 'Sometimes you need just one strong idea. For Code 37 that is a young independent woman with some attitude problems working for the vice squad, and some tension between her personal life and the job she is doing.'

Again he claims that luck played a part, from the cando attitude of directors Jakob Verbruggen and Joel Van Hoebrouck, to the skill of DOP Jan Vancaillie and the casting. 'It all fitted together.' They were also fortunate Code 37 with the location, finding a large, empty school in Ghent that could be converted into a studio and main set for the vice squad. All this allowed them to turn the 13-part series around in less than a year. 'We were so lucky. And when you see luck, you have to grab it and use it.'

A second series of Code 37 is being commissioned by VTM, and Impens hopes to work again with Verbruggen. 'That's another guy who is certainly an upcoming talent, with absolutely his own style, and who wants to make his own feature film. So I'm very curious to see what is going to come out of that.'

person of the year

Code 37

Dancing with Travolta Meanwhile Impens is producing Turquaze, the first feature of young director Kadir Balci, about a cross cultural love affair that moves between Ghent and Istanbul. 'I hope that he will be a new voice in Flemish filmmaking, but it's a bit too early to say whether that's going to happen or not,' Impens says.

Photography on the film has finished and image editing is under way.

Another young filmmaker Impens is working with is Lenny Van Wesemael, who he coached as a student. She is now making a short film called Dancing with Travolta, a sort of musical love story set during a dance contest. He says he doesn't make a habit of producing shorts, but he likes Van Wesemael, likes the script and feels some sort of responsibility towards her as a former student. 'It's very funny, and I really hope she succeeds.'

He's also hoping to work again with Jan Matthys, who directed the TV series Katarakt for Menuet in 2007.

simple checklist Impens has a simple checklist when deciding whether or not to work with a first-time director. 'Good script, working hard, ready and willing to work together with the producer, and a story to tell,' he says, counting off the points.

'I'm a very old-fashioned, conservative and classic type of

producer, I guess,' he goes on. 'People have to work hard. I believe in that, and Felix is the ultimate proof that this is true.

It's not something divine that descends from above, it's hard work that pays off in the end, I believe, and that's what I'm looking for.'

His desire to work closely with his directors limits the amount of projects he can take on. 'I want to be involved, not really hands on, but I want to know what is happening. I want to be there and to help people.' He is amused that producers have a reputation for interfering or somehow frustrating the creative work of directors. 'In an ideal situation a producer stimulates creativity, helps the director find their own voice and personality, rather than controlling it or stalling it.'

This personal involvement in each project is where his own satisfaction comes from. 'I'm not in this business for the red carpet, not for attending premieres, definitely not for being famous and popular. For money? Maybe, but there are better ways of making money in this country than films. You do this because you love it, you love working together with people and making things happen.' ď Š www.menuet.be

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-file i

wow

Generation The revival of the live-action short

Flemish shorts are back in force on the international scene. While Philip James McGoldrick’s Siemiany screens in official competition at both Clermont-Ferrand and the Berlinale’s Generation 14+ this year, Nicolas Provost’s Long Live the New Flesh and Nathalie Teirlinck's Venus Vs Me were immediately picked up for competition at the Berlinale. And there’s more: Nico Leunen’s Afterlife screens at FIPA. But what is at the heart of this sudden revival of the short form in Flanders?

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The new generation of filmmakers who have been receiving critical acclaim in and outside Belgium have undoubtedly acted as a stimulus to those still at film school. With their first and second features they have proved that there is a demand for more daring, imaginative films from Flanders both locally and abroad.

And there is Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) CEO Pierre Drouot who called upon all filmmakers in Flanders to ‘dare to be more daring.’

When the VAF launched its €200,000* Wildcards competition five years ago, no one could have imagined it would have such a significant impact on the quality of Flemish shorts. ‘The fantastic thing about the VAF Wildcards is that they give you wings,’ says Hans Van Nuffel, a young filmmaker who was among the first laureates. ‘All of a sudden the professional film world comes into reach. Winning a Wildcard allows you, as a recent graduate, to concentrate on filmmaking instead of being confronted with the harsh reality of life and having to find a job to survive.’ The success of the Wildcard scheme was also noticed abroad, with the Dutch Film Fund taking up a similar idea.

In this special feature, Flanders Image presents some of the works that have recently been made within the Wildcards programme, as well as profiling one of the 2009 laureates, and some other interesting shorts that have been recently completed. And on page 46 of this magazine, we’ll be speaking to Nicolas Provost and finding out about the people and the films that inspire him.

* There are four VAF Wildcards each year: two for fiction (€60,000 each) and two for documentary (€40,000 each). Winners also get guidance from a coach who will accompany them on their first assignment in the real world. This allows the winners, all recent graduates who were selected by a jury on the strength of their graduation short, to immediately embark on their first professional project.

fresh blood How to Enrich Yourself by Driving Women into Emotional and Financial Bankruptcy Pim Algoed 15 mins When central heating technician Ben Castermans earns some extra money doing work on the side, it gives his brother Igor the idea for a brilliant scheme: Ben should offer his services to the single women Igor has found for him.

The idea for How to Enrich…, says Algoed, came from a friend. It’s actually based on a true story.

‘His mum got to know a guy through some sort of a social club. The man talked her into getting a new central heating system which a friend of his installed. And after the job was done and paid for, the guy disappeared. She never heard from him again.’ The only souvenir of the relationship was the pricy heating system.

Algoed’s graduation short, Tanguy’s Unifying Theory of Life, about a recently graduated filmmaker earning a living in a cleaning firm where a fellow cleaner tells him the most amazing stories for him to turn into a film, won him a VAF Wildcard. How to Enrich… is the result. The film has already received the Humo Award at the recent International Short Film Festival in Leuven.

Filmmaker Jan Verheyen (Dossier K., Cut Loose) was Algoed’s Wildcard coach. ‘He guided me through the production landscape, and that’s how I ended up with A Team Productions,’ says Algoed. Working with a producer, he says, ‘meant that I could concentrate on making the film instead of having to deal with arranging hundreds of things.’

Asked whether he learned anything while making How to Enrich…, the young director says: ‘To me, it confirmed the importance of a good script, and of being surrounded by a good cast and crew.’

What’s next for Algoed? A treatment for a feature film just landed him one of three seats in the 2010 edition of the VAF script workshop. The new project, he says, ‘will be something entirely different’ to his previous work. ‘It will be more of a tragic-comedy instead.’  Henry Womersley

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Iceland Gilles Coulier 22 mins

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A man just released from jail seeks out his former girlfriend. On the way, he has a surreal encounter with a depressed mime artist, also wandering the city.

Gilles Coulier was inspired to make his short film Ijsland (Iceland) by Mike Leigh's 1993 feature Naked. 'The idea of one person just hanging around in a city intrigued me, and I was looking for a story to go in that direction,' he says. Writing with Angelo Tijssens, who also plays one of the roles in the film, he came up with this story idea.

Like Naked, Ijsland is a night film. 'Shooting at night allowed us to show how isolated this person really is,' Coulier explains. 'Apart from the three other characters you don't see anyone in the movie. They are the only thing that is alive in the city.' The location was Ostend, which combined the feeling of a big city with the mysterious, open presence of the sea.

Ijsland is Coulier's graduation film for a bachelor degree at Sint Lukas in Brussels, where his adviser was Patrice Toye (Nowhere Man). The next step is to complete his masters degree with another short film, this time under the watchful eye of DorothĂŠe van den Berghe (My Queen Karo).

He plans to shoot in Ostend again, and the story he has in mind concerns a girl reunited with her mother after a five-year disappearance. The girl won't say anything about what happened during this period, which left her blind, only that it was her own fault.

'Around them there is a big fuss about where she was for five years and what happened,' Coulier explains, 'but I don't want to show all that. I just want to show what is happening between mother and daughter.'

This is an interesting choice, given that his advisers are both strong female directors.

'I sometimes think that this film needs to be made by a woman,' he says, 'because it's about a mother and a daughter, but from my point of view as a male student director I think I can also show something interesting.' ď Š Ian Mundell

fresh blood Nighthawks Hans Van Nuffel 13 mins An older woman tries to hide her true nature from the young girl she is dating. But things heat up when her creator shows up, displeased with her life in denial and her outright refusal to hook up with him. Nighthawks is a story about passionate affairs, vicious circles and… fresh blood.

With HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight saga, there’s definitely a renewed interest in vampires.

But the timing of Nighthawks, Van Nuffel underlines, is ‘pure coincidence’.

‘I got the idea for this film some years ago. I’d been hanging out with a lot of artists. They’ve got rather unhealthy lifestyles,’ he explains. Their lack of sleep and pale skins in fact lent them a somewhat vampiric appearance. In the meantime, Van Nuffel – one of the first VAF Wildcard laureates with The End of the Ride – got on with a few other assignments, although the Nighthawks project stayed in his mind.

The casting of the vampires, Van Nuffel underlines, was key. ‘I needed people who, when they first appear, audiences immediately feel that there’s something wrong. I was familiar with Kirsten Pieters when she was still a top model working for all the major designers in New York, so I was already acquainted with her striking appearance. And then I got to know her through a chance encounter at film school where she was doing some acting. I first wanted to cast her in The End of the Ride but that didn’t work out.’

Another striking face was found in Valentijn Dhaenens (The Misfortunates). ‘Like Kirsten, Valentijn has got the perfect look for this role,’ he says. It was actor Matthias Schoenaerts (The End of the Ride, Loft, My Queen Karo) who suggested Van Nuffel have a look at Dhaenens.

The director has now started on his first feature, tentatively called Oxygen. ‘It’s been tough but exciting as well. Especially when all the pieces start to come together. And working on a film always leads to new ideas for a next one.’  H.W.

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Venus Vs Me Nathalie Teirlinck 25 mins When 12-year-old Marie’s mother comes home with a new boyfriend, many questions remain unanswered and communication seems impossible. Using all her powers, Marie tries to win her mother back, while silently seeking refuge in a cherished memory from the past.

Before Venus Vs Me, Teirlinck attracted attention with her third-year project Anémone, which was selected for Competition in Locarno, and graduation short Juliette, which won her a VAF Wildcard.

The Wildcard, which also comes with a personal coach, allowed her to almost immediately embark on a new short project. ‘I must have written 15 screenplays before I knew that I had the right script for this film,’ she says. Another part of the process is collecting images that reflect the right atmosphere, and the look and feel she’s aiming for. It’s no wonder that Teirlinck’s work is often referred to as a rich collage of images and sounds. 'For me, these images are an ideal means of communicating with the crew, to show things that are difficult to explain in words,’ she explains.

'Working on Venus Vs Me was fantastic’, she says. ‘For this film I wanted to explore and develop new collaborations and relationships. I used to do lots of things myself when working on my student shorts. But when you succeed in finding the right people and then manage to get all of them on the same wavelength, that’s just pure magic.’

When asked whether the subject of her third short is autobiographical, Teirlinck replies with a very clear and unambiguous ‘no’. ‘Of course it’s something close to myself though, this irrational and complex living environment in which you can lose yourself, unable to find what you’re looking for.’

And what’s next? She considers Venus Vs Me the perfect end to her career as a filmmaker of shorts. ‘Shorts allow you to experiment, to find boundaries. I now want to find the right way to tell a more complex story, fully making use of both image and sound in the narrative structure.’

Venus Vs Me will screen at this year's Berlinale Short Competition.  H.W.

docu We Know Bas Devos 11 mins An intimate moment between a father and an almost grown-up son leads to a fundamental, though subtle change in their relationship.

Their unconditional love towards each other becomes clear, albeit unpronounced.

Considered as one of the emerging filmmaking talents Flanders has on offer today, Bas Devos says that he’s a very impatient person. It’s for instance why he and producer Peter De Maegd only applied for a post-production grant from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) for this short. ‘The four shorts I have made were always very modest in terms of set-up,’ he explains. ‘They consist of a few characters, a few locations, a simple storyline. And thanks to an enthusiastic crew that was prepared to work for free, we could move fast.’ In the case of We Know, the VAF support made it possible to finish the film on 35mm. ‘The sad story of too many shorts is that they end op on inferior formats like Beta SP than the material they were initially shot on. For people like me who tend to work very visually this is an outright shame.’

No wonder that Devos works together with DOP Nicolas Karakatsanis. ‘He’s my buddy,’ he says.

‘We share a similar sensibility for images. I consider him one of the best DOP’s around. He’s truly all-round, while I’m much more focused. It’s cool to work with someone you’re fond of.’

The idea for We Know comes from a brainstorming session with lead actor Jeroen Vander Ven (who plays the son). ‘He was also in my previous short and we came up with this story about this moment in your life where, maybe just in a blink of a second, you’ve got this feeling that you understand something. Here you’ve got a son who just for a moment gets affected by the pain or the stress his father suffers from. That’s what this film is about, what it tries to touch. It’s simple but intensional.’

Devos has now teamed up with Minds Meet producer Tomas Leyers to work on his first short which just received a VAF script grant.  H.W.

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The Polish Summer

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Philip James McGoldrick isn’t the typical young Belgian filmmaker. In fact, it’s a moot point if he is Belgian at all. As his name suggests, he has Irish heritage on one side. That comes through his father. There is Polish blood on his mother’s side. What’s more, he has lived in England. But, he recently graduated at RITS film school in Brussels.

By Geoffrey Macnab McGoldrick’s graduation project Siemiany, which is selected for Competition at this year’s Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Fest, and for the Berlinale's Generation 14+ competition, was shot in Poland. The young director (born in 1987) acknowledges that there is a strong autobiographical undertow to the film, a coming of age about two naive teenage boys adrift in rural Poland one slow summer, exploring their sexuality and confronting the adult world. ‘The whole inspiration for the film came because I grew up in Poland and I have family in Poland,’ McGoldrick recalls. The young director was well aware of the homophobic politics in contemporary Poland. That was another reason why he thought it might be interesting to depict characters who aren't sure about their own leanings and who have an obvious attraction for one another.

unnerving experience Predictably, the film school tutors were startled when McGoldrick announced his plans to shoot far away from Brussels. ‘They were worried it would be too ambitious. They advised me to postpone the film.’

His Polish relatives were also surprised. His cousin, a TV director, tried to talk him out of shooting in Poland and suggested he would be better advised to make the film in Belgium.

For the filmmaker himself, returning to the small village of Siemiany where he used to spend his summer holidays as a kid was an unnerving experience. ‘The rental houses were a lot smaller than I remembered. That was the first problem I thought of. I wondered if the cameras would fit in the houses!’

Another challenge was finding young Polish actors who were prepared to make a film in which there is a subtle but obvious gay theme. In the end, he found a brilliant young actor called Damian Ul. McGoldrick had seen him in Andrzej Jakimowski’s

award-winning feature, Tricks. ‘I never thought I’d actually get him to do this role but my casting director got in touch with him and he was very keen to do it.’ Ul was only 12 years old.

However, the young actor was far more open to the ideas and themes of Siemiany than many of the older actors.

emerging sexuality Certain incidents are taken direct from the filmmaker’s childhood.

He had a cousin who dyed his hair blond, just as the gang of boys do in Siemiany. Like the boys, he and his friends used to spend much of the summer catching fish. The days were long and slow, just as he depicts them in the film. He even had a nephew who once showed him a gun.

‘As a boy, I observed that young boys tend to do very strange things when they are bored, like kill chickens or catching fish in a little pond and throwing them in the wheat field to make them feel bad.’ The boys are trying to define themselves and to deal with their emerging sexuality. Their uncertainty about how they should behave leads them to look up to older children, even when these children are bullying delinquents, like the gang of boys with bleached hair.

Siemiany was shot by ace cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis, who has already built up an international reputation thanks to films like Small Gods, Mumbler and Lost Persons Area. In spite of his reputation as a maverick, Karakatsanis proved easy to work with. He respected McGoldrick’s screenplay and didn’t try to lord it over a young director who had only a fraction of his experience.

‘The look I was going for was simple and authentic,’ McGoldrick recalls. He originally planned to shoot on 16mm. Karakatsanis talked him into using 35mm instead. This made the film more expensive but gave the film a visual quality that it might have

nter view i ‘I feel we are on to something that could change the local scene... there are a lot of innovative directors now and cinema here is really exploding’

lacked otherwise. Karakatsanis oversaw the lighting. A camera operator wielded the heavy equipment. McGoldrick wanted the camera to be handheld: that gave the film a documentary-like immediacy but also allowed for surprise and lyricism.

Siemiany, the director points out, could easily have been made as a social realist film ‘about a shitty place.’ He was determined to make it more lyrical and more surprising than that. ‘I showed it as poetry... in my eyes at last.’

Krzysztof Zanussi McGoldrick had some influential backers, among them the great Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, who helped him find a Polish producer. Even so, this was a very tough movie to make. Putting the budget together required patience and perseverance. The Polish and Belgian crew members had to

overcome their cultural differences. ‘Maybe the Polish producer was a bit more rock and roll,’ McGoldrick ventures of the cultural differences between the two nationalities.

Another challenge was getting his collaborators to accept that they were in Siemiany to work, even if it was a holiday resort.

‘It was a very good crew and a good shoot and we all had fun...’ the director pauses before adding. ‘But in the beginning, I really had problems because I wanted to push cast and crew to work and not to slack.’

At one point, the eldest of the two boys refused to jump in the water because it was too cold. That meant the crew lost half a day before he was finally convinced. Perhaps ironically, the scenes that had seemed most challenging emotionally to McGoldrick when he was writing the screenplay didn’t bother his young cast members at all.

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h o u s e

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nter view i Harmony Korine McGoldrick has pursued a circuitous route into the film business. It wasn’t his childhood aspiration to become a movie brat ‘like the cliché of Spielberg’. However, after high school, he decided to enroll in film school. What surprised him at first about RITS was how much his teachers left him to his own devices. At first, he was baffled by the lack of structure and organisation. Gradually, he realised how helpful this might be.

After all, he was entering a business where he would have to fend for himself to prosper. ‘A film director is someone who needs to build something from scratch, from zero,’ he reflects.

‘That was a very good learning school. I learned a lot about creating something from nothing. In that sense, it was a good school...’

Ask him about his influences and he cites Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return. McGoldrick recently met Korine in New York. He saw Korine’s new film Trash Humpers. ‘Totally nuts!’ he says approvingly. He has also given a copy of Siemiany to Korine. ‘He (Korine) likes to show the part of society that is tucked away...he makes very provocative films.’ Like McGoldrick, Korine has always been ready to show the random and cruel nature of adolescent life: to depict characters killing cats and putting them in the trash.

‘Really human things that people do but we never talk about

them because they’re kind of taboo.’ Did McGoldrick himself ever kill cats? He laughs at the question. ‘I killed fish but I never killed cats. That would be too extreme!’

iconoclastic filmmakers Now, the young Irish-Polish-Belgian director is plotting a sequel of sorts to Siemiany. ‘I’d like to make a trilogy of films that would all very much be linked together.’ He won’t disclose many details about the future installments in the trilogy. No, the new films won’t be set in Siemiany. They will feature some of the same characters but at a different age. As for McGoldrick’s own nationality, he is not sure that he sees himself entirely as a Belgian filmmaker. ‘The Belgian scene I have trouble with because I never felt like a Belgian,’ he muses. He speaks Flemish but writes his screenplays in English. However, McGoldrick admires iconoclastic Flemish filmmakers like the Karakatsanis brothers, Felix van Groeningen, Pieter Van Hees and Koen Mortier. ‘I feel very connected to them and I feel we are on to something that could change the local scene... there are a lot of innovative directors now and cinema here is really exploding.’  www.siemianythemovie.eu

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Dossier

22

Carl

‘Ask anyone on the street about their favourite four or five films. They may know who directed them. They’ll know who starred in them but they certainly won’t know who wrote them! Should they know... I don’t know’

Verheyen’s Dossier K., the follow-up to runaway box-office hit The Alzheimer Case. That film, starring Jan Decleir as the assassin whose memory is failing, took nine years to finance. Dossier K. found funding far more easily but even so has taken several years

i

to reach the screen. By Geoffrey Macnab

dentikit

Screenwriter Carl Joos smiles ruefully as he considers the lengthy gestation of Jan

At the premiere of The Alzheimer Case (The Memory of a Killer), the reception was so enthusiastic that financiers were immediately ready to commit to a sequel. ‘Instead of nine years, it took 15 minutes!’ Joos recalls of the clamour to make a follow-up to what became one of the most successful films in Belgian history.

Again, the source material was a crime thriller by novelist Jef Geeraerts featuring the hardbitten detective duo Vincke and Verstuyft. What drew Joos and co. to Dossier K was the novel’s evocation of the Albanian gangster subculture.

Carl Joos (°1961)*

honour

2003)

The screenwriter was fascinated by the ancient law systems of the Albanians. ‘It’s like an almost tribal law system that has developed from religion,’ Joos explains. The Albanians’ highly ritualised system of honour and score-settling provided the filmmakers with a very colourful backdrop against which to set their story. Joos steeped himself in the inner world of the ‘Kanun’, the old Albanian law system ‘I went through this ancient law book and I found lots of background material which I have used in the film,’ the screenwriter recalls. Many of the laws related to rural peasant life.

They were to do with such matters as how many bundles of straw a farmer had to pay as recompense when his pig escapes and tramples down the neighbours’ vegetables.

Joos was also instantly struck by the emphasis the laws placed on honour and by the way Albanians tried to treat a modern western city as if it was a rural mountain community.

‘Honour is practically all you have as a human being. All the rest is dispensable because your tribe or your family will look after you and all other things will settle themselves in the end. But honour is what you are,’ Joos explains the Albanian law system. He was also struck by the symbolism: the idea that when you enter another person’s house, you present your weapon to your host or that when a man gets married, his father-in-law gives him a bullet with which he can kill his daughter if she is unfaithful. ‘That’s a wedding gift - a bullet!’

Blood feuds are commonplace. If someone kills a member of another family, a member of that family will assume the responsibility for avenging the death. That is the only way balance can be restored.

Dossier K. (2009) Storm Force (2006) The Alzheimer Case (The Memory of a Killer, Cops (TV, 2003-2009) Recht op recht (TV, 1998) Storm Force (TV, 1997) Max (1994)

*selected filmography

protagonist The challenge for Joos was combining the more conventional thriller elements with all the background material about Albanian culture. The screenwriter already knew the world of crime fighting. He has spent time with cops and understands their day to day struggles. In Dossier K., the detectives come face to face with the Albanians. It makes for an explosive confrontation.

The Alzheimer Case was dominated by the great Flemish actor Jan Decleir, who played the killer with the faulty memory. The hitch - at least as far as the sequel was concerned - is that the character died. One key challenge for Joos was to create another protagonist with the same mix of gravitas, pathos and menace as Decleir’s assassin. In Nazim Tahir (played

by Blerim Destani), he hopes he has found such a character. Nazim is the one who has to avenge the death of his father. The twist is that he doesn’t know the full circumstances of that death.

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musical background When he is adapting a novel for the screen, Joos will first read the book very carefully. He will then read it again. ‘And then I start massacring it! I tear out pages and write in the margins. Slowly, an idea forms of how I can enter the novel.’ At the same time, he will research the milieu of the novel exhaustively. Then, he will write an elaborate 40 or 50 page treatment. He will use Excel files to try to structure scenes and to move them around. While he is trying to pull the structure together, he is also attempting to work out just how the characters will speak and sound. Why this painstaking approach? The screenwriter attributes it to his musical background. He is thinking in rhythmic terms. ‘I’ve been playing a cornet since I was seven,’ Joos states. ‘I played in a brass band from a very early age.’ His band competed in the Royal Albert Hall in London in the Open European Brass Band Championship (this is the event immortalised in Mark Herman’s film, Brassed Off). He is also adept at playing the trombone, has worked with funk bands and has even written some music. ‘In dialogue writing, that makes me very aware of speech rhythm and pace. I try to write my dialogue very much on how I hear the melody of the people talking.’

rollercoaster Not that Joos, who was born in 1961, studied music. At university in Antwerp, he took courses on Germanic philology. He spent several years in teaching and then in advertising before beginning to write scripts. He had long been a film lover. The next step was to enrol in a weekend film course in Brussels. Eventually, he sold his shares in the advertising agency and devoted himself to screenwriting.

dentikit i Dossier K.

Joos comes from a small industrial town. ‘I still live in the street where I grew up and I feel that’s a very important part of my background in writing. I know all the people in my street very well. I’ve know their parents and I’ve known their grandparents. I know their story... it gives me a lot of input on how families work and how relationships work because I have been able to monitor the same people.’

Joos’ screenplay for Dossier K. lay for around two years untouched. Erik Van Looy, who was originally attached to direct, polished it up. Eventually, Van Looy stepped aside because of other commitments. At this point, Jan Verheyen boarded the project. Verheyen made his own amendments. All the while, the screenplay was evolving. ‘It was getting more and more focused and it was also getting shorter.’

Dossier K. is intended as a rollercoaster ride. The tempo is deliberately set very high. Joos has now written close to 20 hours of TV prime time fiction as well as his feature films. His work for the small screen includes the TV version of Storm Force (Windkracht 10), about a crack squadron of rescue helicopters, and Flikken (Cops).

‘I’ve been writing constantly for 16 years,’ he states. In the early years, he was sometimes offered hack assignments. Since The Alzheimer Case, he generally receives the most prestigious projects and now makes what he calls ‘a good living.’ Not that this necessarily means he has money and praise lavished on him. ‘Ask anyone on the street about their favourite four or five films. They may know who directed them. They’ll know who starred in them but they certainly won’t know who wrote them! Should they know... I don’t know.’  Discover the trailer of Dossier K. on www.flandersimage.com

What’s next for Joos?

The 48-year-old screenwriter’s future projects promise to be in similar register. He is at work with Erik Van Looy on The Premier (working title), a political thriller which he says ‘is coming along quite nicely.’

Joos is also working on an adaptation of The Treatment, the second novel by British crime writer Mo Hayder. And he is also collaborating on The Artists, Brussels based production house Caviar’s pan-European TV series that is being planned

by Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands. There will be five separate pilot episodes, one in each country. The idea is that these will ‘draw in the national audience.’ The next episodes will be the same in every country.

Meanwhile, audiences can also follow the series interactively via several platforms.

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Digital

nnovation

When Bruce Willis leaps hundreds of yards across the screen in

Surrogates or Antonio Banderas jumps his horse onto a moving train in The Legend of Zorro, it is thanks to Eyetronics, a small company born in Flanders that is now very busy in Hollywood.

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By Ian Mundell

Eyetronics has developed a technique for digitising actors such as Willis and Banderas (and extras such as the horse) and turning them into 3D models that can be manipulated by a movie's special effects team. Set up in 1998, the company's portfolio now includes more than 100 films, plus TV series, commercials, computer games and a wide range of other projects.

Recent credits include films such as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, 2012 and Angels and Demons, TV series such as Heroes and Knight Rider, and games such as Grand Theft Auto IV. Eyetronics' headquarters is on the campus of the KUL University of Leuven, where the technique was developed. It also has an office in Torrance, California to handle its Hollywood business and an outpost in Montreal. 'Over here in Leuven we mainly develop the technology,' explains CEO Dirk Callaerts, 'while over there they use our technological solutions and our software to provide services. They are closer to the film market and where 3D is used.'

Callaerts joined the company in 2001, after successfully taking another university spin-off to the market. Although he has a background in electronic engineering, his role now is to be the company entrepreneur. The brains behind the technology is Marc Proesmans, Eyetronics' chief technology officer, whose PhD in image processing is the source of the company's innovation.

People see things in 3D because they have two eyes, each one providing slightly different information about the objects in front of them, which the brain processes into an awareness of three-dimensional space. With only one eye, depth information practically disappears and simple tasks such as putting a cup of coffee on the edge of a table become tricky.

In the same way, two cameras can be used to produce 3D images, but these have limitations when it comes to digital manipulation. They only seem perfectly three-dimensional from the angle of the original shot, and if you try to turn them, the image begins to break up. 'In the beginning, the challenge was how to derive 3D with only one camera,' Callaerts explains.

The method that Proesmans came up with involved projecting a pattern of lines onto an object and taking a photograph that captures the way those lines are deformed by the object's contours.

Š Touchstone Pictures

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competitive field Once collected, the data is then built into model, cleaned-up if necessary, coloured and textured and then 'remeshed', a process that allows the model to be more easily animated.

The same process can be used to generate a digital model of a person's whole body, an animal (although getting them to stand still can be a problem), props or cars. With faces, you might also record different expressions, such as laughter, surprise or pain.

The models are passed on to the people handling the visual effects for a movie, usually working under the visual effects producer and visual effects supervisor. It is by building relationships with these players that Eyetronics has established a place in Hollywood. 'It's a pretty competitive field, where price plays a role, where availability plays a role,' says Callaerts.

'And of course you have to deliver good results.'

nnovation

With actors' availability and shooting schedules changing all the time, Eyetronics sometimes has only a few days to respond to a request to be on set. But the equipment is relatively light and the process quick compared to other digitisation methods, such as laser scanning. Once called in to scan a leading actor or actress, it makes sense to cover the rest of the cast as well.

'When we come on set we have all the equipment, we set everything up, so we tell them to give us as many characters and actors as they want,' Callaerts says. 'We will store all the data and then, if later in post-production they suddenly decide that they need this actor in 3D, we have the data, we can deliver it and then they can pay for it.' This is far easier than trying to catch up with actors who have moved onto other projects, and may have changed their appearance for a new role.

While the basic concept does not change, the Eyetronics system needs to be regularly updated as cameras develop and the amount of data to be processed grows. 'We have to keep up with the changes in equipment to make sure that we are always at the limit of what is technically possible.

Filmmakers always need more and more detail, better colour information, better resolution.' This is one reason why the company stays close to Leuven university. 'A lot of good students graduate from the university, and we know that they have a good basis to be immediately incorporated into this kind of research and development,' Callaerts explains. ď Š

i

Images taken from different angles can then be processed in a computer to create a digital, 3D model of the object. 'That whole set-up is described in the patent,' Callaerts explains, 'but what we developed is in the software, that's the way to extract 3D information from 2D images.'

The apparatus has been refined, with a flash-gun replacing the line projector, but the method that Eyetronics now uses is basically the same. If you want a digital model of Bruce Willis' head, for example, he would sit on a rotating chair while images are collected from different angles, and finally from above and below to cover the top of his head and beneath his jaw. Images for colour and texture are taken at the same time. After about three minutes, Bruce is done.

www.eyetronics.com

Digital Humans Project As well as continuing to develop its services for the film, TV and games industry, Eyetronics has some other projects in the pipeline. One is the Digital Humans Project, a library it is building of 3D characters which can be used by filmmakers and other creatives as 'extras' in projects. 'If we scan actors we don't have the rights to put them in a database and sell them again,' Callaerts explains. 'So we have to find people willing to be scanned and become digital characters.'

A second idea is based on building the company's scanning equipment into a photo booth, allowing anyone to get a 3D self-portrait in a few minutes. The idea is that people would be able to store their digital faces in an on-line community called EyeBcom, and use them on social networking sites or in computer games.

'One of the killer applications that we want to go for is being able to put your own head into a computer game, so you are really playing the game yourself, or with a modified version of yourself based on what you want to look like,' Callaerts says. '3D is everywhere, more and more, which is why we believe that it has to come to the consumer. And what is more personal to the consumer than his or her own face?'

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Fowl Ask most filmmakers what inspired their work and they will give you the names of great directors. Animator Niko Meulemans is a little different. 'The idea came from a sandwich,' he says about his short film Chickendales which he is now developing in a television series. 'I was sitting with a friend at a supermarket, eating a chicken salad sandwich, and we said that it would be so cool if a rooster came to help all these chickens and bring them back to life.' By Ian Mundell

That's exactly what happens in Chickentown. Chickens have been part of his repertoire for years, beginning with comics he drew while at the KASK art school in Ghent. 'You make gags with your friends and about the teachers, and turn everyone into crazy chickens,' he recalls. But he is at a loss to say why chickens have such a hold on his imagination. 'I've no idea.

Why not? Because they taste good? Perhaps because they are funny animals. They are very visual, and you can start to build characters with them. It's just a nose and two eyes and a small body, so you can work fast.' While studying animation in Ghent he avoided the rather baroque direction that the chickens were leading and graduated in 1996 with a more traditional animated short. 'I wanted to pass my degree, so I made something nice,' he laughs. 'Not slaughtering chickens.'

magine i

play It was also at KASK that he and friends made The Museum, a stop-motion film with actors instead of puppets, in which a museum guard has trouble controlling an unruly painting.This won a student film award in Germany and was picked up by MTV. 'We turned it into an advertising spot for MTV, and that was hugely successful. We still don't know why! And we didn't get paid anything for it, but it's been everywhere in the world.'

naked and featherless By this time Meulemans was working in London, and it was here that the sandwich that inspired Chickendales was consumed. He started looking for funds to produce the film there, but soon came back to Belgium where he knew the scene better. The short, mixing 3D animated characters and

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creative control The up-side was that he had retained the rights to the pilots he had developed in the US, and so came back with something to show potential backers. 'In Europe there is more money, and more broadcasters who can get independently involved in a project,' he explains. 'The market moves more here.'

Broadcasters were quick to show an interest in Chickentown, with money eventually coming in from RTBF in Belgium, Canal Plus and Orange in France, NRK in Norway and Disney South East Asia. This in turn attracted co-production partners Ellipsanimé in France and Arameo in Belgium, part of the Dupuis group. But in return for the considerable support from these companies Meulemans and production partner Mélanie Chabrier had to give up the idea of being majority producers of the series.

'The most important thing for us was to keep the graphic creativity, direction and also the voices in Belgium,' says Chabrier. 'We have the chance to really do what we want in this project, but with big groups who will take the majority of the work. But we have creative control.' This was equally

To fulfil this creative role, three or four additional designers will be joining their company 1st Day in Leuven. Recruitment has been tricky, with a lot of competition for local animation talent. 'In the beginning we had an LA mentality and said, "We'll find them all here. We'll open the door and they will just fall inside." But it's not that easy,' says Meulemans. 'So we focused on what is strong here in Belgium. We have a lot of good character designers, good background designers, but unfortunately we don't have enough scriptwriters.' Writing the series will largely be handled in France.

magine

important to the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), which is also supporting the series.

i

real supermarket decor, was completed in 2002, and after appearing at numerous festivals was picked up by French director/producer Luc Besson for inclusion in the compilation movie Zéro Un. 'At festivals we always had the same reaction,' says Meulemans. 'The kids go crazy for these characters, and we had 10,000 hits on the Chickendales website each month. So we thought: this could be interesting, let's start to develop a series about them.'

Chickendales is rather raw, with quite a lot of violence and the characters essentially naked and featherless. So Meulemans made them more child-friendly, and headed for Hollywood to work on pilots at Klasky Csupo, the animation studio behind The Simpsons and Rugrats. However the economic crisis arrived early in Los Angeles, and after three years he came back to Belgium. 'There was no work and the studios were going bankrupt. It was crazy.' says Meulemans. 'I remember reading that 800,000 people left south California in 2007. It was the biggest exodus since the 90s, and I was in that exodus.'

Bunny and Clyde Chickentown will have 39 episodes, each lasting seven minutes, and is expected to be finished in June. Beyond that Meulemans and Chabrier are looking forward to making further seasons of the series, maybe a movie and other spin-offs. 'We have the possibility with these big groups to develop books and comics and other merchandising,' explains Chabrier.

They also want to use the impetus of having Chickentown in production to move other projects forward. These include Charlie Mouly, a series about a nine-year-old girl who wants to help animals and be a veterinarian like her father, and Bunny and Clyde, a story about avatars living inside a computer.

'We've worked for a long time on that and we've created a whole world,' says Meulemans, 'so we are ready to pitch.'  www.1st-day.com

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Flood warning If Gary Wilson-Flood is reading this, then your days as a free man are numbered, Gary!

You made one tiny mistake. Remember that day in the Brussels South/Midi railway station?

Remember that innocent-looking backpacker called Jean-Baptiste? Well, let me tell you something: Jean-Baptiste Dumont is a documentary filmmaker and his next subject is you!

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Where Is Gary? is a 10-week interactive search to find someone he considers to be a very convincing con artist. By Henry Womersley

Gary operates in various European railway stations, talking people into trying to help him get back home, which was how Dumont met him, while he was coming home himself after a backpacking trip. Also carrying a backpack, ‘Gary told me that he had lost his wallet and had no money left to get back to Norway,’ he says. €90 would get him home but the young filmmaker gave him €100. After all, he didn’t want Gary to starve. Besides, who wouldn’t trust a man who also gave the phone number of his wife, asking him to give her a call to let her know he was safe and on his way home? Dumont was sure he would get his money back, and maybe even a little more. Who knows, maybe the happy and grateful couple would even invite him to Norway? Boy, was he in for a surprise. The number he’d been given actually turned out to be that of Gary’s ex-wife. Worryingly, ‘She had not seen him in 10 years and didn’t know anything about his whereabouts.’ A quick search on the internet showed that Gary had done this before. Quite a few times before in fact.

interactive project And that’s where the story might have ended, but the memory of his encounter with Gary and the thought that he had been conned stuck in Dumont’s mind while he was making his VAF Wildcard documentary Vanessa is Still Dancing,

nter-active i in which he followed internationally renowned transsexual entertainer Vanessa Van Durme touring with her onewoman-show. Together with his producer Peter De Maegd of Potemkino, the idea for a documentary project about Gary started to evolve. And now Dumont and De Maegd are developing it in an interactive documentary project. They presented their plans to the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) and were lucky enough to be awarded €60,000, which helped get the project going. But in order to turn this into a documentary entitled Gary Wilson-Flood: Modern-day Pirate, they need additional funding and would welcome potential co-producers. In fact, anyone can become a coproducer by donating €10. And the more you donate, the more prominently your name will feature on the credits!

violent? Or just hand him over to the police? ‘It’s not about revenge, but curiosity,’ explains Dumont. ‘Nor is it about the money. Gary has already paid me back more than I ever could hope for. Thanks to my chance encounter with him that day in Brussels, I found a very interesting subject for a documentary. Therefore, this is the search for a fascinating man who bends the truth to make a living.’

‘That's the advantage of an interactive documentary that you’re both producing and distributing simultaneously,’ adds De Maegd who is very familiar with things like crossplatform content and user-generated content through his involvement in the inter-active TV series project The Artists at Caviar. ‘It all feels a bit strange and exciting at the same time. And for us, it's a leap into the unknown.’

whereisgary.net

out there

In mid-December 2009 they launched the whereisgary.net website. It was also the start of a 10-week worldwide search for Gary that will end some time in February 2010. During this period, Dumont continues to collate any information on Gary that is posted and twice a week, the filmmaker adds webisodes to the site. These are also broadcast on the 8 digital channel in Flanders. As De Maegd puts it, ‘The input we receive can change the course of the search for Gary.

This already happened in the second webisode.’

Hopefully the filmmaker will receive information that will eventually lead him to Gary before he concludes his search.

But, as he explains, it’s not necessarily the main purpose of the project. In a way, Gary is just a pretext to look at practices such as cheating and internet fraud, or to investigate how people distinguish what is true from what is false.

But what if he suddenly came face to face with Gary? Would he ask him to give back the €100? Would he become

But who is to say that Gary isn’t merely a fictional character, conjured up from the imaginations of Dumont and his producer? Isn’t it possible that they’re hoodwinking us in much the same way as Gary duped Dumont? ‘I must admit that this question really surprises me,’ says De Maegd. ‘Yes, Gary is real! That’s my honest answer. Is it because I’m better known as a producer of fiction that people think that Gary is fake? He has made victims all over Europe. After the first radio interview, two people who were also conned

by Gary published their story, one on the whereisgary.net site, the other on our Facebook page. You can watch one of them in one of the webisodes. Trust me, Gary is real and he’s out there somewhere.’  www.whereisgary.net Where is Gary?

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an unbearable intimacy 36

about illegal immigrants in Belgium comes from a short poem by British poet Stevie Smith telling the story of a ‘poor chap’ out at sea who ‘always loved larking.’ His cries for help as he struggles to stay afloat in the

i

waves are misinterpreted. By Geoffrey Macnab

nspiration

Not waving, but drowning… The title for Elias Grootaers’ documentary

The film, chosen for support through the VAF Wildcards scheme and selected for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, is very different from the many other documentaries that have been made in recent years about the plight of refugees in the west. Grootaers’ style is deliberately poetic and oblique. This is not one of those talking head, reportage-driven docs that attack viewers with opinion and statistics. ‘The documentary language I like is much more in the realm of poetry and philosophy than fiction film,’ the director declares. He adds that his aim is to create ‘a world of experience’, not to bombard viewers with information or statistics.

‘We have nothing that is ours except time, which even those without a roof can enjoy,’ reads an intertitle at the beginning of Not Waving But Drowning. The setting is Zeebrugge, Belgium. This may be a seaside town but everything is grey and dull. For the refugees in the detention centre, each day is a long dull grind. They are stuck in rooms waiting for their futures to be resolved. The film’s tense is a continual present. We don’t know about the past experiences of these refugees or what poverty and horror they have fled from. We can only guess as to their future.

cut off Grootaers argues that other documentary makers’ focus on their refugee subjects’ back stories risks seeming paternalistic and judgmental. The inference is that some refugees are deserving of our pity while others are not. In his film, Grootaers tries to avoid such high-handed moralising.

He doesn’t interview the refugees and ask them questions that would be slanted from his own point of view. Instead, he offers what he calls ‘an unbearable intimacy.’ We see the protagonists framed through half-open doors, washing their hands or just eating a sandwich.

Much of the film is in black and white. 'All my films tend to be in black and white and colour in different percentages,’ the director reflects. ‘With this film, I knew it was going to be in black and white from the beginning with this subject matter, this focus on the time experience.’

Grootaers intercuts his own footage with archive material of the waves pounding the shore and of seaside scenes. He found this 16mm material in a flea market in Ghent by chance. It had been shot by an amateur filmmaker. There was no name or date attached. The director guesses that the film was shot in the 1940s or early 1950s. ‘People tend to read it as nostalgic - as something from another time. For me, it was also on a philosophical level about another realm these refugees were cut off from. They are cut off from our world and this other time is another experience that they are cut off from.’

Larry Sider The sound editing is also subtle and poetical. Grootaers’ sound designer was Larry Sider, who has worked with The Quay Brothers and Patrick Keiller. Not Waving But Drowning was produced

by Emmy Oost who also produced Johan Grimonprez’s multiple award winner Double Take. The filmmakers faced a struggle to be granted permission to film in the refugee centre in Zeebrugge.

‘When I called them to ask, I said it was a small film, a poetical film. They said, oh, it is going to be difficult. Different television chains here in Belgium asked the same thing and they got a “no” for an answer.’

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In the end, Grootaers managed to talk the authorities around. They allowed him into the detention centre but only on the condition he was on his own. After he had spent several weeks speaking with the inmates, he began filming as unobtrusively as possible with a miniDV camera. The refugees seemed to understand what he wanted - which was to record their everyday experiences. He ended up filming around 12 hours of material. ‘I wouldn’t say I am lazy but I didn’t want to lose my mind during editing,’ he says of his decision not to shoot more footage.

Jean Vigo Ask Grootaers where his long journey to become a filmmaker began and he looks to his childhood. From the age of three to the age of six, he lived in Africa. His father, a teacher, had fallen in love with Africa. As a child, Grootaers also spent three years in Chicago, where his father had received a grant to study for his PHD in anthropology. ‘I was a child. I had no choice.

I just followed my parents.’

Back home in Belgium at the age of nine, he ended up living in Leuven. Eventually, he ended up studying film at the KASK Film School in Ghent. He started off wanting to make fiction films but gradually realised that he was better suited for documentary.

Ask him about his influences and he immediately cites the French filmmaker Jean Vigo, who is celebrated for anarchical and poetic films like Zero de conduite and L’Atalante and who also made one groundbreaking documentary A propos de Nice. ‘In A propos de Nice, it’s this combination that Vigo has of a very visual poetical style without losing sight of a political core,’ Grootaers explains his passion for Vigo. Above all, what he relishes in Vigo - and in Tarkovsky, another director he reveres - is what he calls ‘anarchistic poetry.’

Grootaers says he sometimes feels like one of those cartoon figures depicted with an angel and a devil on their shoulders. He has a poetic side and is very concerned with aesthetics. At the same time, he wants to be an agitator and confesses to a very strong political side. ‘It is very difficult to combine these two sides (as a filmmaker),’ he says.

creative tension He hasn’t been surprised at all by the lengthy discussions that his film has provoked. Some audiences have asked if it is appropriate to use such poetical language when his subject matter is the plight of refugees. Is he at risk of ‘aestheticising poverty’ on the one hand or

nspiration i of preaching from a soapbox on the other? Does his detached style create intimacy or is it alienating. Rather than be daunted by this, Grootaers sees this clash as a source of creative tension. He is always ready to question received wisdom about filmmaking -for example, the notion that shaky camerawork and bad sound somehow has an authenticity about it.

boxing coach So what for Grootaers now? He is trying to get Not Waving But Drowning into more international festivals. Meanwhile, the director is also hatching a new project. The doc will be about an Armenian boxing coach who fled from Georgia 10 years ago. This coach knew all the great Armenian filmmakers of the period, among them Sergei Parajanov, and was highly involved in the arts.

The boxer filmed his apartment just before he was forced to leave Georgia for the west.

Grootaers has obtained this footage and hopes to use it to contrast the life the boxer used to have and his present-day existence in Belgium, where he works in a factory and coaches boxing part-time. The young director is also hard at work on a PHD on the subject of time in documentary. 'For me, documentary time is very much haunted, very much cut loose from the actualité... the now point, the present, is in some way or other haunted by the past and future.’

Where does that strange mix of surrealism and melancholy in his work come from? That, he says, is down to his roots. 'I am a Belgian filmmaker!'  Elias Grootaers won a VAF Wildcard with his graduation film Lignes.

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Du Chau must go on!

Frederik Du Chau (°1965)* 2010 Hong Kong Phooey (scr + prod) 2007 Underdog 2005 Racing Stripes (+ scr) 1998 Quest for Camelot 1987 The Mystery of the Lamb (short)

*filmography as a director, unless otherwise indicated

It’s 6pm in the Le Merigot Hotel in Santa Monica and the lobby is packed. Frederik Du Chau, the director of such films as Racing Stripes, Quest for Camelot and Underdog, manages to find what seem to be the last remaining seats in the hotel. Born in Ghent in 1965, Du Chau first arrived in LA 20 years ago. A modest and self-deprecating figure, he likes to joke about the way he had ‘failed upward’ in Hollywood. He has been on quite a journey. It’s a long way from Ghent to Los Angeles and the film business.

By Geoffrey Macnab

Movies weren’t the young Du Chau’s only passion. As a teenager, he was a top level basketball player. ‘I was 6ft tall when I was 12. My local club didn’t lose a game until I was 18. We won the Belgian championship every year. We were that good!’ His parents wanted him to get a regular job. He therefore went to a sports school with the view of becoming a Physical Education teacher.

However, Du Chau had already begun to spend his summers making movies. He used to dress his little brother up as ET and have him crawl around in dry ice. Once, when his parents were away for the weekend, he built his own sound stage in the back garden, removing most of the lawn in the process. He put his brother in make-up made out of melted Gouda cheese. ‘I burnt his entire face doing that!’ The aim was to recreate Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. His parents, when they returned home, were furious. Even today, his mother won’t let him forget it because he cut up his baby crib with a hatchet to have wood for the building of the set. ‘That crib was a family heirloom that my newborn daughter was supposed to be in.’

At one stage, Du Chau hoisted his brother up on a rope by the rafters of the attic and dressed him up as Superman. ‘I’d turn the camera on and pretended he was flying. Of course, I forgot that if I left him go, like a pendulum, he would hit the other side of the house.’ (see box page 42)

Raoul Servais Du Chau’s circuitous journey toward becoming a Hollywood director began in earnest when he enrolled in the film programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, mastering in animation. He wasn’t the typical student. He had a populist sensibility and wasn’t ashamed to admit he liked Disney.

The other students took themselves very seriously as artists. ‘They looked down on me. They’d say “what is it with you and that Disney shit”.’

Raoul Servais, one of the titans of Belgian animation, was among the teachers. He, at least, seemed to respect and understand what Du Chau was doing... namely telling stories.

Du Chau was part of a trip from the Ghent Academy to the Annecy Animation Festival. He remembers vividly how a young animator called John Lasseter gave his first speech about CGI animation. The audience booed him off the stage. Back in Ghent, he worked on a graduation film called The Mystery of the Lamb. At the same time, he was moonlighting as a soundman on a professional news film crew run by one of his lecturers. He managed to amass $14,000 in savings. After he’d done his military service, he used the money to go to California. He had paid for a 35mm copy of The Mystery of the Lamb which he submitted to a festival in LA. To his amazement, it was accepted. Du Chau then tested for Disney and was taken on. He was eventually able to secure a Green Card. ‘I was making $770 a week and I thought I was a freakin’ millionaire.’

‘I do like the European sensibility as far as art, storytelling and characters are concerned’

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family heirloom

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‘My mum, a teacher, draws… and she actually paints very well. I guess that’s where the drawing and the artistic side comes from. My dad, a civil engineer, is very meticulous, good at maths, organised, always sitting there with rulers, going through blueprints… both those sides are what you need when you are directing movies.’

As a kid, Du Chau loved watching cartoons on TV. He remembers asking his father how they were made. His father explained as best he could. A family friend lent him a camera. As a seven-year old, he did his own experiments, shooting drawings frame by frame. ‘The magic of seeing something move that didn’t move before bit me!’

Chuck Jones In the early to mid 1990s, he took gigs at various different companies. One was a storyboard artist with the legendary Chuck Jones. ‘He was pretty old. He only came in late in the morning and he left in the early afternoon. But he did sit down with us every day and talked to us,’ the filmmaker recalls of his stint at Chuck Jones Productions. Du Chau and his fellow creators used to sit around all day, coming up with gags and jokes. Every so often, the Yoda-like Jones would intervene. ‘There’s Walt Disney… and there is Chuck Jones. When you are an animation geek like myself, those are the people you definitely know!’

Du Chau remembers his time with Jones as ‘fun but tough’. The old master loved regaling his young apprentices with stories about the old days of Hollywood - in particular of how he had lain on the orange groves on his stomach, watching Charlie Chaplin shooting 200 takes of a shot in an open air studio. The young Belgian realised that his boss was someone who had been there almost at the birth

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Fred The Ferret Frederik Du Chau's passion outside filmmaking is writing comic strips. Part of the appeal is clearly that he retains full creative control over his material: there are no producers fretting on the sidelines, telling him what to do. ‘I write and draw my own comic books.

I love doing that!’ he declares. Last year, he was one of 20 'undiscovered, unpublished new young talents’ selected to be showcased at the Angouleme International Comics Festival. That meant his work was seen by 200,000 people. 'For the comic book geeks in Europe, it's a great thing. There was a three page story, ‘Fred the Ferret’, that I wrote and drew and did the whole thing on.’ (see next pages) Taking advantage of the spare time he had during the Writers' Strike in Hollywood, he took the opportunity to work on a 186 page graphic novel. Five pages are completely done. The rest are fully drawn but not inked yet. The big publishers in Europe are vying to publish it. ‘When the whole movie career is kind of done, I'll be able to draw comic strips for the rest of my life!’

of cinema. He thinks now that he learned one key lesson from the master. As Chuck Jones showed, ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, what kind of money you spend, how you’re going to dress up a shot or a gag’ unless the original idea is funny and well executed.

Carl Fallberg He was also friendly with another old-timer, Carl Fallberg, a story development guru on such Disney classics as Fantasia and Bambi. ‘I would meet up with him and his daughter in Pasadena at some diner and he would go through my drawings. He’d be like “it sucks! I don’t know what I am looking at here. What’s the focal point? I should be able to see it in a split second.”’ Du Chau realised that Fallberg was trying to teach him the importance of clarity. Even today, on his live action projects, when Du Chau is lining up a shot, he’ll decide within a second if it passes the Fallberg test. Eventually, Du Chau was hired by Warner Bros who were venturing into feature animation. That was how he came to direct Quest For Camelot (1998), his first major feature, when he was only 29 years old. He has mixed feelings about the film, which didn’t turn out entirely as he had hoped.

‘I worked on it for three years. The movie that I wanted to make didn’t get made,’ he sighs. ‘I had a choice. I could walk away and say this was not the vision that I had or I could stick out and learn my craft,’ he remembers. He chose the latter option. The lawyer he hired to represent him ran off with much of his money. He had to pay the lawyer upfront – and needed to borrow money from his parents to do so.

dumbing down His career threatened to stall. However, he was able to sell scripts and to keep afloat in Hollywood in spite of the failure of Quest for Camelot. He was taken on by ICM. ‘I got the big fat shark agent at the big agency… here you need that: someone who is going to kick ass and get you access to all the big material.’ Racing Stripes (2005), about an abandoned zebra who thinks he is a racehorse, was a far more positive experience. It made more than $100 million at the box-office. Even so, Du Chau still didn’t have final cut. Along the way, the director has made one or two decisions he regrets and has seen opportunities slip out of his hands. He rejected Enchanted. At one stage, he worked on the development of His Dark Materials (later to come out as The Golden Compass). Underdog (2007), which he made for Disney, proved a frustrating experience. Du Chau had worked long and hard to try to make a witty and smart comedy about a superhero dog. In the end, the new studio bosses insisted on dumbing down the movie and aiming it at very young kids.

one regret Still, he has plenty of new projects on the boil and has also been busy writing and drawing his own graphic novel, The Menehunes. Yes, he does miss Ghent a little. He would love to teach some of what he has learned in Hollywood to students back home in Belgium. Does he feel Belgian? ‘Yes, absolutely,’ Du Chau insists. ‘I am that person still. There is a gigantic dose of Hollywood reality. I’ve lived here for 19 years. But I do like the European sensibility as far as art, storytelling and characters are concerned… one regret I have is that I haven’t made a movie that puts that into action. I haven’t been in control. I haven’t had the opportunity to say let’s make a movie the Hollywood way but with a European sensibility.’ He pauses and adds: ‘one day I will’. 

check out www.menehuneisland.com about Frederik Du Chau’s pet project that will be made both into a comic strip and a feature film Frederik Du Chau

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Advertentie

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under the influence

Nicolas Provost

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Nicolas Provost always knew that he wanted to be an artist.

Even at the age of 12 he was making 'installations' around the house and photographing them for friends and family to look at.

'I thought it was normal that I should make art,' he says, 'and they should take time to look at it!' This creative drive combined with a love of cinema to produce a prestigious career in the visual arts.

This year Provost will begin his debut feature film, The Invader, but first there’s Berlin. His new short, Long Live the New Flesh, is selected for the Berlinale Shorts Competition. And he’s got a solo exhibition at Berlin's Haunch of Venison gallery. By Ian Mundell

Provost grew up in Ronse, a small town in Flanders close to the frontier with French-speaking Wallonia. 'It was on French TV that I learned to love cinema,' he recalls. 'That's where I saw the whole history of cinema pass by, from American classics and westerns to the Italians, the Nouvelle Vague. I've always had a fascination for cinema. But when David Lynch came along with Blue Velvet I was the right age to be blown away by this new way of making cinema. I knew that I was going to be a filmmaker. I didn't know when. I knew that I had to learn, to mature and have a vision.'

Rather than studying cinema, he studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.

'I didn't want to go to film school at 18, because I knew that I was too young and didn't have anything to say. I was afraid of being disappointed by film school, that it would be too conservative. So I went to the art academy so that I could try things out.'

Kurosawa and Resnais This coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution, and Provost started to explore the possibilities for manipulating sound and moving images. He spent the last two years of his studies as an exchange student in Bergen, and on graduation in 1994 returned to Norway to live and work.

His work from this period creates haunting new images by splitting and doubling scenes from films by directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Alain Resnais. 'A lot of it happens just through working with the material, like a sculptor,' Provost explains. 'You try to double a whole movie, and suddenly it's there.' He describes this as a way of making poetry with the world's common memory.

www.nicolasprovost.com

i nspi r ational These are some of the works Nicholas Provost currently gets inspired by: Music Bat For Lashes www.batforlashes.com

nfluence

He moved back to Belgium in 2003, and it was here that his career took off. As well as gallery shows, his short films appeared at film festivals such as Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno and San Francisco. His work also diversified. Exoticore, his farewell to Norway, was made with actors, while Plot Point built a narrative from clandestine images shot on Times Square.

Today the two filmmakers who have the most influence on Provost are Stanley Kubrick and, still, David Lynch. 'For me Lynch is the last master alive who clearly questions the phenomenon of cinema,' he explains. 'We don't do that any more. There are good directors and great films, but here is someone who is still trying to see how moving image and sounds can develop.'

The inspiration behind The Invader is unusual, and very personal. It's a moment from Pump Up the Volume, a documentary on the history of House music, in which the landmark song 'Your Love' is introduced with aerial shots of the skyscrapers of an American city at night. 'This moment was so ecstatic,' Provost explains, 'because it was an emotional experience to see the history (it was very dear to my heart) and the way it is shown. I just felt: this is what my film is about. I started from there. It's crazy! Then I had to fill it up and decide what it would be about.'

He went back to Exoticore and its central character, an African immigrant who goes off the rails. He will return in The Invader, but rather than a social drama about immigration, Provost sees it as a classic anti-hero story, inspired by films such as Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. 'It's about a man who has too many desires and gets killed because of it,' he says.

While making a feature fulfils one of Provost's ambitions, he does not expect to repeat the experience every couple of years. 'I want to keep on growing as a visual artist and try to reinvent myself each time that I make a film,' he says. 'I hope that I will be able to make a couple of feature films, that they will last and mean something, and inspire other people.' ď Š

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Kubrick and Lynch

Jack PeĂąate www.jackpenate.com

Film Two Lovers by James Gray (2008)

Nicolas Provost, Films - Solo exhibition, Haunch of Venison (Berlin), 12 February - 3 April 2010 www.haunchofvenison.com

DVD Generation Kill (HBO, 2008)

Art James Coleman www.jamescoleman.com

Theatre Mondays by Peter Seynaeve

Stand-up comedy Pablo Francisco

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Ex

Drummer International Film Festival Rotterdam programmer Gerwin Tamsma talks about one of his favourite films from Flanders: Koen Mortier’s Ex Drummer.

My favourite Flemish film from the last few years is Koen Mortier’s Ex Drummer.

I remember vividly how I saw it. I watched it in a DVD projection room upstairs in our offices. It was still unfinished.

The writer of the source material, Herman Brusselmans, is quite well known in The Netherlands. I really don’t have the time or the energy to read everything he writes because he is very prolific. When I was a student in the 80s, I read his first books. We all thought they were very funny but moving in their depressive way.

He has a great sense of tone – a sense of atmosphere and existential tone. This same partly ironic, partly melodramatic, partly violently serious tone is also in the film. I was very surprised to see this version of a Herman Brusselmans novel because it could have gone in all sorts of directions. The movie, of course, is not Brusselmans – it is 100% Mortier.

The film has certain moments of macho poetry. It is very self-conscious, just as Brusselmans’ work. You can’t talk about Brusselmans’ writing without talking about self-consciousness. In books and novels, you can write about things that are not easy to put into a film. When I watched the film, I immediately forgot the source material.

At the time, Sandra Den Hamer (then director of IFFR) was making the competition.

She immediately liked the film but maybe shivered a few times before taking it into competition. When she did, she embraced the film very generously and stood by it, even if some people didn’t get the joke.

Ex Drummer is not a film for everybody but I am happy that it did well out of Rotterdam. It had good sales and has been distributed now in many countries.

Koen knew what he was doing. He knew he was stepping on some toes. He had a hard time financing Ex Drummer. These projects are against the wind which is also something that we in Rotterdam like. If we come across a project we like which has this headwind, I am always happy that the festival can give these films a push.

The opening credit scene has been widely discussed. In it, you can see why he is also such a successful maker of commercials. The opening has this bravura of an elaborate advertisement. It immediately gets you hooked. It’s one long shot going backwards. Of course, if the film was just funny and we could laugh it off, it wouldn’t work. Mortier pushes the limits of what we accept as funny to the point where it hurts. There are a lot of things people laugh about. It’s OK, in my opinion to laugh about these things that are deeply, tragically, part of human life.

This is not reality. This is not a social realist film. You have to judge the tone of the speaker by the way he presents himself.

I am not sure that Mortier will be remembered in the end for his iconoclasm – he will be remembered for his filmmaking. There are not many people who work in the same vein. I think he is quite special. He is a very warm, funny and gentle person in real life – a nice person to know basically.  As told to Geoffrey Macnab

'Mortier pushes the limits of what we accept as funny to the point where it hurts' www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com To find out more about the favourite films from other key players go to www.flandersimage.com * Koen Mortier’s second feature, 22nd of May, is currently in post-production

Issue #16 | Spring 2010 | €3.99 Cover Nathalie Teirlinck by Bart Dewaele

CREDITS Editor Christian De Schutter Deputy Editor / Photo Research Nathalie Capiau Deputy Editor / Digital Karel Verhelst Sub editors John Adair An Ratinckx Contributors Geoffrey Macnab Ian Mundell Henry Womersley Photo credits p 7 Nikolas Karakatsanis; p 11 Code 37 ©VMMA; p 14 Gilles Coulier©IKKL; p 15 Hans Van Nuffel©Bart Dewaele; p 16 Nathalie Teirlinck©Bart Dewaele; p 24-25 Eyeworks/ NyklyN; p 40 Richard J.Cartwright; p 48 Toronto pictures by Vali Valenti; p 51 Bart Dewaele All other stills copyrighted by the respective producers

Design Mia Print Wilda NV Subscriptions € 10 / year (three issues) Info: flandersimage@vaf.be Published by

Flanders Image/VAF Bischoffsheimlaan 38 B-1000 Brussels Belgium/EU T: +32-2-226 0630 F: +32-2-219 1936 E: flandersimage@vaf.be www.flandersimage.com

Flanders Image is a division of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) Special thanks to: Myriam De Boeck, Sonja De Boeck, Aurore Boraczek, Bianca Candreva, Dirk Cools, Karel Van Damme, Fabian Desmicht, Pierre Drouot, Siebe Dumon, Brecht Van Elslande, Paul Embrechts, Tom Van der Elst, Hans Everaert, Katrien Maes, Karen Pays, Karla Puttemans, Stef Rycken, Dirk Schoenmaekers, Katrijn Steylaerts, Inge Verroken, Frédéric Young and all the filmmakers and producers who helped us with this issue.

When you have finished this publication, please give it to your library or recycle it

www.flandersimage.com

Flanders Image 2.0 This year’s 60th Berlinale will also mark another anniversary. It will be exactly 20 years since Flanders Image made its first international outing, at Berlin’s European Film Market.

I was a trade journalist at that time and I still remember my interview with Rita Goegebeur, who was then general manager of Flanders Image. It’s possible she might even remember it too as it was the first interview she’d given. We all owe Rita a lot. Together with the organisation’s chairmen – producers such as Dirk Impens, Antonino Lombardo and the late Daniel Van Avermaet – she helped define what we think of today as an audiovisual export organisation.

When Rita decided to move abroad (many of you probably know her today as a valued member in Jérôme Paillard’s Marché du Film dream team in Cannes), Annemie Degryse took the reigns.

In 2003 Flanders Image joined the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF). The move allowed us to become involved in promoting films at a much earlier stage.

And it made it possible for us to better monitor, follow and support emerging talent. Last year, we officially launched a new division: the Location Flanders film commission. What we’re currently experiencing in Flanders is without a doubt the most exciting time in our organisation’s history. Today we can talk about the emergence of an entirely new generation of filmmakers whose productions break through on the international scene, both at key festivals and in theatres, as well as at home.

Back to Rita though. Despite a limited budget, she also ensured that we were the first promotional body to have its own website. This was a considerable investment and entailed a huge amount of bureaucratic wrangling on her part.

But it proved to be the right decision.

Which brings us to the Flanders Image 2.0 project, where both our print and digital online publishing activities will better connect with, and complement each other. A story in print might, for example, be continued online, or refer to trailers or shorts which can be watched on the website. It’ll also mean that certain activities will cease to exist, others will be adapted or re-invented, new initiatives will be launched, and some things won’t be changing at all. This is all planned with you and the way you consume information in mind.

The new-look and slightly re-named magazine you’re holding in your hands (or flipping through online) is part of this plan.

So why did we reduce ‘image’ to a mere ‘i’ (‘eye’) in the nameplate on the cover? Aren’t we undermining our own brand? We don’t think so. We will remain Flanders Image. The magazine however goes beyond ‘image’, as it also covers any number of other ‘i’ words such as 'information', ‘innovation’, ‘international’, ‘inspiration’, ‘iconic’, ‘imaginative’… And ‘interactive’ too, because from the moment our new website is up and running later this year there will be more interaction possible between this publication and you, the reader. Therefore allow me to conclude with a quote from a 1927 movie made outside of Flanders: 'You ain’t seen nothing yet!'

 Supported by

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flandersimage@vaf.be www.flandersimage.com

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HAUNCH OF VENISON BERLIN

Long Live the New Flesh (film still), 2009

Heidestrasse 46 10557 Berlin Germany

Premiering in competition at the 60th Berlin Film Festival www.berlinale.de

T+ 49 (0) 30 39 74 39 63 F+ 49 (0) 30 39 74 39 64 berlin@haunchofvenison.com www.haunchofvenison.com

Nicolas ProvosT Films

12 February—3 april 2010