flanders #17 | Summer 2010 | e 3.99
COOLfilms hotstars
FLANDERS’ HOTTEST FEMALE ACTING TALENT I CONGO RETURNS I Q-SPHERES I LITTLE BABY JESUS IN CANNES I Ijsland TO CINéFONDATION I VANJA D'ALCANTARA I HILDE VAN MIEGHEM I EVA Küpper I TALE OF TALES I www.flandersimage.com
i nside Cover: Veerle Baetens As seen through the lens of Bart Dewaele
04 i-OPENER
A widescreen impression of Fleur Boonman’s feature debut, Portable Life
07 i-CATCHER
A look at Hans Van Nuffel’s first feature, Oxygen
08 INTERVIEW
Vanja d’Alcantara’s Beyond the Steppes is based on the experiences of the filmmaker’s grandmother in the Second World War
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Meet Flanders’ hottest female acting talent
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Talking to Gust Van den Berghe, whose Little Baby Jesus of Flandr has been selected for this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes
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A word with Gilles Coulier, whose short, Ijsland, has been selected for the Cinéfondation in Cannes
28 INNOVATION
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Q-spheres creates breathtaking locations, with none of the problems
32 INTERNATIONALs
Cineville producer and director Carl Colpaert lives and works in Los Angeles
36 INTERACTIVE
Let Tale of Tales change your mind about computer games
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The 50th anniversary of Congo’s independence is remembered in a series of documentaries
44 INSPIRATION
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Eva Küpper delivers a documentary which is thoughtful and complicated. Just like its director
46 INFLUENCE
Director and actress Hilde Van Mieghem on what or who she’s influenced by
48 ICONS
Palm Springs, LA, Berlin... Just a few places where you might see our filmmakers shine
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Director Jaco Van Dormael talks about one of his favourite films from Flanders
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Ella-June Henrard, who was first seen in Hans Herbots’ Bo, veteran actor Rutger Hauer, and Sam Louwyck share the major roles in Fleur Boonman’s debut feature, Portable Life, in which a naïve young girl turns into a young woman through a series of seemingly chance encounters. A contemporary road movie, Portable Life explores the boundaries between film and photography by portraying the girl’s real and inner journey through parallel worlds and different time sets, where certain people appear to be inextricably linked with one each other. Shot on location in Belgium, France, Romania, South Africa, Bali and Morocco, the film was scripted by Boonman and lensed by Christopher Gallo. Producer is Bart Van Langendonck for Savage Film.
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Portable Life
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Music sets the tone at the Ghent Film Festival
Experience the best of Barry...
John Barry
at the one-night-only concert on October 21st 2010 at 8.30pm at Kuipke Ghent where he will be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Soundtrack Academy. The Brussels Philharmonic–the orchestra of Flanders, conducted by Nicholas Dodd, will perform many of the classic scores of the four-time Academy Award winning composer, including Goldfinger, Mary Queen of Scots, Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves and Midnight Cowboy. John Barry already has his ticket, do you?
Celebrate the 10 anniversary of the World Soundtrack Awards th
together with 10 world-class composers. Among them Howard Shore, Stephen Warbeck, Angelo Badalamenti and Gustavo Santaolalla! This festive edition of the most prestigious film music awards in the world will take place on October 23rd 2010 at Kuipke Ghent. It will feature legendary music from unforgettable films, performed by the Brussels Philharmonic– the orchestra of Flanders conducted by Dirk Brossé. Tickets are available on www.filmfestival.be
Don’t miss out on this unique event and order your tickets now on www.filmfestival.be. Prices are € 25, € 35 or € 45.
Oct 21.2010 Kuipke Ghent
Oct 23.2010 Kuipke Ghent
Want to submit your film for screening at the Ghent Film Festival?
Send a screener (multi-region DVD) along with the entry form (www.filmfestival.be/pdf/ENTRY_FORM.pdf) and some brief info on the film and its makers before August 1st, 2010 to Wim De Witte. Leeuwstraat 40b, B-9000 Ghent – Belgium , tel. +32(0)9 242 80 60 - fax +32(0)9 221 90 74 - info@filmfestival.be
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Oxygen
In our last issue, Hans Van Nuffel presented his latest short, Nighthawks. Now, in this issue, we present his first feature film, Oxygen, a hospital drama with a difference, which recently completed principal photography. The film centres around two young men who share an incurable illness. Will their love for the women in their lives be strong enough to conquer their fear of dying? This may be a strongly emotional story, but it's not as gloomy as it sounds. ‘Chronic patients often have a really weird sense of humour and a desperate optimism,’ the director explains. He wanted that sense of humour to be reflected in this film. Based on an original screenplay by Van Nuffel and Jean-Claude Van Rijckeghem (Moscow, Belgium), the film stars Stef Aerts and Wouter Hendrickx (The Misfortunates, Long Weekend), as well as Rik Verheye, Anemone Valcke (Moscow, Belgium) and Marie Vinck (Loft, The Kiss). Ruben Impens (The Misfortunates; Moscow, Belgium) is DOP, while Spinvis wrote the score. Produced by Van Rijckeghem and Dries Phlypo for A Private View, delivery is expected at the turn of this year. Henry Womersley
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Long Steppe Home the
Vanja D’Alcantara’s first feature Beyond The Steppes is based on the experiences of her grandmother. During the Second World War, the grandmother, living in Poland, was deported to Siberia, where she lived from 1940 until 1943. She was then transited
© Bart Dewaele
to Uzbekistan and ended up at the end of the war in the Middle East. By Geoffrey Macnab
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‘She was deported because she was part of the aristocracy, the Eastern European landowners,’ d’Alcantara explains. ‘There were political reasons for the Russians to take anyone who would be counterrevolutionary, including landowners and intelligentsia. They deported more than a million people and sometimes it was just arbitrary.’ During her exile, the grandmother lost her baby. She was separated for seven years from her husband. They were eventually reunited in the Congo, where d’Alcantara’s mother was born. The family then moved to Belgium in the early 1950s. D’Alcantara knew her grandmother well. ‘We had a very close relationship. She was a really important person for me. I was 15 when she died.’
narrative freedom Although her grandmother was a shy and humble lady who didn’t like to talk about her own experiences, d’Alcantara was well aware of what she had endured. This dark episode in her family’s history inspired the young director to make her film. However, d’Alcantara is at pains to point out that Beyond the Steppes isn’t simply a documentary-style account of her grandmother’s turbulent experiences. It’s a dramatic film, made with narrative freedom. D’Alcantara makes use not just of her grandmother’s story (after her death, the family found her wartime diary) but also of incidents in the lives of other women deported at the same time. D’Alcantara’s short Granitsa (2006) was shot in Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Express. However, she and her producers quickly decided that it would not be feasible to make Beyond the Steppes in Siberia itself. Or in Russia. The director briefly considered filming in Mongolia or Romania or Hungary before deciding on Kazakhstan which offered the vast, empty landscapes she needed. There were clear advantages to shooting 6500 km from home. The cast and crew were alone together, a long way from home. On one level, their experiences mirrored that of
the exiled women whose story d’Alcantara tells. ‘We were really isolated, like the characters in the film. We were going through this very intense journey.’
Hotel Hermine Kazakhstan presented its own challenges. The filmmakers were far removed from the western world of easy internet access and mobile phones. For the vegetarians on the team, the meat-based local cuisine was hard to stomach. ‘The food was quite greasy. There was a lot of meat, which I don’t eat... the more we went on, the less budget I think they had for the food and so the quality went down.’ Nor was the accommodation at the Hotel Hermine at all luxurious. ‘Hotel is a big word,’ d’Alcantara says of the building in which she and the crew stayed for several weeks. In Kazakhstan, she continues, the landscapes are beautiful but the buildings are often ugly. To d’Alcantara’s dismay when she prepared to shoot in the dead of winter, there was no snow. ‘Not only was there no snow but it was really ugly!’ she remembers. ‘There was this real autumn feel. The grass was dead. In the spring, we had spent six weeks there and it was absolutely beautiful with so many colours... but now there was nothing.’ The only solution was to tweak the screenplay and to film very early in the morning, when the temperature was at its coldest. She and her crew set up at 5am, when it was still dark. The sun came up slowly, with what she recalls as ‘a beautiful mist and this beautiful white freeze.’
dignity Making a feature film was a daunting experience - far tougher than shooting a short film like Granitsa. ‘Making a short is a fun experience. Shooting a feature, there were fun moments, but it is directing - really directing. You are born as a director because you are confronted with very deep questions at every level. You really develop tools.’
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‘I think, even though I haven’t been through such terrible circumstances, that you can always find some strength and some meaning in life, whatever happens to you’
It helped that she had an experienced Director of Photography in Ruben Impens who had also shot Granitsa. ‘We have a solid relationship. He brings me a lot because he has experience and a very strong vision.’ Impens was using the Red, the celebrated digital camera used on more and more feature films. This enabled the filmmakers to shoot quickly and efficiently, without the inconvenience of sending off material to the lab or carrying around hundreds of rolls of film. D’Alcantara knew from the outset that she didn’t want to make a historical film or a war movie or a classical period piece. ‘No!’ she declares. ‘This was a modern, intimate personal journey. That I was very clear about.’ She acknowledges that she has strong feelings about the Soviet authorities who treated her grandmother so harshly. ‘Of course, they’re the bad guys. But there are no bad guys really. At the end of the day, they were also completely isolated. They were part of a system that they did not choose to be part of... I don’t really judge them. I always believe that when something happens to you where the cause is from the outside, you just have to deal with it. My grandmother never complained about anything, in spite of everything she went through and the baby she lost. She had a lot of dignity and she gave a lot of love to the people around her.’ The director cites a book she read about a Jewish-Dutch woman persecuted and eventually killed by the Nazis. Despite everything she endured, this woman was still able to write about the beautiful trees she could see through the window and the magic of the light. ‘I think, even though I haven’t been through such terrible circumstances, that you can always find some strength and some meaning in life, whatever happens to you.’
strong character The lead actress, Agnieszka Grochowska, was in almost every shot. D’Alcantara cast her on the basis of her audition in Warsaw. ‘Casting someone is like meeting someone, when you feel there is a connection,’ the director says of the young but very experienced Grochowska. She didn’t like all of Grochowska’s previous movies. ‘It was really more that I felt there was this fragility, this melancholy and also this very strong character. We met a few times and somehow it became clear it had to be her.’
Beyond the Steppes was an epic project… shot on a tight budget. The film, produced by Denis Delcampe and Annemie Degryse, was made for under e 2 million. It was shot in Russian and Polish. D’Alcantara isn’t especially fluent in either language and spoke English on set with her actors. She knew what the actors were saying because she had written the script, which was subsequently translated. ‘As for the directing, I think it’s really good not to understand the language. Then, you’re really concentrated on what you feel. You don't really listen to the meaning of the words - you really look at the acting.’
strong emotions There is one group of spectators very eager to see Beyond the Steppes - namely the members of d’Alcantara’s own family. She is not going to show it to them, though, until the premiere. ‘I want them to see the film at the proper premiere. I am very, very much looking forward to them seeing the film. It’s a film that I really made for them. It is about our family,’ the writer-director says. ‘My relationship to this story is my personal bond with my grandmother. It’s not about Poland or history or the Second World War. It was that character, that person, who drove me to tell that story.’ Strong emotions are bound to be in the air when the family does finally see Beyond the Steppes. D’Alcantara confides that she has warned her mother in advance that ‘she will need a lot of tissues.’
Beyond the Steppes
Beyond the Steppes http://beyondthesteppes.com
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The cameras love them, and so do audiences. Meet Flanders’ hottest female acting talent. Natali Natali Broods was discovered by Dorothée van den Berghe, who cast her in her short Brussels Midnight (1989). Natali made her feature film debut in S. (1989) by Guido Henderickx, and can also be seen in Tom Barman’s Any Way the Wind Blows (2002), Fien Troch’s Someone Else’s Happiness (2005) and Felix van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates (2009).
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Wine Wine Dierickx made her big screen debut in Tom Barman’s Any Way the Wind Blows (2003), but it was Felix van Groeningen who put her on the map in Steve + Sky (2004) and particularly in With Friends Like These (2007) in which she had a leading role. She also featured in Eric Van Looy's megahit Loft (2008) and later this year she will star in the highly anticipated ensemble pic Smoorverliefd (Madly in Love) by Hilde Van Mieghem.
-file i Charlotte Charlotte Vandermeersch played in several shorts before making her feature film debut in Felix van Groeningen’s With Friends Like These (2007). She also played in Erik Van Looy’s Loft (2008). Later this year, Charlotte will star in Turquaze by Kadir Balci.
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Marieke Marieke Dilles first got noticed in the epic TV series The Emperor of Taste (2008), which won her a Golden FIPA for Best Actress. She recently appeared in Jan Verheyen’s Dossier K. (2009), the follow-up to The Memory of A Killer. Another prestigious series she’s involved in is The Divine Monster, which is scheduled for broadcast in 2011.
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Marie Marie Vinck made a strong impression in Hilde Van Mieghem’s The Kiss (2004). She also played in Erik Van Looy’s Loft (2008), Erik Lamens’ S&M Judge (2009) and Ivo Van Hove’s Amsterdam (2009). Coming up are roles in Hans Van Nuffel’s Oxygen and in Hilde Van Mieghem’s Smoorverliefd (Madly in Love).
-file i Laura Laura Verlinden made her big-screen debut in The Last Summer (2007) by Joost Wijnant, but it was Nic Balthazar’s Ben X (2007) that really got her noticed. The following year, she turned heads in Erik Van Looy’s Loft, and lit up the small screen in the award-winning TV series The Emperor of Taste (2008).
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Ella-June Ella-June Henrard was discovered by Hans Herbots, who cast her for the main part in Bo (2010). Next she will star alongside Dutch veteran Rutger Hauer in Portable Life by Fleur Boonman.
YOUR IDEAS
OUR KNOWHOW K
S p e c i a l i s e d i n R E D w o r k f l o w s , 3 d a n i m at i o n & s t e r e o s c o p i c 3 d
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Schiphollaan 2 1140 Brussels phone: +32 2 735 60 20 info@ace-postproduction.com w w w . a c e - p o s t p r o d u c t i o n . c o m
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A Winter's Most film students graduate with a short film, but Gust Van den Berghe had other ideas. He wrapped up his degree at the RITS film school in Brussels with the 80-minute feature En waar de sterre bleef stille staan, which goes by the English title Little Baby Jesus of Flandr. Now connected with Brussels producer Minds Meet, the film is selected for this year’s Directors Fortnight in Cannes. By Ian Mundell 'I wanted to test myself with this project, and it was maybe a revolt against the school system as well,' he says. 'You can learn a lot at school, but they teach you to forget things as well. To find your personality and become an artist is something that you have to do yourself.' The source material for his film is also unusual, a Christmas play written in 1924 by the famous but now unfashionable Flemish author Felix Timmermans. Van den Berghe was attracted to the mix of earthly and divine themes in the story, which is about a group of beggars who have a religious encounter while travelling the countryside in winter. 'It's a story that has lost all its value,' he explains. 'The older generation knows it, the generation in between knows it but has rejected it, and nobody from my generation knows it.' One way he went about recovering the story was to cast disabled actors, most from the Stap theatre group. 'These people are very human, and I love the human aspect of the story,' Van den Berghe explains. 'When I read it I thought that, if I want to do this, it has to be with people who are as pure and human as they are in the story.' When he proposed the project to them, the response was enthusiastic. 'I came along with a scenario of 120 or 150 pages full of dialogue and old Flemish sentences, precisely
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Tale what not to do. But they had the same vision of things. They love challenges, and after 10 minutes it was "OK!"'
improvising
Š Bart Dewaele
Once shooting got underway, the project took on a life of its own. 'We improvised a lot,' Van den Berghe recalls. 'We changed the script constantly, because the actors never knew where they were and which scene they were playing. Suddenly someone would have a nightmare, somebody would fall asleep or somebody would run away. We really had to be on point every minute.' Even so, he remains impressed by the way the actors worked. 'I think that they are underestimated by a lot of people.'
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Meanwhile, many of his crew were participating in a shoot for the very first time. 'No-one involved in the crew ever made a full-length movie before, but a lot of them had never even made a short movie before,' he recalls. 'I have really good memories of it, but it was a rough period and I learned a lot.' The harder it gets, the happier Van den Berghe is as a director. 'I hate it when everything goes well! Seriously, it means that something is wrong. You have to feel that there is a machine turning, it has to make a noise. If everything goes too smoothly you feel that you are not needed any more. I want to have control over the thing, and if there are a lot of questions or a lot of things that can go wrong, you can control it more.'
Bruegel On top of challenging source material and casting, Van den Berghe also chose to shoot his film in black and white, with carefully composed still shots rather than the more modish hand-held style. 'I've made some Handycam movies, and it was really fun, but I don't think that it has that impact any more,' he explains, adding that people seem to see it as an easy option. 'I can see why students do it, because maybe it's a cheaper solution, but we made a movie for very little: placing a camera in a fixed shot doesn't cost any money.' This stillness, the winter landscapes and the use of black and white gives the film an antique feel reminiscent of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 'It makes you feel very safe,' Van den Berghe explains. 'It's a world where things are either black or white. Some things you see, some things you don't. Then I wanted to pull the viewer out of the story by putting colour in, for one scene. It gives you a taste of this colour, and then goes back to the safe world, saying "I hope we never go there again!"' A self-confessed film addict, Van den Berghe cites F.W. Murnau's Faust as one of his inspirations for the film. 'There are some Pasolini and some Herzog influences, I guess, and people mention Tarkovsky as well, so it's possible that a lot of the spiritual matter was influenced by those kind of films.'
Stijn Coninx Having gone against the advice of his teachers at RITS, Van den Berghe was left to his own devices when making the film. 'Nobody cared any more about me, nobody knew what I was doing. I didn't see one prof during the shoot.' Once it was finished, the head of the film department took a look at the first cut and liked what he saw. Since this was veteran Flemish director Stijn Coninx (Daens, Sister Smile) the teachers started to take
'When I read this story I thought that, if I want to do this, it has to be with people who are as pure and human as they are in the story'
www.littlebabyjesus.eu Little Baby Jesus of Flandr
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notice. 'I had a lot of apologies, and I really appreciate that. It takes a lot of courage to apologise to a student,' Van den Berghe recalls. 'If they re-read my pitch, they would find the movie that I made, but I think they never really listened. But I understand that. If students come up with this kind of project every year, it would get a bit tiring.' Further endorsement came with the award of a VAF Wild Card prize in December 2009, which will give Van den Berghe e 60,000 towards his next film project. And in 2010, Little Baby Jesus of Flandr was picked up by Brussels production company Minds Meet. Van den Berghe still wants to work on polishing the film, and when that is finished will think about his next project. One idea is to build on the themes of humanity and being that he has already started to explore. 'I would love to put this film in a triptych, so try to make two other films that fit in with it,' he says. 'I always like bigger work!' ď Š
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Naked in
© Bart Dewaele
Ostend
Despite its Nordic title, Gilles Coulier’s Cannes Cinéfondation selected short film Ijsland (Iceland) is set in night-time Ostend where 34-year-old excon Wesley is back on the streets. He is an arrogant man who can’t bear the idea that his former girlfriend may have taken up with someone else. He is contemptuous of a mime artist he meets as he roams the city. ‘In a way, the arrogance is like a shield he uses to defend himself,’ Coulier says of the combustible protagonist of ijsland. ‘All of a sudden, the shield falls off...’
One inspiration for the character was the similarly headstrong but vulnerable chancer played by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). As originally written by Coulier and Angelo Tijssens, who also appears in the film, Wesley was full of rage. However, Ijsland’s lead actor Willaert (Nowhere Man, Ex Drummer) and Coulier slowly began to mould Wesley in another way. ‘Wim said to me, no, the character doesn’t need anger.’ Why Ostend? Coulier explains that the West Flemish coastal town is a tourist resort in summer. However, out of season at night-time, its character changes. ‘There is nobody in the streets. It is just an empty, isolated town.’ Coulier, who shot the movie over five nights in early May, describes the town as one of the ‘characters’ in the film. The title of the film is semi-ironic. Wesley and the mime artist both yearn to leave Ostend but would Iceland, one destination they talk about, be any better?
Coulier is now planning a film about two brothers ‘looking up their biological dad.’ They’ve never met him. Their mother is long since dead. Both brothers have big problems in their lives. One of the brothers is convinced that he is the famous EgyptianFrench singer Dalida. Coulier aims to recruit Sam Louwyck (22nd of May, Lost Persons Area) to play the character. The other brother will be played by Willaert. Coulier grew up in Bruges. His route toward filmmaking was circuitous. As a kid, he loved movies. He originally studied economics in Ghent but quickly decided that he wasn’t enjoying it and spent much of his time watching films. ‘I followed like a good schoolboy the advice I was given but I quickly decided it was nothing for me,’ Coulier reflects. ‘I get bored pretty quickly... if I don’t like things, I just don’t do them.’ The aspiring young auteur dropped out of college after a year and announced he wanted to go to film school. His father, who has his own TV production company, was initially skeptical. ‘Son, it’s a difficult world. Don’t do it. Many people try it but just a little group achieve what they want to do,’ was the father’s initial advice about the film business. However, once his father realised that he was deadly serious, he gave Coulier his full support. The RITS Film School turned him down. However, he was accepted by St Lucas and quickly became inspired by the attitude of the coaches, who include Marc Didden and Patrice Toye.
own vernacular ‘What was interesting about being at school was that you can make mistakes,’ the young director says, referring to some of his early work as ‘crap’. He argues that it is through your
wrong turns and blunders that you learn. Gradually, you begin to improve. At the film school, he met David Williamson, his cinematographer on Ijsland. Coulier, now in his final year at film school, still clings strongly to his West Flemish identity. People from the region have their own vernacular which outsiders don’t always understand. Much to his surprise, Coulier won a VAF Wildcard for Ijsland. He describes the evening when the awards were being given out at the Leuven International Shorts Festival in ironic fashion. The night was already over. He was bored and disgruntled, wondering what he was doing there. And then... his name was read out. ‘It was the last award that was given. I was sitting on my chair, thinking why did I send it in? You can only do the Wildcard once.’ And Ijsland is only his third-year film school project, not his graduation film which he’s working on right now. The VAF Wildcard comes with a grant of e 60,000 toward the winner’s first project as a professional. Coulier will also be able to work closely on his screenplay with a ‘mentor’. He discovered recently that this will be Felix van Groeningen. ‘He’s a good director... after Leuven, we were on the phone together. He said he liked my movie a lot.’ The young director believes these are exciting times for Flemish filmmaking... and for their audiences. ‘I have the feeling that people want to see more personal movies. I don’t like the word “art” and I don’t like the word “commercial”.’ He cites the American director Quentin Tarantino as a particular inspiration: someone who makes very personal work which is also savoured by a mass public. ‘That’s what I dream to do as a filmmaker!’
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digital location Having worked as a location scout, Jo Van Hove knows how difficult reality can be. The weather changes all the time, or outside life interferes. The location owner can have concerns or the director is not happy and wants to change something. 'So I was thinking, if we could scan the environment and deliver the necessary information for the computer people to put into a digital image, then we could deliver the location free of all these problems.' By Ian Mundell
This is the basis of the Q-Spheres service, which Jo Van Hove founded in 2007. It currently operates through a partnership of 16 location scouts in 10 different countries, providing virtual location capture to order, anywhere in the world. The name, incidentally, is a tribute to the master gadget maker Q in the James Bond films. People have been building digital locations for some time, but it only really works for certain settings. 'You can create a completely new location if you want something very stylish or modern,' Van Hove explains, 'but if you want something older there is no way, at the moment, that you can recreate in the computer things like the patina or differences in colour that come with age.'
getting the light right You also need to find a way to make the objects you put in the digital location look as if they belong there, and that means getting the light right. The guru in this field is Paul Debevec. 'He has found a way of lighting 3D objects with light that you capture in an existing location,' says Van Hove. 'You make a set of images where you recreate the background of the location, and then you capture the light the way it is at the same moment when you capture the background.' Apply this light field data to a 3D model of a car, or the motion capture of an actor, and the results are amazing. 'It's really like the 3D object is in the location. It captures the same light, the same reflections.' Van Hove worked with Debevec's team to develop the approach to virtualising locations that is now used by Q-Spheres. This meant moving on from the makeshift practice of creating light fields from numerous photographs of the location or by taking shots looking into a smooth mirror ball. This second method captures the light falling on a point in a location, but also produces distortions and colour aberrations.
virtualising locations A more sophisticated approach is to use a panoramic camera, but the models in use at the time Q-Spheres was starting up needed several minutes to complete the job, still too slow to avoid background movement or changes in ambient light. Van Hove found a Swiss panoramic still camera called the Roundshot that takes just a couple of seconds, and persuaded the manufacturers to adapt their software for capturing light fields. When virtualising a location you also need to shoot a target of known dimensions that tells you what size to make
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A decisive rendez-vous for international filmmakers Come & meet at the Short Film Corner Palais des Festivals, level 01, aisle 14 www.shortfilmcorner.com
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the 3D objects that will later be inserted into the scene. Q-Spheres has developed its own, which is better in assessing depth and size than anything else on the market. 'Thanks to the 3D target we know all the measurements of the entire space,' says Van Hove, although he declines to go into details. When commissioned to virtualise a location, Q-Spheres will send out a team of two people armed with the necessary equipment. Sometimes this will be a location found by the client, sometimes a location drawn from Q-Spheres' own database. The team will be told the required weather and lighting conditions that they have to secure, and the sort of shot that is required for the final product. That might be a photographic or filmed commercial, or a scene in a movie. The work of virtualising the location only takes around 20 minutes, but waiting for the right conditions can take longer. Van Hove recalls a recent job in Shanghai where it rained for nine days after the team arrived. 'On the 10th day they shot what was needed, so instead of making 50 people wait nine days you make two people wait, and that's much less expensive.' They are also spared the expense of lighting the location and securing it for long periods of time.
360° images If the reality of the location is still not perfect for the director's needs, it is also possible to make significant changes after it has been captured. 'When you virtualise a location the light is baked in, you cannot change it,' Van Hove explains. 'We can solve that problem by recreating the entire space in 3D, using the textures from the virtualised location, and then reworking the light.' For example, for a Volkswagen commercial Q-Spheres had to virtualise a location in San Francisco featuring a particular house and a driveway. However, the rule there is that driveways are always on the north side of the house, which meant it was too shady for the commercial. 'We did the shoot anyway, and the post-production house recreated the building completely, changing the light falling on it. That worked perfectly. If we deliver good textures and measurements, then they can work with it without any problems.' Van Hove has given up the position of managing director at Q-Spheres, but continues to oversee new business and technical development. For the future, he is working on a swing arm that will allow them to produce seamless 360-degree images. 'If you make virtualised locations there are always problems with the foregrounds, so we have developed a technique that makes it possible to deliver the right backgrounds seamlessly with the foregrounds,' he says. 'That's something new. It's faster, it's easier, and it doesn't need any post-production.' He's also keen to show what the company can do for the movies, for instance allowing the camera to follow a 3D object such as a car through a virtualised location. 'We can create conveyor belts, like time tunnels, from light and background. If you want to drive with a 3D object through a location, then we would build a time tunnel where we shoot a highresolution image every three metres. Then, because of the driving speed, you would not see that it is shot in different settings.'
image quality At the moment Q-Spheres mostly works on commercials, where high production values count, but for films Van Hove feels as if he is waiting for the industry to catch up. 'What we deliver is of such high resolution, such high quality, that people in the film industry often say that it is a little bit too high.' This should change as digital cinema projection and high-definition television put a premium on image quality. 'For HDTV, where you are really going into sharpness and the brightness of images, and the brilliance of images, you cannot use the mirror ball any more.' Van Hove is convinced that as 3D techniques become more prevalent in the film industry, attitudes will change. 'There are a lot of people doing 3D, but still working in an amateur way. The future for Q-Spheres is if people recognise that making light fields and virtualising locations is a real job,' he says. 'They should let the specialists do what they do best.' ď Š
www.q-spheres.com - www.q-spheres.us
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Welcome to the Vista Theater. This ornate and beautiful old cinema is in a rundown part of Sunset Boulevard in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. It’s above the cinema that Ed Wood, director of the famously atrocious Plan 9 From Outer Space, kept his offices. On a hot and dusty morning inside and outside the cinema, a film crew is at work on a new movie called The Land Of The Astronauts. A surreal drama set in the city of dreams, directed by ex-pat Belgian Carl Colpaert. By Geoffrey Macnab
Citizen Carl Jack McKenzie (David Arquette), a once hot shot composer, is down on his finanical luck and must take a temporary job as a limo driver as he struggles to put his life back together, the way it was… the beautiful wife, the beautiful kids, the beautiful house and his career as a composer, explains the film’s director Carl Colpaert as he sits in a plush chair in the front row of the Vista cinema waiting for his technicians to set up a new shot. ‘It’s a story about how success and failure in Los Angeles, and especially in Hollywood, are very closely intertwined. One day you can sit in front of the limo and the next you can sit in the back.’ Bijou Phillips, and Vivica Fox are also in the movie.
Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Francis Coppola all got early career breaks working for Roger Corman - and so did Colpaert. It’s more than a quarter of a century now since Colpaert took an American Film Institute summer class in Brussels. At the time, he was studying economics and communications. He was so inspired that he enrolled at the AFI graduate program in LA. Once he graduated, he landed a job with Corman. One of Colpaert’s first jobs was editing some risqué Corman movies for TV. He was assigned to take out the nudity. Eventually, he climbed his way up the Corman ladder, working on the editing of a film called Wheels Of Fire. Flemish is Colpaert’s native tongue. He grew up near Kortrijk, in a small town near the French border, not far from Lille. However, moving to Los Angeles wasn’t as dramatic an upheaval as might have been expected. The point about LA is that it’s a city of outsiders. On his AFI course, Colpaert came across Swedes, Brits and Germans who had also upped sticks from Europe. Throughout his time in the US, he has kept his ties in Europe, sometimes even making movies there (for example, Where Eskimos Live, starring Bob Hoskins) and often seeking financing from Europeans in the form of pre-sales. The style of filmmaking that Cineville has always specialised in is auteur-driven. The company works with a group of directors (Dan Ireland and Alison Anders among them) making indie movies for about $2 to $5 million. Meanwhile, Colpaert also has a sister company, Keystone, which specialises in straight to DVD fare.
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Kortrijk
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Thankfully, Colpaert’s own career in Hollywood has had more ups than downs. However, he clearly relishes living in a town in which spectacular reversals of fortune are almost commonplace. ‘It’s a very unstable city,’ he muses. ‘As beautiful as it looks, Los Angeles is geographically unstable because of its earthquakes, mudslides and fires. And then you have a business (movies), that is unsettling. You’re constantly on your toes, which is good - you are always alert. You never know here.’ The ex-pat Belgian is a mini-mogul in his own right. He is the founder of production and distribution company Cineville and has produced over 30 movies. Ask Colpaert if he has a Belgian sensibility and he promptly replies: ‘I have a surreal sensibility - and that’s Belgian. I take more from Belgian painters than I probably take from Belgian cinema but I do think that there’s a surreal aspect about Belgium. It’s an extremely surreal country because of its centuries old culture clashes in such a small territory.’
Cineville In 1990, Colpaert launched Cineville together with Christoph Henkel. The aim was to set up an American company which had a European edge to it. When Colpaert is directing, he puts his other duties to one side. ‘I fully concentrate on the directing. The producing part is done once the money is in place.’ Directing, he adds, is all about focus - you can’t do the job properly unless you are immersed in it.
Cineville Created in 1990 by Carl Colpaert and Christoph Henkel, Cineville has produced over 30 independent films starring such actors as Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn, Salma Hayek, Viggo Mortensen, Joan Plowright, Renee Zellweger, David Arquette, Ethan Hawke en Vivica A. Fox. Its 30+ slate includes features like Venice Film Fest entry Hurly Burly, Sundance contenders like The Whole Wide World, Mi vida loca (also selected for Cannes), Gas Food Lodging (also in Berlin), and the Toronto selected Swimming With Sharks. Other films include Café Society, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Hoop Reality and G.I. Jesus. Currently in production is The Last Ride.
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The Land of the Astronauts
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It’s clear that he much prefers making movies to the grind of trying to get them financed. Markets like Cannes or the American Film Market fill him with dread. ‘They have so little to do with making a movie... but then again so much!’ To quote Orson Welles, making movies is 97% hustling for money and 3% making movies. During his time in Hollywood, Colpaert has witnessed many upheavals in the indie film landscape. As he puts it, ‘it’s all boom and bust.’ On the one hand, these are tough times for independent companies. The studios have closed their specialty arms and the foreign sales market is far less lucrative than in the 1990s, when Cineville movies like Gas Food Lodging were the toast of festivals like Sundance and were sold worldwide. There is an upside, though. Colpaert points out that filmmaking is now far cheaper than in the 1990s. He is shooting The Land of the Astronauts with the Red camera. ‘Between the Red, and Final Cut Pro and Apple, you’ve taken care of a lot of expenses,’ the director reflects. It helps, too, that Colpaert has always been able to attract the best actors to his material, often at bargain prices. Renee Zellweger, Viggo Mortensen and Salma Hayek are some notable names who’ve worked on Cineville pictures early in their careers. ‘We are not paying our actors a lot. I think they probably enjoy doing a few of these movies where they can stretch their muscles as actors and then do the studio films for a pay day. I think that balance will continue.’ Colpaert derives the same pleasure from movies that he first experienced growing up in Belgium, watching the best work of Fassbinder, Truffault and Bertolucci in Europe and the films of Scorsese, Coppola etc. in the US.
nternationals i ‘I take more from Belgian painters than I probably take from Belgian cinema but I do think that there’s a surreal aspect about Belgium. It’s an extremely surreal country because of its centuries old culture clashes in such a small territory’
reality Once he has finished The Land of the Astronauts, Colpaert will be working with Allison Anders on Smile Now, Cry Later - the follow-up to Mi vida loca. They’re hoping to recruit Eva Mendes and Jessica Alba to play small roles. He is also preparing a film that will shoot in Ghana called A Place In The Shade. Cineville even has an animated project called Hippos in the works. Cineville’s 1994 feature Swimming With Sharks showed Hollywood in a resolutely unflattering light. Kevin Spacey gave a brilliant but chilling performance as a sadistic Hollywood mogul who treats his assistants with vicious contempt. ‘That abusive relationship that the studio boss has with the assistant is sometimes there,’ the producer-director reflects. From his own laid-back behaviour with his crew and assistants on The Land of the Astronauts, it’s obvious that Colpaert himself doesn’t behave anything like the Spacey of Swimming With Sharks. He takes too much pleasure in what he is doing to be that mean or vindictive. Nor is he an exploitation king like his old boss, Roger Corman. ‘Roger was always about making money... with our movies, we try new things and we sometimes lose money. In that way, we’re very different.’ You do escape in a different world for awhile,’ Colpaert explains his attraction to moviemaking. ‘To shoot reality is not what it’s about. We already have reality...’ As his voice tails off, his assistant beckons him. He is needed back on set. ‘This is an easy day,’ he confides as he says goodbye. ‘It’s the first day of shooting, things are still very civil… but it will get crazy tomorrow, sounding almost apologetic that everything is so calm. A little craziness is what he likes.
Carl Colpaert (°1963)* THE LAND OF THE ASTRONAUTS (2010) G.I. JESUS (2006) THE AFFAIR (2004) DROWNING ON DRY LAND (1999) FACADE (1997) THE CREW (1994) DELUSION (1991) * selected filmography as a director
www.cineville.com
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Š Bart Dewaele
Gamekeepers
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If you think that computer games are just about shooting things and collecting points, then Tale of Tales will change your mind. The games designed by Auriea Harvey and MichaĂŤl Samyn, who run Tale of Tales from Ghent, are not about winning or losing, but experiencing particular sensations and exploring ideas. By Ian Mundell
moment of remembrance Samyn and Harvey don't spend too much time trying to second guess who their audience might be. Take The Graveyard, for instance, in which you play an old woman who visits a cemetery. You can walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. 'We can't really say who that is for,' Harvey concedes. 'It's something that makes you think of your grandmother or a time when you lost someone, and that is universal. For some people this project makes no sense at all, while other people have a moving moment of remembrance.' A further wrinkle is that there’s a free version of the game and a paid-for version whose only difference is that the old lady sometimes dies while sitting on the bench. 'Many people prefer the free version because they don't want her to die,' Samyn says. 'It's a challenge to people: are you going to pay for that? The experience is drastically different if you see her sit there and suddenly she dies. It's a shocking thing.'
awkward position
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‘we started with the idea of making games, leaving out all the violence and competition. It turns out that a lot of people who play games as a hobby like our work as well, so there is an audience there’ – Michaël Samyn
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'It's always about putting a character in an environment,' says Auriea Harvey about the inspiration for their games. 'Usually we have a theme or story in mind, maybe something that already exists that we want to re-interpret, or in some cases, like The Endless Forest, it was just a very abstract notion of a deer in a forest, and we go on from there.' The Endless Forest is a shared on-line environment in which people can become deer, free to wander through the forest and interact with what they find. There are no goals, and no winning or losing. Launched in 2005, it is still going strong. 'The whole community just goes nuts for The Endless Forest,' Harvey says. 'They've taken it and made it their own. We have no control over it any more.' Another motivation is their own experience of playing computer games. 'We quickly realised that we found it interesting for different reasons than gamers generally do,' says Michaël Samyn. 'So we started with the idea of making games for that kind of sentiment, leaving out all the violence and competition. But it turns out that a lot of people who play games as a hobby like our work as well, so there is an audience there, even though they have trouble calling it a game.'
The Graveyard
The Path, released in 2009 and their first commercially available game, also challenges expectations. Based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, it gives the player a simple enough mission. 'The game starts by saying "go to grandmother's house and stay on the path", just like the fairy tale, and gamers do that,' Samyn says. 'But when they reach the end, the game tells them that they have failed for following the rule.' 'Think about the story,' Harvey adds. 'It's based on Little Red Riding Hood. Does the girl go straight to her grandmother's house? No, she doesn't. So, you fail to tell the story and you have to go back.' After that, the player is put in the awkward position of having to break the rules and take the consequences. 'In the end the story is rather unsettling for some people. It makes you do something that you know is going to result in the death of the girl you are playing.'
What’s next? Having just released Fatale and Vanitas, plus a version of The Graveyard for the iPhone, Harvey and Samyn are about to embark on a longer period of development with two new projects. The Book Of 8 returns to material developed for their very first project, 8, which was never finished, and which will create an environment based on a fairytale palace. The other, with the working title Flower/Lock, will take the player on a sort of transcendental cosmic journey. 'It's an experiment with pleasure, in a way, sex being a big part of it, representing that feeling as a trip,' says Samyn, before becoming cryptic. Prototypes should be ready in 18 months, at which point they will look for a publisher. That's a long time in the world of computers, so they make no presumptions about where the technology might be at that moment. 'Ultimately what we make is the software,' says Samyn. 'What happens inside the imaginary space is the most important thing.'
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Belgisch Congo belge A double DVD offering an insight into colonial reality through the lens of the three most prominent 'colonial film-makers': Gérard De Boe, André Cauvin & Ernest Genval DVD RELEASE 12 JUNE
ROYAL BELGIAN FILM ARCHIVE INFORMATION AND ORDERS: WWW.CINEMATEK.BE
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The The Path Path Fatale
The Path
beautiful moment A fascination with story telling was also behind their next project, Fatale, along with an interest in figurative painting. 'We liked the way that a painting can tell a story without being linear,' Samyn explains. 'So we wanted to experiment with that in our own medium, to see how far we could go presenting a still scene, a scene where there is no linear progression, where all you basically do is look.' They chose to work with Oscar Wilde's version of the Salome story, in which the eponymous femme fatale claims the head of John the Baptist, the man she loves, from King Herod. The game they created is a sort of living tableau of the palace after main events in the story have taken place, which the player can explore. Painting was also the inspiration for Vanitas, released in February as an application for the iPhone. Taking the idea of memento mori from paintings of the 16th and 17th century, they created a 3D box with items such as a bird skull, a flower or a wrist watch which are calculated to prompt reflection on mortality. New objects appear every time the box is open, and the user can move them around by touching the screen or tilting the phone. 'We wanted to make something that is just a very beautiful moment,' says Harvey. 'You don't have to play it for hours, it is just something you do for a few moments, and you listen to the audio, and it is just a chance to sit and think.' There is also the irony of contemplating vanity and worldliness on an expensive gadget like the iPhone. ď Š
www.tale-of-tales.com
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ŠRobert Lebeck Boyamba Belgique
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Congo Belgium's central African colony, the Congo, gained its independence in 1960, and four Flemish documentary makers are taking advantage of the fiftieth anniversary to tell their stories about the country. Diverse in style and content, some of their films are linked to independence and the colonial relationship, while others build on newer encounters with the country. By Ian Mundell Pale Peko Bantu II
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Cemetery State
Returns
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Boyamba Belgique by Bart Van Peel and Dries Engels begins with a precise moment during the independence ceremonies. As the Belgian King Baudouin rode in an open car through the capital Kinshasa, a young man reached in and took his sabre. The moment was caught by photographer Robert Lebeck, yet despite becoming an iconic image almost nothing was known about the man in question until the two filmmakers started to investigate. 'We found amazing theories around the event, and different tracks, so it becomes a whodunit,' says Van Peel. 'It's also a moving story about recovering your history, so there are some emotions there as well.' Filming in Kinshasa and other regions of the immense country, Engels and Van Peel found it easy to involve people in their quest. 'The nice thing is that you can explain your story in two sentences: we're looking for the guy who took the sword. People understand immediately what you are up to and they help you.' Local radio and churches were used to contact people who might know about the event, but there was also an element of luck involved. 'We talked to plenty of politicians and professors, but it was one guy sitting in a hut who helped us most,' Van Peel recalls. 'He had a phenomenal memory, and was also great storyteller.' They also talked to Lebeck about his photograph, and Belgian residents whose lives were turned upside down by independence. 'The ex-colonial people that we interviewed are still waiting for a kind of rehabilitation, I think,' says Van Peel. 'There is a lot of bitterness there.' But the advantage of the story is that it is essentially positive. 'There is so much misery in tales about Africa, but this is an uplifting story. It is about audacity and hope, and no harm was done. It's like something a schoolboy would do.'
from nowhere at all Franรงoise Levie has also found a positive story about the Congo, going further back into its shared history with Belgium. Panda Farnana een Congolees die stoort (Panda Farnana, caught between cultures), is about a Congolese boy adopted and brought up in Belgium by Louise Derscheid, a woman inspired by the humanist ideals of Tolstoy. Paul Panda Farnana went on to study agronomy, in 1908 becoming the first Congolese to receive a higher degree. This was the same year that the Congo ceased to be the private property of the Belgian king, Leopold II, and became a colony in the conventional sense. With his degree and Belgian citizenship, Panda Farnana returned to the Congo as an administrator, but was not welcomed into the all-white colonial civil service. 'He was educated and brought up in Belgium, yet was still Congolese,' says Levie. 'So in fact he was from nowhere at all.' Returning to Belgium, he fought in World War I and was imprisoned in Germany. He emerged from the experience radicalised, and became an important campaigner in the pan-African movement. He went back to the Congo in the late 1920s, to set up a school and a church, but died under mysterious circumstances in 1930. Levie received an enthusiastic welcome when she went to shoot in the Congo. 'They really want the film to be made. He is like a forgotten founding father to them.' In addition to location work and some historical reconstructions, she will tell the story through documents, such as Panda Farnana's letters and pamphlets, and rarely used images from the film archives of Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa. 'We have no experts. It's a story that we have discovered by ourselves,' says Levie. This was the attraction of the project for producer Anna Van der Wee. 'What's so fascinating is that we are writing history,' she says. 'It's an unknown story, in Africa and in Belgium.'
every inch Filip De Boeck's Cemetery State is firmly set in the present. 'What interests me is urbanity,' he explains, 'what makes an African city African, why would it be different from Tokyo, New York, Paris or Brussels.' An anthropologist at the Catholic University of Leuven, De Boeck has more than two decades of experience working in the Congo. After collaborating with a photographer on a book about
Cemetery State
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'Kinshasa is not an easy place to film. You have to fight for every inch of footage' Filip De Boeck
Kinshasa, he started to explore the possibilities of a film. 'I wanted to focus on one locality, and through that site try to talk about broader things that go on in the city.' He chose Kitambo cemetery, which despite being 'closed' by the authorities years ago is still used for burials and hosts a vigorous local economy. 'The cemetery provided a single time and place out of which you can narrate a very interesting specific story, but which you can also extrapolate to a larger urban context,' he explains. Beginning in 2004, De Boeck got to know a group of gravediggers, and it's their daily routine that he follows in the film. Through them he also explores a disturbing trend for young people who no longer acknowledge traditional beliefs to take over funerals by force. 'You never really know if the family - the parents and uncles and so one - will still be in control at the actual funeral,' he explains, 'they can easily lose control over the whole thing.' Sometimes De Boeck and his crew were warned by the grave diggers simply to stay away. 'The funerals that we filmed are actually the calm ones.' Even with good contacts, a command of the local language and a lot of experience of the Congo, shooting was difficult. 'Kinshasa is not an easy place to film,' De Boeck says. 'You have to fight for every inch of footage.'
absurd dream
Panda Farnana, caught between cultures
That struggle is woven into the fabric of Bram Van Paesschen's films, so that he becomes one of the characters himself. 'For me, making a movie is about dialogue, so it would be lying not to integrate myself,' he explains. This means including the banter between the people being filmed and the camera crew, and constant interruptions from passers by wanting to have their say or to ask for a hand-out. His first film in the Congo, Pale Peko Bantu Mambo Ayikosake (Wherever there are people, problems are never lacking), follows a group of men working in the informal mining economy in Katanga province, in the south of the country. They dig out minerals by hand and sell them by the sack-load to official buyers, or smuggle them out on the black market. Now Van Paesschen is preparing to return to the area to shoot a follow-up film, Pale Peko Bantu II (And From The East They Came). 'The first film was about these artisan diggers, the second will be about the Chinese community in town which buys the minerals. The characters won't be the same, but it's the other side of the story,' he explains. Selecting these characters is an important part of the process. 'I spent last year integrating into the Chinese community, which isn't easy because they really stick together and lead a very closed life in Africa. But now I have two strong characters who are able to carry the movie, and I'm dying to go and shoot.' That will take place through May, June and July 2010. Beyond that he hopes to make a third film in the area, this time focusing on a long-time Belgian resident who wants to build a wildlife park. 'It's a very peculiar situation, and I like him a lot,' Van Paesschen explains. 'The film will be about his absurd dream, in my eyes, of making the country a tourist hotspot.' ď Š
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Eva Küpper’s much-feted documentary What’s In A Name is about a New York transvestite and body artist called Jon Cory who performs outrageous shows on stage. He is wild, confrontational and funny: a self-proclaimed ‘gender terrorist’. Off stage, Cory is very different: a thoughtful, complicated character, wrestling with questions of sex and identity. What the film makes very clear is that gender is a negotiable and paradoxical
Eva Knievel!
concept. By Geoffrey Macnab
Küpper likes to ride and race motorbikes. She tells anecdotes about burning up the track at Silverstone and opening up the throttle on remote country roads. The world of speed and leather that she conjures up is as far removed as you can imagine from the transvestite subculture she explores in such intimate fashion in her documentary, which was made as her graduation film. No, she doesn’t jump buses like Evel Knievel. However, her point is clear. There are contradictory sides to every personality, including her own. She goes to her classical ballet classes... on her motorbike. ‘Every person has a male and a female side. That has nothing to do with sexuality whatsoever. It’s what makes a person and how you find a balance.’
family friend Küpper’s relationship with Cory began many years ago. As a child, she spent time in the US, where her mother was working as a physiotherapist. Jon Cory was a family friend. Back in those days, the future cross-dressing gender terrorist was a mild-mannered New Age Jewish baker, happily married to Sharon. When the couple visited Belgium, Sharon used to babysit for the young Eva. ‘I didn’t really know him very well. He always struck me as a nice, quiet, timid but extremely friendly person,’ Eva recalls of Jon. She struck an immediate rapport with him. There was no obvious sign then that he was on a quest for a new gender identity. He later told her that even when he was a teenager, he yearned to have breasts. ‘He was jealous. He wanted those! He wasn’t questioning his identity but he wanted those.’ Cory, now 53, was an educated and very cultured man who led an outwardly conventional life. However, he was beginning to experiment with drag. Not long after 9/11, Küpper saw him his drag routine performing at a birthday party in Belgium. ‘I was totally and completely overwhelmed! He did this very slow, serene seductive dance like Scheherazade with veils,’ she recalls. ‘He was so beautiful... there was deep eroticism but also deep love.’ 17 years old at the time, she was mesmerised.
film school Küpper describes herself at the time as a regular student at a Catholic girls’ school, studying Latin and maths. She hadn’t even thought of becoming a filmmaker. A passion for movies ran in the family. Her grandparents on her mother’s side were ardent cinephiles who had made 8mm movies. Eva’s sister
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is an actress. The sister’s husband is a director. Even so, Eva was reluctant to pursue an artistic course. After leaving school, she studied biomedical science and commercial engineering. Her studies were interrupted when she fell ill with a form of glandular fever. When she began to recover, she decided that, no, she wasn’t going to become an engineer. She made a last-minute application to the film school in Ghent and, to her amazement, was accepted. It took me a while to rewire my brain... the creative side I had neglected for a while. The first semester was awful! If you dance, you want to learn how to dance. You see the teacher do the moves. You know how it is done but you just can’t compute it in your brain! You can’t get it in your limbs. I really had that feeling.’
What's In A Name
the essence Küpper had wanted to make a film about Cory for a very long time. She forced herself to wait until she had begun to master her craft. When she was finally ready to begin, Cory immediately agreed to give her complete access. What’s In A Name doesn’t use voice-overs or use archive footage or delve into Cory’s family history and marriage. It’s left to the subject to explain his own story. ‘I wanted to go to the essence,’ the director says of her painstaking approach. Early on, the director was startled by the extremes to which Cory went on stage. ‘I had no idea that he had gone so far,’ she recalls of the family friend turned drag queen. ‘The first time we were there, he gave us a couple of DVDs of his performances and I was horrified - really shocked!’ Gradually, though, Cory and Küpper rediscovered their old intimacy. She films him on the subway at dawn, when dressed as part man and part woman (and even has a fake head). We see him in his workshop (he is now a carpenter by trade) and in the surgery where he is having breast implants.
VAF Wildcard Küpper’s strategy was never to confront her subject, who was a very strong personality and would have relished a clash. ‘It was a matter of handling him in a softer way. He wanted me to really be a director and shout at him and boss him around. I never did that.’ With What's In A Name, recently presented at HotDocs, the young director is already busy hatching future projects. She is preparing a TV film about a 71-year-old Belgian fashion designer Yvette Lauwaert - a personality as formidable in her own way as Cory. ‘What they have in common is that they are incredibly charismatic and very juicy creative characters.’ What’s In A Name won Küpper a VAF Wildcard. The award provides e 40,000 toward a future project. Küpper plans to use the money for a documentary about Crestone, Colorado, a former gold-mining town that is home to over 20 different religious communities. ‘It’s a town with 74 inhabitants and you have 24 different religious centres!’ Eva Küpper
‘Every person has a male and a female side. That has nothing to do with sexuality whatsoever. It’s what makes a person and how you find a balance’
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Hilde Van Mieghem has had a long acting career, appearing in around 30 feature films, both indigenous and international, as well as TV series and shorts. But directing has always been an ambition. 'Even when I went to theatre school I dreamt of being a director,' she tells Ian Mundell. At the same time, she was wary of trying to direct too soon. 'I thought I was too young, I didn't have enough experience, I didn't know enough as a person,' she recalls. 'But I knew that I could act, and I thought that I could use the time when I was acting to develop as a director.' Her first film role was in Friday (Vrijdag, 1981), directed by the celebrated Flemish writer Hugo Claus. She knew immediately that she was in the right place. 'It was the atmosphere. Having this concentration on one shot. It was something so focused, which you don't have in the theatre. I loved it, and I still love it.' However it was not so easy to get into the director's charmed circle. 'I saw Hugo Claus talking with the producer and with other people, and I hated it that I couldn't be there!' she says. 'I wanted to know everything about making a film.' As her roles grew through the 1980s and 1990s Van Mieghem was able to pick up the tricks of the trade. 'Everything that I've learned about filmmaking I've learned by being an actress on film sets,' she says.
Š Bart Dewaele
Under the Influence
Hilde Van Mieghem
inspirational These are some of the works Hilde Van Mieghem currently gets inspired by: BOOK
During this period, external influences did not play a large part in her work. 'Storytelling was more important to me at that time than the visuals,' she says. That has changed with her latest film, Smoorverliefd (Madly in Love), a romantic comedy about the lives and loves of four women in the same family, recounted through the four seasons. 'It's only with this film that I've really felt the influence of things that I like.' The names she cites are, she concedes, 'old guys': Federico Fellini, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ingmar Bergman. 'I'm not so fond of modern films,' she says. 'I like to go and see them, but these people are really masters of filmmaking.' For Smoorverliefd (Madly in Love) the biggest influences are Fellini and Allen. 'My film is about an actress, so you are immediately in that world of the imagination, of reality and unreality, of fantasy. Fellini has that a lot.' She was particularly inspired by the theatricality of films such as And The Ship Sails On and Amarcord, as well as earlier classics such as La Strada. With Allen, it is his way of being smart and funny at the same time. 'To have an intelligence in your dialogue, saying things that are high-brow, but in a way you can laugh at,' she explains. She cites classics such as Manhattan and Annie Hall as favourites, but also less fashionable films such as Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex and his modern work. 'Match Point is also a fantastic film, I think.'
Nothing To Be Frightened Of Julian Barnes www.julianbarnes.com
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'In every contract I ask to see rushes, and I've always talked with camera people. In the breaks, I've always sat with the crew and never with the actors.' In the late 1980s she started to study, first attending scenario labs and then enrolling at the Sint Lukas film school in Brussels. In 1997 she made her first short, The Sugar Bowl, which went on to win awards at festivals in Belgium and abroad. Her first feature, The Kiss, followed in 2004, and Love Belongs to Everyone in 2006.
THEATRE Roman Tragedies Shakespeare directed by Ivo Van Hove / Toneelgroep Amsterdam www.toneelgroepamsterdam.nl
Franz Kafka There are also literary influences in the new film. 'I've read a lot of poems because of this film,' she says, citing Rilke as an example. 'At the beginning, one character is in love with a poet. He is writing poems especially for her and only she knows it, because he also has a wife.' The love letters of Franz Kafka are another influence. 'Kafka always inspires me. He's my guru.' (Coincidentally she also played in Steven Soderbergh's Kafka.) Van Mieghem admits to having huge ambitions as a filmmaker, and already has three new projects in mind: a thriller, another romantic comedy and a TV series. 'I would really like to make something in the same vein as Berlin Alexanderplatz,' she says of the series. 'I have a story in mind that you can't tell in an hour and a half, you really need time. And if you can keep the cinematic level, you can make great television.' ď Š
MUSIC Amy Winehouse www.amywinehouse.com
ART Sam Dillemans www.sam-dillemans.com
Hilde Van Mieghem www.caviarcontent.com Smoorverliefd (Madly in Love)
FILM Dangerous Liaisons Stephen Frears (1988)
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The
Misfortunates Golden Camera winner Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, The 8th Day, Mr. Nobody) talks about one of his favourite films from Flanders, Felix van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates. I saw The Misfortunates in Brussels when it was released. It was one of my favourite films of the year. What was an incredible challenge in that film was to show so many sad things that appeared funny and full of love. Even though it is desperate, the story is so full of hope also. It is not denying reality. It is a reality we just have to live with. The actors in The Misfortunates were fantastic. What is really obvious is that the actors and the director have known each other for a long time. You have a sense that this is a family of actors who have found a style. This is a style that is at the same time realistic and - as we say in French - ‘décalé,’ which means quirky and offbeat. The acting is really very powerful. Van Groeningen’s style is really very simple and, at the same time, very complicated. We don’t see it as complicated. The camerawork is fantastic too. It’s a film that I kept in mind for days after seeing it. When I had just come out of the screening, I wanted to go back. This is not a film about heavy-drinking and alcoholism. It’s more a film about having fun, about being together, about loving each other - even through alcohol. Emotionally, the most powerful moments were when all these men were so drunk and destroying themselves and you just see the loving smile of the son who accepts it. He accepts his father for who he is and his family for what they are - that was really deeply, deeply moving. When I saw The Misfortunates, I really had the feeling that it didn’t need anything more. He had everything he needed to make it fantastic. The Misfortunates had a lot of screens in the north of the country but when you went south of Brussels, only a few theatres were showing it. That is really something sad. The French-speaking people in the south of the country prefer to see a film in French. A film like this which is really so beautiful is not travelling even within Belgium. My father is Flemish, my mother is French-speaking. I speak better French than I do Flemish. I understand very well Flemish but my vocabulary is like that of a kid because I spoke the language mostly when I was a kid. I have made a short film in Flemish, The Boat. I don’t really see a difference between Flemish and French-speaking filmmakers in Belgium. The language makes a difference but I have very good friends like Stijn Coninx and Dominique Deruddere who are Flemish - we really do the same job. I don’t think people are different from one side or other of the border. In Belgium this mixing of style is very familiar - we mix languages, we mix styles, we mix cultures, we mix everything! And nobody ever agrees. That’s very typical. It’s something as French-speaking as it is Flemish. It is something we have in common. I think it’s the most beautiful thing we have in Belgium - to have this mix, this shock of the meeting of cultures and styles. That gives us a sort of freedom - a feeling that anything is possible. There is not “good” cinema and “bad” cinema or good and bad taste. Most of the time, nobody agrees with anybody else - and so anything is possible. I don’t really differentiate either between the Flemish actors and the French-speaking actors who live in Belgium. Except for the language, it is something similar. What I like about those Flemish actors is that they underplay. Would I ride naked on a bicycle down the Croisette (as van Groeningen did to promote The Misfortunates in Cannes)? That would depend on how many girls are around! As told to Geoffrey Macnab
It’s a film that I kept in mind for days after seeing it. When I had just come out of the screening, I wanted to go back’
www.mrnobody-lefilm.com www.themisfortunates.com
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Issue #17 | Summer 2010 | e 3.99 Cover Veerle Baetens by Bart Dewaele
Editor Christian De Schutter Deputy Editor / Art Direction Nathalie Capiau Deputy Editor / Digital Karel Verhelst
Contributors Geoffrey Macnab Ian Mundell Henry Womersley Photo credits Bart Dewaele (p 12-19), Leila Fisher (p 4-5), Sofie Silbermann (p 7, p 46-47 Madly in Love), Ellen van den Bouwhuysen (p 44), Ann Vallé/ELLE Belgium March 2010 (p 20)
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