Equator Savage Film (Belgium)
The daughter of a recently deceased entrepreneur convinces a former child soldier to accompany her to Congo to find out what really happened to her father. Synopsis Charlotte, the young daughter of a wealthy Belgian businessman, is crushed when she hears that her father Didier has died in a car crash in Congo. In his will she is made sole beneficiary. Alarmed by these events, Charlotte convinces Joseph, an ex-child soldier and former protégé of her father, to help her find out what really happened. Along the way she finds out her father was an arms dealer, and that his death may not have been accidental. As the evidence piles up, her uncle (Francois) becomes the most likely suspect of her Didier’s early demise. Together Charlotte and Joseph coerce her Uncle into telling the truth: he confesses that her father is still alive, but chose to abandon them to start a new life, freed from all the accusations that had been chasing him. Charlotte and Joseph then travel to Cape Town, where they manage to track down Didier, hidden away in a luxurious mansion with his ‘new’ family, a black woman and a newborn son. Didier keeps up the façade, tries to reason with all the parties involved. He bribes Joseph into leaving Charlotte behind with him, and then forces her to return to home. Before he has his bodyguard escort her to the airport, Didier confesses to Charlotte that Joseph is his son, and thus her halfbrother. Charlotte is crushed when she realizes her father never really loved her, and that his reasons for abandoning them were always selfish. 16 NPP 2013
Joseph saves her from the clutches of her father’s bodyguard, and together they return to her father’s house, so they can settle things once and for all. From that point on, Charlotte’s journey to save her father turns into a quest for revenge. She realizes her father is a monster. And monsters have to be stopped. Director’s Statement Only once my childhood friend Egide told me about his exodus from Rwanda. He remained quite detached, emotionless even, as he told me about the night his whole family was murdered by a battalion of Hutus. He was the sole survivor, and drifted around for more than two years before he was finally put on a plane to Belgium. The central idea for this film came much later, after attending the funeral of the rich father of a former girlfriend of mine. A young Congolese boy came up to introduce himself after the service. He turned out to be my ex-girlfriend’s younger half-brother. She was in shock, her mother less so. She obviously knew about it, but had always kept her mouth shut. Equator is a film about loss, guilt and redemption. It’s a story about a girl who discovers something about her herself by treading in her father’s footsteps. It’s also a story about an impossible love affair between two opposites, and how sometimes, family ties need to be cut in order to move on. Director’s Profile Hans van Nuffel’s first feature film Adem (Oxygen) (2010) won over twenty international film awards, among these a Discovery Award at the 2011 European Film Awards. He has since been working on his new film Equator, produced by Savage Film (Bullhead), while collaborating with Roel Mondelaers on both Plan Bart and an animation feature film called Lucy to be directed by Raf Wathion. He will also be helming three episodes of The Riddler this autumn, a VRT/Eyeworks production.