Robbe De Hert’s Fugitive Cinema

Often it takes the death of a filmmaker to get their films out of the archives and onto the screen. So it is with Robbe De Hert, who died in August at the age of 77. Long celebrated as the enfant terrible of Flemish Cinema, it is finally possible to see where some of that reputation comes from, thanks to memorial programmes this month in Ghent and Antwerp.

But these isolated events — all the more transient at a time when it is hard to get to the cinema — need to be followed by an effort to make his films available on digital platforms or DVD. If he is so important to the development of Flemish cinema, as the obituaries all say, it would be good to see why.

De Hert’s importance primarily lies in Fugitive Cinema, a collective he helped set up in Antwerp in the mid-1960s. Inspired by the Free Cinema movement in the UK, it made socially engaged and experimental films, mixing documentary, drama, collage and animation. It was particularly influential for its ‘off-television’ productions, reportage on social issues that the public television refused to address.

Louis Paul Boon and Robbe De Hert on the set of De Bom (1969)

SOS Fonske (1968), for example, showed a family going through the humiliation seeing its belongings auctioned on the street to cover the cost of a bankruptcy. Rather like the early work of Ken Loach, it helped launch reforming legislation. Meanwhile Dood van een Sandwichman (1971) looked at the way commercial and political interests took over the funeral of a young cyclist.

De Hert collaborated on these films with Guido Henderickx and Patrick Le Bon, who would also go on to careers as feature directors. Meanwhile De Hert made his own films, such as De Bom (1969), a short about a garage owner who finds a lost American atom bomb in his garden, and Camera Sutra (1973), a sprawling broadside against Belgian society.

In the 1980s De Hert’s career took a surprisingly commercial turn, beginning with the historical drama De Witte van Sichem (1980), and continuing with popular comedy Zware Jongens (1984) and the 1950s nostalgia of Blueberry Hill (1989). He also began making documentaries on the history of Flemish and Dutch cinema.

While his main feature films from the 1980s are available on DVD (assuming you have the patience to rummage through the second-hand bins) De Hert’s earlier work, and that of Fugitive Cinema more broadly, is extremely hard to see. This is where the memorial events this month make their contribution.

On 14 October the Ghent Film Festival will screen Dood van een Sandwichman and De Bom, with producer Willem Thijssen on hand to talk about his collaboration with De Hert, and veteran film journalist Patrick Duynslaegher present to provide context.

A deeper dive into the Fugitive years will then be held at De Cinema in Antwerp on 19-21 October and again on 26-28 October. The programme begins with De Hert’s debut short Twee keer twee ogen (1963), then goes on to cover SOS Fonske, De geboorte en dood van Dirk Vandersteen (1968), Camera Sutra, De Bom, Dood van een Sandwichman, and Le Filet Américain (1981), De Hert’s last film in the Fugitive style.

The Ghent and Antwerp programmes will both be introduced by film historian Gertjan Willems, who has written one of the best appreciations of De Hert’s career. This appears in Dutch on the bilingual film site Sabzian.

Willems has also been instrumental in ensuring that De Hert’s archive is preserved. This covers not just the activities of Fugitive Cinema and his subsequent productions (completed or otherwise) but also the fruit of his obsessional research on Belgian cinema history.

Robbe De Hert’s office, before its contents were donated to Antwerp University

The films have been transferred to the Cinematek for preservation and digitisation, while paper records and other items have been donated to Antwerp University, and will be held in the city’s Felix Archive. From October on, Willems and his colleague Steven Jacobs will organise a seminar to guide Antwerp master students in theatre and film studies through research into the early Fugitive films. The students will also help build an inventory of the archive.

All of this activity would make a lot more sense if the Fugitive films, and De Hert’s other work, were more widely available. Hopefully, we will not have to wait for too long.

text © Ian Mundell 2020
photos courtesy Ghent Film Festival (top) and Antwerp University (bottom)

Ben Okri in Brussels

It’s unusual to have an African writer in Brussels to help launch a Belgian film, but this was one reason for Ben Okri’s visit at the beginning of March. The Nigerian novelist and poet was also interviewed on stage before the screening, answering questions about his early life and its influence on his writing. The following day he gave a lecture on art’s role in society.

The film was N — The Madness of Reason, by Flemish director Peter Krüger, a mix of documentary and fiction whose starting point is French encyclopaedist Raymond Borremans. After fleeing Europe in 1929, Borremans travelled around Africa, first as a musician then running a mobile cinema.

He also started collecting information on every aspect of what was then French West Africa. Towards the end of his life he assembled an encyclopaedia on Côte d’Ivoire, where he had settled, but when he died in 1988 only the volumes up to the letter N had been published, hence the title.

Krüger’s film begins with Borremans’ death, then goes on to imagine the Frenchman’s spirit roaming restlessly around Africa, unable to find peace because his life’s work is unfinished. Along the way he observes the world he has left behind and encounters old friends, associates and people who follow occupations similar to his own.

In this way the film contrasts Africa’s past and present, and challenges the urge to order the world. “The aim of Borremans’ life was to objectify and systematise African reality, but as a spirit he is forced to enter a world which cannot be reduced to facts and figures,” Krüger says in the film’s press material. “The film presents a subjective experience of reality which is penetrated by a world of imagination, dreams, emotions, stories and poetry.”

Okri’s involvement came late in the process. Krüger had approached him at the beginning to collaborate in writing a text for the project but Okri was busy with a novel. Okri also explained during the post-screening Q&A that he thought the film would take much longer than the three years Krüger suggested. He was right.

Seven years on Krüger had finished shooting the film and had a rough edit, but he still needed a text. When he approached Okri again, the writer’s focus had moved from prose to poetry and the notion was a better fit. Having seen the rough cut, Okri worked independently on his text. He then handed it over to Krüger, who distributed it through the film.

Most of it is spoken in French, but other languages also feature, and some of Okri’s text has been turned into lyrics to be sung. Largely, however, the words represent Borremans’ inner thoughts, voiced by Michael Lonsdale, and a dialogue between Borremans and an African woman (Wendyam Sawadogo) who can perceive his spirit. In some instances, Krüger said, he altered the editing slightly to accommodate the text, but it seems that Okri’s words were used rather like a musical score. This accords with Okri’s approach to the text.

“I wrote it like poetry,” he says in an interview recorded when the film screened at last year’s Ghent Film Festival. “I added oblique lines. I introduced words that pulled at the image, that sometimes subverted the screen, that sometimes opened a new door into the image and into the world of the characters. It was just little additions, just the way Miles Davis does his trumpet interventions.”

He also spoke about how he felt the text should complement the images. “The words must do things that images cannot do, which is imaginative suggestion, hinting at other realms, philosophical disturbances, ripples on the surface of the screen. A sneak punch underneath the mind of the viewer.”

This works to some extent if you are a French speaker, and the words enter your mind on the same level as the images. But reading the subtitles — which you have to do in any case when the language changes — puts the words at a disadvantage. Both Krüger and Okri spoke of an interest in the oral tradition in African art, which makes all the writing on the screen somewhat counterproductive. Unfortunately (but typically for a ‘Flemish’ film in Belgium) there appear to be no plans to screen N — The Madness of Reason in French-speaking parts of the country, nor was this Brussels avant-première at Bozar followed by a general release in the city.

The way of working and the translation into French makes it rather hard to assess Okri’s contribution, although in addition to providing the text it seems clear that he was an inspiration for Krüger’s appreciation of Africa. For example, there is one shot of a misty road at night that strongly recalls scenes from Okri’s The Famished Road.

Okri is complementary about the film, of course, but it is interesting that he situated his comments last year in the wider context of films about Africa, both by Europeans and by Africans. “There’s a way that Africa tends to be filmed that I’m not very fond of, which is to say it tends to be filmed too externally,” he said. “It’s too much of an outward gaze, too much of looking for sensational elements. But what Peter had done is he’d filmed Africa with warmth and with dimension, with transcendence. He’d looked at ruins and decay and sadness, but he’d also looked at fertility and richness and dance and celebration. He conveyed the richness. I like the textuality of the film, I like the layers of it.”

During the March Q&A he said that he hopes to publish his text, either as part of a future poetry collection or as a stand-alone publication. The press kit gives a 15-line taster, beginning:

The road is singing about the voices of the feet
The crooket feet of history.

We have suffered
And our songs will return our missing moments.
What does it mean to return?

And yes, ‘crooket’ rather than ‘crooked’.  You can get an idea of the way Okri’s text is used in the film through this excerpt. Meanwhile, his lecture — entitled Can Art Save the World? — can be seen here.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Belgian cinema in May and June

The Belgian film drought continues. Stretching a point you could say that four local films had a theatrical release during May and June, with nothing more scheduled until September. There are some promising films waiting in the wings, but for the moment the industry appears to be on its uppers.

The best of the four new releases is A Pelada, a low-budget, sweet-natured sex comedy made in Brazil by Belgian director Damien Chemin. It tells the story of Caio, a poolman who spins dizzying tales of sexual conquest to his friends but is basically too lazy or too timid to do anything of the sort. When Sandra, his wife of three years, suggests their flagging relationship needs spicing up, he nearly dies of shock. But she is serious, partly because she loves Caio, partly because a fleeting kiss from another woman has aroused her curiosity. And so begins a series of misunderstandings and misadventures as Caio and Sandra try to get their act together, as we know they must.

While it’s not unusual for Belgian directors to shoot far from home, this tends to be at the art-house end of the market or because there is some diaspora connection. Think Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth, Gust Van den Berghe and latterly Chantal Akerman in the first category, Diego Martinez-Vignatti and Kadir Balci in the second. Marion Hänsel is a notable exception, a globe-trotter working in the mainstream.

Damien Chemin trained as a cinematographer in Brussels, going on to make a series of fiction shorts and documentaries. But then he fell in love with Brazil and found work there making adverts and documentaries for public television. A Pelada was conceived as a modest TV movie for a regional broadcaster, intended to give the people of Aracaju in the north-east a chance to see their own city in fiction. But Chemin was also able to interest his old producer Tarantula Belgique in the project, which in turn brought in funds from Belgium’s French community, a Belgian broadcaster and the tax shelter. Financially, this is a majority Belgian co-production.

Even so, the budget is low and it shows, with both sound and image experiencing some dodgy moments. But it is well written and the two leads — Bruno Pêgo and Kika Farias — are beautifully cast. It’s a joy to watch them wrestling with their contrasting emotions, their discomfort focused on worries so slight that it prompts sympathy rather than the teeth grinding inherent in most comedies of embarrassment.

A Pelada can also be considered an addition to the slight corpus of Belgian LGBT cinema, thanks to its bi-curious storyline and a range of gay and lesbian characters that goes beyond the usual stereotypes. While not exactly a queer film, it is pleasingly open-minded.

The gender roles are much more traditional in Je suis supporter de Standard, a football-themed rom-com that marks the directing debut of minor actor Riton Liebman. He plays Milou, a fanatical supporter of Standard Liège football club who has to hide his obsession when he falls for Martine (Léa Drucker), a radio producer who detests the beautiful game. At first he succeeds, but when she finds out that he is seeing eleven men behind her back, he has to kick his addiction.

This would appear to be fertile ground for something in the Judd Apatow line: a first act of gross bad behaviour morphs into a second of tension between the sexes, before resolving into a romantic conclusion. The problem is that Milou is not a loveable Apatow man-child, but a selfish, superior and sometimes vicious creep. It’s hard to like him, hard to believe that Martine likes him, and impossible to care what happens to him.

A further problem with the film is that it also wants to be a Jewish comedy, pitting Milou against his successful brother, long-suffering mother and an uncle who is trying to tempt him back into the faith. This theme is not developed very far, but it is tempting to imagine how the film might have turned out as a full-on Brussels Jewish comedy with some romance and football thrown in, rather than a low-rent Walloon Fever Pitch. It is also tempting to think how Philippe Blasband or Micha Wald might have shot it, but now we’re straying too far into fantasy football.

Sous le figuier might be squeezed into the Belgian family by virtue of director Anne-Marie Étienne, who was born here but has made her career in France with film such as Tôt ou tard (1999) and Si c’était lui… (2007). And while this is a majority French co-production, mainly shot in Luxembourg, there are Belgian connections in the plot and the cast.

It begins in Brussels, where Nathalie, Christophe and Joëlle (Anne Consigny, Jonathan Zaccaï, and Marie Kremer) are experiencing crises at work and in their relationships. While all have children, none of them really has a family. Then there is Nathalie’s friend Selma (Gisèle Casadesus), who is 95 years old and living alone, earning pin money by telling fortunes. Various connections and coincidences bring them together at a large house in the country, where they plan to spend the summer along with Christophe’s three small daughters. It is also where Selma plans to die, gently and happily. As she approaches the end, the others start to see clearly what they need in their own lives.

Superficially light and heart-warming, this sentimental drama draws on some deep, dark anxieties about contemporary life, from the erosion of family relationships to the fear of dying alone. Just as escaping to the country gives the characters distance, so it allows the viewer to think about these things without getting too depressed. This is also the film’s main weakness, since it produces a fantasy of family life and beautiful death that seems very distant from reality.

Finally, what could be more Belgian than Piet Piraat en het Zeemonster, the fourth in a live action franchise from children’s entertainment factory Studio 100. Helped along by TV programmes, theme parks and a whole heap of merchandising, the films routinely figure in the lists of the best attended local films of the year.

text © Ian Mundell 2013

Belgian cinema in March and April

Four Belgian films arrived on local screens around Easter: two populist local comedies, one provocation and a grass-roots retro thriller. None of them have travelled much internationally, mostly with good reason. The one that deserves better is Vincent Lannoo’s Au nom du fils, a scathing satire on sexual abuse and the Church.

Lannoo has known the long gaps between projects that often afflict Belgian directors, with a five-year silence after his second feature, Ordinary Man (2005). But now he is on a roll, with both productivity and quality rising. Bloodsucking mockumentary Vampires (2010) was funny but looked cheap, while Little Glory (2011) succeeded so well in aping US indie drama that it had no voice of its own.

In contrast, Au nom du fils is polished and spends time building its story, so that when the more outrageous punches land they are felt. Some of the new-found smoothness may be down to co-writer Philippe Falardeau (Oscar nominated for directing Monsieur Lazhar), but it could equally be a sign of Lannoo’s growing experience.

The plot centres on Elisabeth (Astrid Whettnall), the earnest host of a Christian radio phone-in show, who learns the hard way how far the Church will go to protect its priests from accusations of sexual abuse. Traumatised, she takes matters into her own hands. The slowly building tension is released in a series of blackly comic and sometimes ultraviolent set pieces. These are best experienced without prior warning, so I’ll say no more.

Une chanson pour ma mère has a much safer sense of humour and is aimed at a broader audience. Directed by Belgian first-timer Joël Franka, the financing means it presents as a majority French co-production, with a cast designed to register on both sides of the border: Sylvie Testud, Patrick Timsit and Guy Lecluyse from over there, Fabrizio Rongione and the increasingly busy Sam Louwyck from over here.

They play the estranged members of an Ardennes farming family, reunited by the mother’s terminal illness. Now bed-ridden, the mother (Michèle Moretti) is fading fast and will not now be able to fulfil her life-long ambition of seeing French singer Dave perform in the flesh. Since the star (now fading) is touring small towns in region, the family decides to ask him to come to their mother’s bedside. When that doesn’t work, they take more drastic steps.

Rather like Johnny Hallyday in Jean-Philippe and Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD, part of the humour comes from Dave playing himself and being self-deprecating about his star status. If, like me, you don’t know who Dave is in the first place this falls a little flat. Even if you do know him and his French TV adverts for Dutch cheese, I suspect it is not exactly hilarious.

That said, Dave does look a little like a wizened Klaus Kinski, which passed the time for me, particularly during a scene where the Werner Herzog-ish Louwyck is trying to coax him out of a Smart car. Visual gags of this kind — Sam Louwyck as a monk under a vow of silence, Sylvie Testud in a Smurf mask — make up the film’s few memorable moments.

The most helpful clue to the pedigree of Une chanson pour ma mère is the co-writing credit given to Benoît Mariage, best known for underdog comedies with Benoît Poelvoorde such as Les Convoyeurs attendent and Cowboy. Franka’s film has the same flavour, describing grand gestures from people living disappointed lives. They may fail, but in the process they learn the value of what they have. That usually means family, and Une chanson pour ma mère falls into line with a particularly tiresome tear-jerking ending.

A more distracting association is that the plot bears a passing resemblance to Calvaire, Fabrice Du Welz’s striking horror film about a small-time entertainer touring the Ardennes who is taken prisoner and put through a grisly ordeal by a farmer. Du Weltz is thanked in the credits, presumably for being a good sport.

The other populist comedy is Bingo, about a staid older couple whose comfortable suburban life is shattered when the vulgar lower classes move in next door. Directed by Rudi Van Den Bossche, until now a specialist in serial kid pix, this is the first movie from the Echt Antwaarps Teater. Over the past 30 years, this Antwerp theatre group has been turning out populist comedy on stage and occasionally on Flemish TV, giving it a following that allowed this big screen treatment to go into production without public subsidy (this is not as rare in Belgium as it once was, but it is still unusual).

At this stage I can’t comment on the results. The film only screened briefly in Brussels, without subtitles to help locals with the Antwerp accent. Clearly I’ll need to catch it on home ground, if it sticks around long enough.

Fat Cat is a Brussels film and so was easier for me to read. It concerns a young safe-breaker, Enzo (Christophe Piette), who is hired to take part in a robbery intended to recover incriminating evidence being used in a turf war between property developers. The job feels bad from the start and delays make Enzo increasingly uneasy. As he waits in the Fat Cat bar for the green light, he tries to work out whether he is the fall guy.

The film was shot in the neighbourhood around Gare du Midi, which has been aggressively redeveloped in recent years into office and retail space. Most of the audience for the film’s short run at the Nova Cinema would have been aware of this, either through grassroots campaigns in favour of displaced residents or militant documentaries about their plight. Seeing that world turned into a neo-noir with a fat, funky soundtrack was a lot of fun, but if you’re not in the know I expect the film’s visibly low-budget and creaky acting are harder to forgive.

I also suspect that directors Patricia Gélise and Nicolas Deschuyteneer, here making their second feature, respect their sources too much. Fat Cat feels like the work of fans rather than auteurs, content to pay homage to film noir rather than take its conventions and transform them.

Belgian cinema in February

Young directors often get carried away with stylistic flourishes, the sort of gratuitous image making that can be forgiven in the hope that it will be brought to order in subsequent films or at least connected more firmly to the storytelling. That’s fine in an environment where a tyro director can turn out a film every year or so, but things tend to move more slowly in Belgium. That’s why we have movies like Le Monde nous appartient, Stephan Streker’s self-indulgent sophomore feature, which came out in February nine years after his debut Michael Blanco (2004). At this rate, he may never get the exuberance out of his system.

The film concerns the crossed destinies of young professional footballer Julien (Ymanol Perset) and petty criminal Pouga (Vincent Rottiers). Julien is on the rise, waiting for a break that will get him into the team. Pouga is slipping back into crime, addicted to the rush he gets from snatching a handbag or stealing a car, yet unable to turn to parole officer Magali (Dinara Droukarova) because he loves her with a ferocious, undeclared passion.

We know from the outset that the two young men meet and that one of them gets knifed. Streker then takes a step back to explore their lives in Brussels, contrasting Julien’s conditioned ambition with Pouga’s joy in the physical sensation of speed and martial arts. Meanwhile actual and surrogate father figures play an important role for both in their transition to full adulthood.

The best way to explain the problem I have with Streker’s visual style is to say that it feels like advertising. I feel as if he is trying to sell me a car rather than tell me a story in which a car is important, or indeed to sell me a rhino rather than use its appearance in an underpass as a symbol of Pouga’s relationship with his father. The images are great — I’ll buy the rhino — but they distract me rather than keep me in the story.

Le Monde nous appartient

That said, some of Streker’s images do work well. There is a taut heist sequence that combines violence and absurd comedy, and the film is very good at exploiting Brussels’ underground spaces, from road tunnels to the pre-Metro. Yet some of the most effective moments are simply about acting, from Zoltan (Reda Kateb) riffing on the need for a criminal to dress sharply to Julien’s father (Olivier Gourmet) not listening to a phone conversation as he slips back into a gambling addiction.

As a Brussels film, Le Monde nous appartient has appropriately mixed credentials. It was funded by the film commissions on both sides of the linguistic divide, and although there is no Flemish spoken you have Sam Louwyck on screen and a substantial musical contribution from Flemish singer-songwriter Ozark Henry. However the young male leads are French rather than Belgian, something that is starting to look like a trend. Think of Rottiers in L’Hiver dernier, Guillaume Gouix and Matila Malliarakis in Hors les murs, or Gouix and Arthur Dupont in Mobile Home. Where are the successors to Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier meant to come from if not local productions?

Also arriving on Belgian screens in February was Kinshasa Kids, a shallow docu-fiction about Congolese street children striving for a better life through music. The film is frustrating on many levels, not least of which is its inability to tell a story or develop characters effectively. The adults come through, but the kids themselves remain two-dimensional. There are many strategies in documentary and fiction for addressing this, even under difficult conditions, but none have been used successfully here.

Then there was Frits & Franky, a sequel to the Flemish hit Frits en Freddy (2010), with writer/producer Marc Punt taking over directing duties from Guy Goossens. The original was a good-natured crime comedy, leaning heavily on reliable actors and a nicely colloquial script, thick with bickering and insult. Only Peter Van den Begin reprises his role in the sequel, with the nervous, gullible Franky (Sven De Ridder) replacing the psychotic Freddy (Tom Van Dyck) as a foil for Frits. That means less energy and a pathetic note to much of the comedy, particularly in a plot strand where Franky becomes besotted with a kind-hearted prostitute. In all, the film is a bit of a drag to watch.

Like its predecessor, Frits & Franky was made without public subsidy, something that is still a relative rarity in Belgium, even with the large amounts of money flowing into production through the national tax shelter. This time, however, a good deal of the plot revolves around animosity between the Flemish and the Dutch, so the goal may be to add cross-border appeal to the formula. Initially set for a Dutch release in early March, the film seems to have fallen off the latest schedules.

Belgian cinema in January

The most powerful moment in Belgian cinema during January was the avant premiere of La Cinquième saison at Cinéma Vendôme in Brussels. With snow and ice on the ground, the salle filled to overflowing. People seemed to huddle together, still wrapped up in coats and scarves, as they watched the film tell its story of a world in which spring and then summer refuse to arrive. Entering into the chilly, magic realist tale was not at all difficult.

La Cinquième saison

This is the third feature of directing couple Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens, American and Flemish respectively, but long resident in Wallonia. After filming Khadak (2006) in Mongolia and Altiplano (2009) in the Andes, La Cinquième saison represents their first wholly domestic fiction. Filmed close to their home in the Condroz (a band of rolling agricultural land bordering the hills and forests of the Ardennes), the film is mainly in French but was majority funded by the Flemish Film Fund. Hence, a properly Belgian film.

Thematically it continues their concern with the environment, community and destiny, explored though strikingly constructed images. As before they draw on local folklore, the difference being that this time the folklore is Belgian rather than Mongolian or Peruvian. In previous films the viewer had to take it on trust that the more ornate images drew on authentic sources, but here the rituals, with their masks and giants, are instantly familiar, if not from life or the media then from the paintings of James Ensor.

La Cinquième saison

For local viewers, a layer of political references also comes into play. One Flemish character, an itinerant beekeeper played by Sam Louwyck, suffers a fate satirically emblematic of tensions between the north and south of the country. Another well-known Flemish face, actor Peter Van Den Begin, plays a character engaged in a battle of wills with an unresponsive rooster, the symbol of Wallonia. It ends badly.

In the context of Belgian cinema, the film fits into a long tradition of fantasy and fable, yet also joins a small but significant body of rural storytelling, drawing visual inspiration from the work of artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Constant Permeke. It’s notable that the cinematography was by Hans Bruch Jr, who shot Gust Van Den Berghe’s equally striking winter fable Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (2010).

The directors say that La Cinquième saison closes a trilogy of films and that their next project will be different: a comic road movie provisionally titled Kebab Royal.

January also saw the release of Fien Troch’s Kid, a rural story of an entirely different kind. It concerns two young boys whose mother is struggling to maintain a farm in eastern Flanders after the disappearance of her husband. As the money runs out, the threat of violence from her creditors becomes ever more tangible.

Set in the summer, and shot in bright, clear images from the child’s point of view, the film builds up a level of menace and tension that is quite remarkable. Yet it also proves too much to sustain, and the conclusion doesn’t quite hit home as it should. Nevertheless, Kid remains an impressive continuation of Troch’s strongly expressed worldview, begun with Someone Else’s Happiness (2005) and Unspoken (2008).

In addition to these films from established directors, two relative newcomers also had national releases in January.

Kadija Leclere’s debut feature Le Sac de farine tells the story of a young Moroccan girl, raised in Belgium in the 1970s, but forced to move back to her family’s home village at the age of eight. Left in the care of an aunt (Hiam Abbas) she grows up with independent ideas that put her on the side of rebelling students in the mid-1980s. The story is attractive enough, but Leclere’s direction is uneven and there are some frustrating narrative loose ends.

David Lambert’s Hors les murs is a more assured debut, recounting the shifting dependencies in a gay relationship in Brussels, from first meeting to bitter parting. Performances by Guillaume Gouix, Matila Malliarakis and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin are spot-on, and the city’s bohemian side is pleasingly realised.