Interviews

Producer Hans Everaert (Menuetto Film) talks to Business Doc Europe about the late Jan Hoet, one of the most controversial European art curators of recent decades and profiled in Luc Vrydaghs’s dynamic auteur feature doc, close to completion and ready for delivery in early 2024. “With Jan Hoet, curation was from the gut. It was a physical kind of experience,” says Everaert.

Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe, whose new documentary The Jacket screened at the Flemish CONNEXT showcase, has been at the Gent Festival this week, just down the road from Antwerp, but he hasn’t been showing a movie. “I work here as an editor. It’s really just taking formats, making DCPs for the cinemas thinks like that, just technical work,” Poppe tells BDE of his current “side hustle” between making his own movies.

This week Sarah Lederman was singled out by Oscar-nominated Belgian director Lukas Dhont as one of the Future Five group of highly talented emerging filmmakers from the region. Lederman was the sole docmaker. “People say sometimes about me that I see things they didn’t see,” Lederman reflects to BDE, “I look deeply into things, I love details and I just love the things that make the everyday special.”

Film partnerships in Flanders sometimes start in surprising ways. The collaboration between director Marjolijn Prins (whose new feature doc project Fantastique won the Perfect Pitch Award at CONNEXT this week) and producer Mirna Everhard from Serendipity Films can be traced back to when they worked in the same bar. The director and producer explain all to BDE.

What starts as a story about humans, kidney stones and stones in a geological sense, slowly unfolds into a meditation on ecological grief. “We always say that stone is silent, it is dead. I wanted to do something opposite and bring it very much to life. The kidney stone is a metaphor for that,” says director Benoot.

This week Thom M. Vander Beken presented his work-in-progress that deals with a highly sensitive inflammatory subject, that of the systematic round-up of 10,000 Jews in Antwerp in 1942 and their subsequent deportation to the death camps. “Even 80 years after the end of the war, many in Flanders still find it difficult to fully acknowledge the tragedy that occurred,” the director said.

At MIA 2023, the creative team behind Italian outfit B&B Film are pitching their new non-fiction project, titled Achille Lauro – The Terror Cruise. The docuseries explores “one of the most tragic operations of international terrorism,” through “the direct testimonies of the protagonists who lived through the hours of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, and the subsequent Sigonella diplomatic crisis.”

Luca Rea’s new documentary tells a tale of mischief that may just have led to murder, all set within the high-end art world and along the canals of Livorno. “The Modigliani Affaire is an investigative documentary, a cold case that tells the incredible story of a prank that got out of hand,” the Fandango team behind the film tell Business Doc Europe.

As a film subject, there’s nobody quite like Jesus, and Norbert Busè’s new doc project suggests that each new generation needs a new cinematic Messiah. “Famous directors such as Pier Paulo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard and Martin Scorsese have brought him before the camera. No life has been filmed as often as his. The Jesus film adaptations are very diverse and always a reflection of their time,” the director tells BDE.

Hans Everaert is at the Flanders showcase this week with 2m2 by Volkan Üce, whose 2021 documentary All-in was received rapturously by critics and audiences alike. Currently in pre-production, 2m2 is a story about burial, immigration, religion and commerce and focuses on Turkish undertaker based in Belgium. “He has a special kind of feeling for humour without losing sight of content and the theme,” Everaert says of director Üce.