“I have absolutely no expectations,” Steven Dhoedt, filmmaker and producer at Brussels-based Visualantics, wryly responds when asked what he is hoping for from the inaugural Flanders Film Days showcase (7-8 October). Nonetheless, Visualantics is a major presence at the event. The company has four separate feature documentaries being presented as works in progress.
The four films are Glenn Dumortier’s Little Monster (the filmmaker investigating why his grandmother drank herself to death); Mahboul, directed by Jan Vromman and Jannes Callens, about a psychotherapeutic institution near Charleroi with a ground-breaking approach to patient care; Brecht Debackere’s Nostalgia for the Future, a paean to the life and work of film artist Chris Marker, and Transition Fog from directors Maui Druez and Preben Verledens, and which chronicles a battle for survival in a landscape dominated by the eucalyptus industry and devastated by forest fires.
“For most of these projects, it is the very first time they have been shared with such a large audience of film professionals. It’s a good opportunity to see how they are received and what feedback we get from the room. Anything else is a nice extra, already a plus…I’ve done so many of these things that it’s good not to get your hopes too high,” the producer strikes a low-key note.
Visualantics was founded by Debackere and Dhoedt in 2003, when they were still at film school. They work alongside producer-editor Gert Van Berckelaer. “Initially a small, obnoxious collective of like-minded film students,” is how the company describes itself.
“I think we are less obnoxious now, but it is still the same spirit,” Dhoedt observes that the freewheeling ethos which defined the company in its early years still remains.
When asked about the editorial policy, he replies that “we don’t really have one.” Projects are chosen simply on the basis of the topic or the way the film is being made.
For Little Monster, director Glenn Dumortier has cast an elderly lady to portray his grandmother. The casting process is itself part of the film – and this sequence will be shown to delegates in Ghent. The project is backed by broadcaster VRT and is midway through production with a likely delivery date of April next year. It is heavily based around archive. Rotterdam-based Serious Film is the Dutch co-producer and Wallie Pollé’s Lightlines Distribution will handle the Dutch release.
Visualantics discovered Little Monster several years ago through a pitching event for emerging Belgian documentary makers at Docville in Leuven. “Glenn had just graduated from film school and he was doing a very casual pitch on Little Monster. He also showed parts of his graduation project which really impressed me…Glenn really has a way with words. The way that he writes is very touching.”
In Mahboul, the filmmakers make a fiction film with the patients and caregivers in the institution. “One part is an observational documentary but it has a film in a film as well, a fiction short written with everyone there.”
On Nostalgia for the Future, the company is working with Italian partner, Ghirigori, and with Dutch outfit Serious Film. The documentary reflects Debackere’s admiration for Chris Marker – or to give him his real name, Christian Bouche-Villeneuve. Marker has had a huge influence on film culture with experimental works and essay films like La Jetée and Sans Soleil, but the public still knows little about him. Dhoedt admits that he himself first found out about La Jetée after watching Terry Gilliam’s 1995 feature 12 Monkeys, which was directly inspired by it.
The first five minutes of Nostalgia for the Future (which will be ready for early 2026) will be shown in Ghent. “That’s the movie that is in the most advanced stage. We have a picture lock and are starting sound post-production now. We were thinking what to show and we decided we’d just to show the opening of the film which gives a pretty idea of what to expect.”
Maui Druez and Preben Verledens, the directors of Transition Fog, have already worked with Visualantics on their earlier film, I Am Golden Karen, about a young Thai rapper who has grown up in Thailand but yearns to return to Karen State, Burma.
“They came back with a second idea which I also liked,” Dhoedt recalls. The new doc is entirely set in a small town in Portugal that was hugely affected by the forest fires. One small village is trying to find a way to survive and adapt to climate change. Their problems are exacerbated by the “huge eucalyptus monoculture which is part of the paper industry.” Eucalyptus trees are, of course, highly flammable, but also very profitable.
“For every film, we build an outreach plan. This is something that the Flanders Audiovisual Fund asks us [to do]. There is a little bit of funding to develop this. The outreach plan is then used more as a guidebook to set up an impact strategy,” the company founder explains how he and his colleagues always think about audiences and distribution at the start of projects.
Visualantics is committed to co-production for practical reasons. “We don’t do it for the sake of it because it does take time. If we were able to finance something entirely within Flanders, I would definitely prefer that, but very often that is just not possible.”
The hope this week in Ghent is to pique the curiosity of festival directors.
Dhoedt acknowledges that the theatrical market for docs in Belgium remains “really small…I think people go to cinema less and less and they’d rather go to fiction than documentary – but you do have a loyal audience who find these movies.”
After more than 20 years in existence, Visualantics has a formidable back catalogue. The company works with aggregators and also has titles available to stream from its own website. “It works very well for certain films…and it doesn’t work for certain [other] films,” Dhoedt observes of the mixed fortunes of in-house VOD operation.
After more than two decades, the company still remains “entirely independent.” Alongside the four titles being presented in Ghent this week, Visualantics is hatching plenty of other projects.
On the TV side, there are two music series in development. One, yet to be titled, is about Brussels’ underground music culture. The second, The Sound of Soul, charts the history of K-Pop. (This is a co-production with South Korea). Meanwhile, the company is already aboard as Belgian partner on Dutch director Menno Otten’s new immersive, archive-based documentary, Still City.
With his director’s hat on, Dhoedt is currently working on Sunrise Kids which he describes as “a chronicle of rebellious youth in Japan over the generations.”
The company’s sense of irony hasn’t changed with the years “We gradually matured (ever so slightly) and made a modest reputation for ourselves in the fields of creative documentaries and short fiction,” Visualantics writes on its website – a very modest summation of the achievements of what remains one of the most adventurous production outfits in Flanders.
