It’s the Second World War but not as audiences generally know it. Koen Mortier, the Belgian director of irreverent punk comedy Ex-Drummer, is behind the hugely ambitious new 11 x 50-minute documentary series Voices Of Liberation, presented as a work-in-progress at RE>CONNEXT 2021. “It’s a modern version of the liberation,” he tells Business Doc Europe.
To make the series, Mortier and his team have been trawling archives and attics, looking for letters, diaries and testimony from civilians, resistance fighters, soldiers and many others involved in a conflict that convulsed Europe and the world for six years. The aim is to engage a younger audience which may feel that the events between 1939 and 1945 are a long way removed from their own lives.
“It has been an incredible search for stories, for letters, for the right hosts,” Mortier says.
The hosts of each episode all have a strong personal connection to the war. They include English actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Belgian-Wallonian director Bouli Lanners, Flemish singer Bart Peeters, Algerian-French actress Sarah Kaminsky; and German actor Christian Berkel, known for his roles in films such as Downfall and Inglourious Basterds.
Brodie-Sangster’s great-grandfather was Major Anthony Bertram who lived seemingly quietly with his wife Barbara in sleepy West Sussex but was actually running a “secret house” for French resistance agents and European spies being transported by the British secret service.
Lanners’ grandfather came from a village in Wallonia that was utterly destroyed. The British and US soldiers built wooden barracks there – and that’s where the inhabitants lived for several years.
Meanwhile, German host Berkel’s family history includes an extraordinary love story between his parents: a German man and a Jewish woman. The woman had to flee because of Hitler and lived in Spain and Argentina. The man, a military doctor, became a senior German officer on the eastern Front. She was pregnant with his child. They met up 10 years later, stayed together and eventually had Berkel.
Kaminsky talks about her extraordinary father, Adolfo Kaminsky, a brilliant forger who fought for the French Resistance during the war and helped save thousands of Jewish families.
The hosts are shown at the locations where their families had some of their most momentous experiences. For example, Lanners is shown on the exact spot where the Battle of the Bulge started, while Sarah Kaminsky is shown in the locations where the Jewish families were saved.
The filmmakers have also found the most precise and vivid footage they can of the events that are talked about.
No, Mortier’s own family history isn’t as colourful as that of the hosts he has recruited for his documentary series. Growing up, he didn’t know that much about the war. However, when he grew curious and suggested a project about the war to Dutch FilmWorks’ CEO Willem Pruijssers, the response was immediately very enthusiastic.
Mortier has striven to capture the youthful vitality of his subjects. This won’t be one of those wartime documentaries full of elderly talking heads. It will have energy and panache. “It’s a modern version of the liberation,” he says. “Most of the liberation material is very stiff and very official…I’ve tried to make something that is more human, more filmic. I’ve tried to make something totally different!”
There is already evidence that younger audiences in Benelux are intrigued by the wartime years. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, shot partly in the Netherlands, was a big hit in the region. More recently, Dutch drama The Forgotten Battle has been a runaway box-office success for its distributor September Film, in spite of Covid capacity restrictions and the fact the film will soon be available to watch on Netflix.
Mortier hasn’t seen The Forgotten Battle film yet. He has been too frantic writing and preparing Voices Of Liberation to come up for air.
Voices Of Liberation is produced by Mortier’s regular partner, Eurydice Gysel, through production company Czar. It is backed by Screen Flanders, Belgian Tax Shelter (BNP Paribas Fortis), NL Film Production Incentive, Netflix (Flanders) & Telenet. Distribution is handled by Dutch FilmWorks.
