It’s clear that Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke sees traces of himself as a youngster in the 13-year-old Bo, the effervescent main character in his new feature documentary Planet B, a world premiere in Grand Angle at Visions du Réel. She is a teenage climate activist who, together with her friend Luca, throws herself into protests.
As a kid, Van Eecke was similarly idealistic and had his own brushes with the authorities. “I think I was 15 and I went to a youth camp in the Pyrenees in France. It was against the construction of a road where you had the last bears,” the filmmaker remembers. The protesters tried to stop heavy machinery coming to the site. The French police then turned up in large numbers and were very aggressive.
“It marked me for the rest of my life,” the director says of an episode he describes as being like “a political crash course.”
The events gave him an insight into what it was like being on the front line.
“When the youth came on the streets, I was so happy to see this as I am a climate activist [too],” Van Eecke says of the mass protests which broke out in Belgium in 2018/2019 – and in which many school age kids took part. They were inspired by Greta Thunberg, the precocious young Swede who has become a global figurehead for environmental activism.
“I said, my next film is in the streets,” Van Eecke remembers his initial enthusiasm about the protests. He was struck, though, by the vicious backlash against the kids from conservative Belgians in the mainstream media and politics “All these young girls, they received so much hate also from a large part of the population.”
The youthful protesters were criticised for skipping off school to go on marches. They were called naive and stupid, and were accused of being manipulated by professional militants.
Van Eecke began scouting, looking for young activists to appear in his film – and soon found his two main characters.
As with all of his documentaries, the director prepared by spending a lot of time with his subjects. He wanted them to trust him and to be at ease on camera.
“Bo is just really intelligent and really nice,” Van Eecke says of his main protagonist. She and her friend Luca were 14 when he started filming them. They charmed him. With their mix of enthusiasm and idealism, they were also screen naturals. “I started filming with them and felt very quickly it was worth continuing the filming process…I said to them that I wanted to stand with them in this struggle.”
At first, Bo wasn’t part of Extinction Rebellion but she quickly became radicalised.
The director reminded her that when he was her age, he was also an activist and “fell into civil disobedience.” However, in that period, the scientific information about the danger to the future of the planet from climate change wasn’t yet available.
Van Eecke knew he needed to be sensitive and respectful of his subjects. They were adolescents in a formative period in their lives. This was a delicate coming of age film, as well as one about the battle against environmental catastrophe.
“Of course, I included the parents of both youngsters in the process, talking to them about what I wanted to make and also saying to them from the beginning that I was not going to put the film into circulation without them viewing it and giving final comments.”
The teenagers were very open. They were as frank and outspoken about gender politics as they were about eco issues. “Both of them [Bo and Luca] laughed a lot when they saw the film and I was very happy to see that they recognised themselves,” Van Eecke notes of their reaction to the documentary.
As the film shows, the teenagers are energetic and high spirited. “Every colour is more coloured. When you are sad, you are very sad and when you are happy, you are very happy,” the director says of the heightened emotions the youngsters feel. The other side is that they also endure moments of “deep loneliness and deep sadness.”
The director knew from his own experiences that street protests can be both exhilarating and very daunting. “It’s a heavy job. You cannot disengage…I try to capture this also. Once you get very serious about this activism, it is really a heavy job.”
Bo and Luca were very young but Van Eecke was struck by how “mature” they were in talking about the issues that the protests raised.
Planet B was produced by Hanne Phlypo at Clin d’oeil Fims. She also worked on the director’s other recent project, Holding Up The Sky (2023), which looks at the plight of the Yanomami people in the tropical rainforest in Brazil as they deal with marauding white industrialists. Their first film together was Samuel In The Clouds (2016), about an elderly ski lift operator in Bolivia.
“Never change a winning team, the say! Hanne and me, we love to work together,” the director enthuses about his producer.
The aim is to launch Planet B in cinemas in Belgium in the autumn. There has already been strong international interest in the film. This may be a very local, very Belgian story but, as Van Eecke observes, it also “expresses something universal.” Idealists everywhere will be able to identify with the issues it raises.For her part, Bo believes the film can also be used as a campaigning tool to drive the message home that the world risks imminent ecological collapse unless action is taken now.
