Why now? 37 years after the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium which led to the deaths of 39 football fans at the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool FC and Juventus, four separate new dramatised and doc projects focus on one of the darkest nights in football history.
Among the projects, Hans Herbots’ drama Heysel 85 is being produced through Menuetto Film. There is a small-scale documentary being made by Canvas. Production outfit De Mensen is making The Heysel Stadium Disaster, a four-episode drama series directed by Cecilia Verheyden and that features a police officer, a doctor and fans caught up in the disaster.
Arguably, the most high profile of the projects is The Heysel Tragedy, the documentary series by Jan Verheyen and Jean-Philippe Leclaire. Adapted from the book ‘Heysel, A European tragedy,’ written by Jean-Philippe Leclaire and produced by Scope Pictures, the series premiered at the Rome FilmFest in the autumn. It also showed at IDFA and the Red Sea Festival. The series has now screened to public acclaim on Belgian TV through RTL to bumper audiences.
“To be honest, it is a mystery,” Verheyen says of the current spate of films about the tragedy all arriving at once. “It’s not an anniversary…I really think it is a coincidence.”
The veteran Belgian filmmaker points out that there has been a rise recently in incidents of football hooliganism. There were deaths after a stampede at an African Cup of Nations match in Cameroon last January. Fans had horrific experiences outside the State De France in Paris at the hands of riot police before the Euros Final in 2021.
After Heysel, stringent safety measures were introduced. Authorities vowed that such disasters would not be allowed to happen again. Memories, though, have faded. This, Verheyen suggests, has given the Heysel disaster a “certain relevance” and topicality.
The series was originated by Scope Pictures’ Geneviève Lemal. “She has been trying to get a feature film off the ground for years and she finally said, no, maybe this is a story which needs to be told in all its detail in a documentary,” says Verheyen.
Over the six episodes, the filmmakers follow the stories of various protagonists from the moment they decided to go to the match to the final Heysel trials at the Court of Justice in Brussels. The protagonists include “victims, culprits, people involved [at] several levels, and you follow their dramatic arc.”
Various players who took part in the match, including Liverpool’s defender Mark Lawrenson and Juventus keeper Stefano Tacconi are also interviewed.
“We took great pains in trying to film everybody in an interesting location.” Verheyen remembers. He and his team went to Turin; they went to Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium; they went to the King Baudouin Stadium, as the site of the Heysel in Brussels was renamed. They wanted the documentary to have “a certain visual allure.”
This was certainly not a “highlight” in the history of UEFA or one that the organisation initially wanted to be reminded about. “They [UEFA] were not exactly encouraging us but once we made the decision we were going to move forward with this and explained what our goals were, they were actually very, very helpful,” the director pays tribute to the “fair and co-operative” behaviour of the European football authorities. “They did not ask for editorial control. They did not ask to see finished episodes.”
Verheyen was in his 20s when the disaster happened. “We all remember where we were on May 29th 1985,” he says of a date which became seared on the Belgian people’s consciousnesses. “It was a bit of a national trauma.”
What made the tragedy all the more shocking is that it was broadcast live to an audience of 400 million viewers. Even after the deaths, the match went ahead. As Verheyen recalls, when viewers tuned in for the evening kick-off, “the riots and the panic and the violence was still going on. The commentators didn’t know exactly what was happening.”
The filmmakers assembled huge amounts of footage from the night of the match. They have access both to what was broadcast on television and to material shot by freelance camera operators. “The way that was filmed, the total lack of self-censorship would be impossible now,” Verheyen says of the graphic and shocking imagery of fans caught up in the fatal stampede.
What caused the tragedy? Was it the crumbling stadium, the ill-conceived ticketing arrangements, the inept security, the poor organisation from UEFA or the aggression of the charging Liverpool fans? “You start to realise that, as somebody in the documentary says, a disaster is in fact a whole series of different little accidents which finally add up to the disaster…and if only one of these accidents had not taken place, maybe the whole thing would not have taken place,” the director reflects. He also draws a distinction between “responsibility” and “guilt, which implies some sort of pre-meditation.”
The Liverpool fans, some of whom were charged and convicted of involuntary manslaughter, clearly didn’t intend to kill the fans in Section Z. As their lawyers later proved, none of the 39 victims had wounds that could be directly attributed to violence from those fans. The victims all died from suffocation.
Verheyen met one English survivor from the Heysel who still goes to his therapist once a week – 37 years after the tragedy. “He cannot get the images out of his head. And if you look at the footage, I think if you were there, it must have been a life altering experience.”
Some of the survivors were furious that the press didn’t intervene on the evening of the tragedy. Instead, the photographers and camera operators carried on taking pictures and filming. Verheyen asked one of the cameramen why he didn’t put down his camera and go to help. The cameraman replied that one of his eyes was closed and that the other was looking through the lens. What he saw was in black and white and the lens somehow seemed to distance him from the carnage in front of him.
“Heysel was almost like a war zone at that moment. It was about survival. It was about doctors making a distinction within a split second that that guy is beyond help, let’s concentrate on the other guy,” Verheyen says of the “triage” performed by the medics. He can’t help asking himself what he would have done if he had been caught up in the events on the May evening. Would he have run for the exit or would he have stayed and helped?
Verheyen acknowledges that both Liverpudlians and some of the Italians were wary when first approached by the documentary makers. However, his co-director Jean-Philippe Leclaire knew many of the subjects through his research for his book.
This was Verheyen’s first documentary but the veteran filmmaker says he is now hooked on the format. He relished working with “a relatively small team,” at least compared to his fiction films. “We didn’t have a catering table every day for instance,” he notes.The director quickly realised, though, that he needed to be very sensitive and tactful with his interviewees. “There were a number of the Italian people, the victims, people who were there and who survived but also people who lost their husband or lost their son. For them, it is 37 years ago. Every time somebody makes something like this, the wounds are re-opened,” Verheyen reflects. “You should not underestimate the trauma and scars this experience has left…”
