CONNEXT 23

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.

In this humorous and heart-warming documentary, the relationship between a 103-year-old mother and her mentally challenged daughter (62), who have lived together for years in a Belgian care-home, must be refashioned as their health begins to fail. Bye Mom is, at heart, a charming mother-and-daughter love story.

The life story of Walter Arfeuille is an odd and perhaps even tragic one. He is a man driven by a quest for recognition who once strived to stand atop the competitive strong-man world in Belgium. Now, well into his sixties and struggling with physical issues, he attempts to grab a final modest headline, all watched over by a film crew who he thinks can help him prove himself to the world one last time.

Flemish producer Kristian Van der Heyden and co-director Jimmy Hendrickx updated BDE on the status of their project about the very real spectre of modern-day human slavery. The makers are looking to complete the film by the end of 2023 ahead of a Q2/3 festival roll-out in 2024. “I learned a lot from Jeremy about being an activist... I hope he has the courage to never stop the fight," says Hendrickx of co-director Jeremy Kewuan.

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.

Fantastique by Marjolijn Prins and produced by Serendiity Films won the Perfect Pitch Award while the 5-part series She They Us - Towards an Equal Future, directed by Zaïde Bil, Heleen Declercq and Sam Peeters and produced by Cassette for timescapes, won the Work in Progress Award. The total value of all the awards at CONNEXT 2023 came to approximately 80,000 euros.

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.