Kids are laughing and playing around. They’re having a pillow fight or playing football indoors. Some are snoozing. There are 15 of them staying in the house and they’re not that keen on washing dishes. These are the young protagonists of How Do You Spell Home?, the debut feature doc from Louisiana Mees-Fongang (which world-premiered in IDFA Luminous 2023).
The young people featured are refugees who’ve arrived in Belgium as unaccompanied minors. At times, the Juneco community centre where they’re living seems like a refuge, a place where they’re safe, but at the same time it’s only a temporary home.
Mees-Fongang was working for production company Sonderland when she first heard about the home for the young refugees. “In the beginning, the idea was to make something small but when I came there [to Juneco] and saw these children and youngsters, I would say that because I am a very intuitive director and screenwriter, I just felt so curious about that place and what it meant for such a multicultural group to live together, what their stories were and what the present story was in this house,” she remembers.
The kids came from many different parts of the world: Eritrea, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan among them. They needed to figure out what they would do when they left the centre (they couldn’t stay beyond the age of 18.) “What I found intriguing and beautiful was the correlation between this fear of what is going to be next; being in this new country, still having difficulty with the language and adopting to the culture and, at the same time, being in this time-frame as a youngster where you are opening up more to the world.”
When it came to winning the trust of the kids, it helped that the filmmakers had already won the confidence of the “coaches” at the centre.
Mees-Fongang talks of the “gentle and slow way” in which she approached the filmmaking. “There were many times we went with the camera, we would put the camera in the middle of the room but we would not film,” the director remembers. “If there were points I felt it was too intrusive or too intimate [a moment], I would not film. I would stay in the distance.”
She adds that she is not the type of filmmaker who turns up, “robs” everything she needs in a “colonial” way and then moves on. She wanted to establish a long-term relationship with her subjects.
The kids were aware of the camera’s presence and were therefore more comfortable when shooting actually began. If they were having a bad day, they knew the filmmakers would leave them alone.
Shooting began in the autumn of 2019. Production was interrupted by Covid, a traumatic time for some of the youngsters.
All of the youngsters involved in the film have now moved out of the home. This means they “get a bit nostalgic” when they watch the documentary (which they have already been shown). It captures “a very precious moment of their lives.”
Inevitably, the ties between the youngsters have loosened as they’ve all gone their separate ways within their lives. The film is a nevertheless a poignant reminder of old friendships and what they went through together. The centre was their home and they experienced many moments of closeness there.
The tone of the documentary continually changes. At times, the kids seem happy and carefree. “Part of their reality is complex and hard. They had tough moments. But, at the same time, they’re young, active and full of energy and potential. This is also something I really found important to show,” says Mees-Fongang.
The documentary was produced by Diplodokus, one of the most inventive and adventurous production companies in Flanders. “I had decided there was a bigger movie in this place. I could sense it, I could feel it, I wanted to dive much deeper,” the director explains how the project eventually turned into a full-scale feature. One of the first steps was to make a “clip of 15 minutes” explaining the idea to the producers.
The director has various new projects in the pipeline, both in fiction and documentary. She is unusual among young Belgian filmmakers in that she moves seamlessly between the doc and fiction disciplines.
“Every time I make a fiction, it comes from documentary research,” she says of her “flexible” approach to the two forms. After graduating from KASK film school, she took the deliberate decision to achieve various credits in Political Science and Government at Ghent University.
“I felt at a certain point that I needed a more thorough understanding of the history of migration and the politics and sociology of globalisation,” she says. “One should not become a filmmaker too early in life. I feel you need to live life and experience life in many diverse ways before you can really be creative and carry the responsibility of making imagery and sharing that with so many people.”
