Little Heaven

This week, the Open Doek Festival (20 – 29 April) kicked off in Turnhout, while Leuven is getting ready for the 8th edition of the International Documentary Festival DOCVILLE (27 April – 5 May). Both programs house a large selection of Flemish titles, ranging from Daniel Lambo’s Dry Branches of Iran to Berlinale attendees Anton Corbijn Inside Out andAsparragos.

For the eighth consecutive year, DOCVILLE highlights the best documentaries and awards prizes in various sections. This year, Flanders is well represented in its national competition with more than ten short and feature-length film titles.

Lieven Corthouts’ Little Heaven is to screen at the Good Pitch²  Festival at The Hague (27 March). At the fest, eight documentary filmmakers working on human rights and justice projects are invited to present their films to a number of leading broadcasters and NGOs, as well as other participants who might be able to help them spread their work.

Little Heaven is the harrowing tale of an extraordinary orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. On their thirteenth birthday, children in this particular orphanage are told that they were born with HIV. It is a hard and demanding story, but also a hopeful one, thanks to the zest for life shown by the children’s and their carers.

A record-breaking haul of eleven documentaries and four docu projects from Flanders have been selected  for this year’s IDFA, the international Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (16-27 November). Works from Jeremy De Ryckere and Kristof Bilsen, who recently graduated from RITS and NFTS (UK) respectively,  are shown in the Student Documentary competition. The other entries feature in the Reflecting Images: Panorama, Paradocs section and IDFA pitching Forum.

Both Jeremy De Ryckere’s The Heir and Kristof Bilsen’s White Elephant compete for the IDFA Award for Best Student Documentary, worth €2,500. The Heir tells the story of a father, Raf, and a son, Dominique, and their relationship to their passion: horse racing, a long family tradition. White Elephant is a documentary about the Central Post Office and its employees in Kinshasa, DR Congo. This grandiose relic of a colonial past has trapped its employees in a frozen timewarp from which they are planning their escape. Last year the Award for Best Student Documentary went to the Flemish doc What’s in a Name by Eva Küpper.

Little Heaven, a creative documentary by Lieven Corthouts, is selected for this year’s 9th Berlinale Talent Campus (12 – 17 Febr). The Talent Campus brings together up-and-coming filmmakers during the Berlinale. Little Heaven is part of Doc Station, a training programme for documentary filmmakers.

Little Heaven tells the story of Lydia. When she turns 13 Lydia has to move to a second house in the orphanage where she lives. This marks the point where sister Saba has to tell her she’s been born with HIV. All the children in her new home are carriers of the virus. Still they try to have a normal life like other teenagers. Little Heaven tells the story of this life-changing moment. For a year we closely follow the thirteen-year-old. The evolution from being a child to being a teenager and growing up plays a key role in this documentary.