Welcome Home

Tom Heene’s Welcome Home, which only recently received an invitation to Venice, and Patrice Toye’s Little Black Spiders are the Flemish eye-catchers at the 36th World Film Festival in Montreal (23 August-3 September). Heene’s debut feature will be screening in the First Films World Competition, while Toye’s film will be celebrating its world premiere in the prestigious Focus on World Cinema section. In total, no less than 10 Flemish (co)productions were confirmed for the Canadian fest’s line-up.

With selections for both Montreal and the International Critics’ Week in Venice, filmmaker Tom Heene has pulled off an impressive feat. In Montreal’s First Films World CompetitionWelcome Home is in the running for one of three Zenith Awards. Producer of Welcome Home is Tomas Leyers for Minds Meet. The Brussels-based production company even has a second film screening in Montreal: minority co-production The World Belongs to Us by director Stephan Streker was confirmed for the Focus on World Cinema programme.

Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season and Tom Heene's feature debut Welcome Home are invited in Official Competition and the Venice International Critics' Week respectively. But there's even more to discover: this year's Venice line-up also includes three co-productions with Flanders: the Venice Days opener Pinocchio, Venice Days selected Kinshasa Kids and Tango libre in Orizzonti.

The Fifth Season is a haunting tale. A mysterious calamity strikes: spring refuses to come. The cycle of nature is capsized. Alice, Thomas and Octave, three kids in a village deep in the Ardennes forest, struggle to make sense of the world that is collapsing around them.

Tom Heene’s directorial debut Welcome Home is among the seven features to be presented as part of this year’s 27th Venice International Critics' Week (29 August-8 September). The film shows three intense moments in the life of Lila, who is the common thread between three men she will meet during significant instants of her existence.

Describing himself as an ‘audiovisual creator’, Tom Heene was production manager on films such as Pulsar and The Five Obstructions, while also creating audiovisual sound and image installations such as DarkMatr. Welcome Home stars Manah Depauw, Kurt Vandendriessche, Felipe Mafasoli and Nader Farman.

Welcome Home, Tom Heene’s debut feature, began as three interlinked short films, 3 X Lila. The project is set in Brussels, the city where the director is based. At night, a car carrying some spoiled young ‘eurocrats’ to a party, crashes into a bicyclist. She is badly hurt. This is Lila, a young woman recently returned to Belgium from travels abroad. Fiercely independent, she is in the process of splitting up with her boyfriend Benjamin, even if she is still as physically attracted to him as ever. We see her arriving at the airport in Brussels and accompanying an Iranian man in the bus to the city centre. He hasn’t been in the city for years and is bewildered by how it has changed, with its new array of skyscrapers and glass-fronted office blocks.

Text : Geoffrey Macnab ; Portrait : Bart Dewaele

The basis was seeing Brussels as a map of trajectories that cross each other,’ Heene says of the Short Cuts-style structure of Welcome Home. 'I’ve lived 20 years in Brussels. People leave and people come back… the film is close to how I feel about this town.’ If Welcome Home is a love letter to Brussels, it is a very barbed one. The city is in a constant state of flux. This is underlined by the different languages used by the people in the film (English, Dutch, French) by the coming and going of the characters and by the transformations in the buildings. The Iranian man, revisiting Brussels after so long away, tells Lila that the architect who has built all these impersonal, modernist structures should be ‘whipped’.