Michaël Roskam’s highly praised debut Bullhead won the Best Feature Award at the Victoria Film Festival in Canada (3-12 February). This victory will surely give cast, crew and supporters alike a boost of self-confidence in view of the upcoming Academy Awards prize ceremony this Sunday. Bullhead is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

After 10 days of more than 150 films from all over the world, the film claimed the award for Best Feature at the Victoria Film Festival earlier this month. The award is one more decoration in what is now becoming a true victory march around movie fests all over the world, following among others the Jury and Critics Prize at Beaune and the Propeller Award for Best Film at the Motovun Festival. The film was also rated an exceptional 3.5 out of 4 points in the highly influential AP movie review.

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Two major Flemish productions, Germaine and Time of My Life, have been boosted by a slew of positive news and numbers. Both films are based on true stories and have succeeded in catching the attention of media and public alike. Nic Balthazar’sTime of My Life was receveid enthusiastically at Berlin's EFM, while Frank Van Mechelen's Germainehas proven itself as a true box-office hit.

Films Distribution, international sales agent of Balthazar’s second feature Time of My Life, confirmed that the film drew a great deal of attention at Berlin’s European Film Market. Towards the end of March, Time of My Life will be released in The Netherlands, Luxemburg and the French-speaking region of Belgium. Time of My Life has already managed to claim two major festival awards: the Audience Award for Best Film at both the RamDam Festival and The End Festival in Amsterdam. The film was also honoured with a special mention from the jury at the prestigious Rome Film Festival.

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Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas is set for a Dutch premiere in Amsterdam’s Pathé De Munt cinema on 7 March as part of the 15th Amsterdam Gay & Lesbian Film Festival  (Pink Film Days, 15-25 March), which kicks off a week later. Meanwhile Peccadillo Pictures has signed on to handle the film's distribution in the UK and Ireland.

The Dutch premiere, which will be attended by cast and crew, is just the start of a tour in The Netherlands. North Sea Texas will screen in a number of cities, including Nijmegen and Den Haag. In March, the film will also feature in the line-up of the BUFF (13-17 March), the International Children and Young People’s Film Festival in Malmö, Sweden. North Sea Texas recently made its US debut at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and was picked up for US distribution by Strand Releasing.

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Two concepts for animated features from Flanders, Jan Bultheel's Cafard and Sancta Media's ZOOks, will be presented at this year's Cartoon Movie (7-9 March) in Lyon, France. Flemish production companies are also involved in three international co-productions. With a total of five projects in Lyon, the Flemish animation industry is very much putting its talent on display this year.

Jan Bultheel's Cafard is a historical drama set during World War I about the true and improbable odyssey around the world of the first Belgian armoured vehicles division. Sancta Media is working with Editions Dupuis and Flemish broadcaster VRT to start production on ZOOks, a transmedia adventure film developed using the rotoscope technique. At the heart of ZOOks is the story of a wilful young girl who braves a forbidden forest to find her missing mother.

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The legendary French director of such classic films as A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), And Now My Love (Toute une vie) and Bolero (Les uns et les autres) talks about his Flanders film favourite, Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come as You Are (Hasta la vista), and what the film did to him when he saw it at the fortieth edition of the Montreal World Film Festival last year. ‘I have rarely got such a kick out of discovering a film that was so completely unexpected,’ the filmmaker admits.

‘I am in this multiplex at the Montreal World Film Festival. While I am waiting to go to a master class I’m giving, I decide to go into one of the cinemas at random. A film is starting and I have no idea what I am about to see. Nothing out of the ordinary up to now.

As I sit down in my seat, I am totally oblivious to the fact that it is about to roll away and that I am going to be thrown into the world of those people for whom I rarely spare a second thought. But it is the exact opposite that happens: I find a blind man staring at me through the screen of my prejudices.’

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The cast of Vincent Bal's latest film, The Zig Zag Kid, knows about his taste in movies. 'At the end of the shoot I gave each of the actors a DVD of a film that had really touched me,' he explains. 'Among them were The Apartment, To Be Or Not To Be - I gave that to Isabella Rossellini - and Hôtel du Nord by Marcel Carné. These old films are from so long ago but you can see that they are about people. It's the story of the characters that touches you. They are so well-written, so well-made. Timeless, in a way.'

Even though cinema has changed since these films were made, Bal thinks lessons can still be learned from them. 'The rhythm may be different but the emotions are the same,' he says. 'I think you can also get something from the tone. In Billy Wilder's films, for example, there's a combination of sarcasm and a sort of romance. It's like yin and yang. If it's only romance, it gets sappy, so you need a bit of the sarcasm to make it real and gritty. I really like that combination.'

Bal first came into contact with the films of Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch and other classic directors through watching TV when he was growing up in Ghent. He was also touched by more modern films. 'I'm a child of the eighties, so films like Back to the Future were really important, but I also discovered Woody Allen, and that was an eye-opener for me because I really loved the humour,' he says. 'Then, when I was 18, I discovered Peter Greenaway, which was a totally different kind of cinema and very visual. I loved Drowning By Numbers.'

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Erik Leijonborg is to direct the Swedish remake of Nic Balthazar's award-winning feature debut, Ben X. Principal photography is set to start on 26 March in the Stockholm region. Balthazar's second feature, Time of My Life, receives its international market premiere this Saturday at the EFM in Berlin.

Ben X won the Grand Prix des Amériques as well as the Audience Award and the Ecumenical Jury Award at the 2007 Montréal World Festival. The film was also the very first to win the Black Pearl at the inaugural Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Besides touring festivals around the globe, including the 2008 edition of Generation 14+ at the Berlinale, Ben X also sold to over 50 territories. Producers of the Swedish make-over are Martin Söder and Tomas Bäckstrom for Eyeworks Film & TV Drama AB. Alex Haridi (Departure, Miss Kicki) adapted the original screenplay written by Balthazar.

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Writer-director Ilse Somers admits to having mixed feelings about her profession. 'I've always had this love-hate relationship with film, because it is so hard to find your way and get your projects made,' she says. Fortunately, the love has proved stronger than the hate and Somers is about to complete Seaside Rendez-Vous, her first feature for the big screen.

It's easy to understand Somers' ambiguous relationship with filmmaking once you hear something of her career. After training as an assistant director in Brussels in the early 1980s, she went to New York to take a masters degree in film at Columbia University. This was meant to be a stepping stone into the US film industry, but just as she was completing her first assignments the Gulf War broke out, the industry contracted and the work dried up.

For a while she split her time between production jobs in Belgium and writing in New York, but this soon became untenable and she returned permanently to Europe. In 1994 she began teaching screenwriting at the RITS film school in Brussels, and in 1997 completed a successful short film, Sancta Mortale, about a young girl living in an old people's home who has vivid religious fantasies. This was followed in 1999 by film for Dutch television, Cowboy uit Iran, about a refugee who befriends two apparently stray dogs on the beach, and through them finds an adoptive family.

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Remember Eddy Merckx? There was a time in the 1970s when he seemed to be Belgium’s very own answer to Superman, a prodigy on two wheels who won the Tour de France several times. Whenever he was in a big race, the country would grind to a halt. Men would crowd round fuzzy TVs in spit and sawdust bars to roar him on. His victories inspired them and made them feel better about themselves. Merckx’s exploits were certainly uplifting for the troubled young protagonist of Gert Embrechts’ debut feature, Allez, Eddy!

‘Certainly, in Belgium, Eddy Merckx was a super-hero,’ Embrechts declares. ‘He was a perfect human being, as perfect as can be.’

Allez, Eddy! takes place in 1975, when the Belgian cyclist was at his peak… but also the year when he lost the Tour de France for the first time. The setting is a small provincial town. The main character is Freddy, a shy and repressed ginger-haired 11-year-old boy who suffers from incontinence and whose mother cossets him. His room at the top of the house is a shrine to Merckx. Freddy has his own bike, suspended by ropes from the ceiling so that he can recreate his hero’s greatest rides.

Modernity is encroaching. Freddy’s dad has a butcher’s shop and is terrified that the big new supermarket will steal away all his custom. However, to mark the opening of the supermarket, a special race has been planned. The winner will get to meet… Merckx himself! Even though the father hates the supermarket, he secretly signs up Freddy for the race. This is a rites of passage story. Not only does Freddy need to take a step from childhood and fantasy into the grown-up world… his village has to adjust to a new age.

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Being set in the 1970s doesn't make Germaine a museum piece. 'Even now, 40 years on, it remains very current,' says its director, Frank Van Mechelen. The film is based on a play from the period, which was inspired by the author's experience of a wildcat strike. Van Mechelen thinks the questions of community and family loyalty that it raises should still resonate. 'I hope that things are still the same now, that people feel a sort of solidarity, that they want to help each other.'

The story revolves around the Debruycker family. Jan (Stany Crets) works at a zinc factory in Balen, a small town in the Kempen region in the north east of Belgium. When a strike breaks out in the winter of 1970-71 he is not too keen on taking part, but he is also not brave enough to follow his bitter old father's advice and cross the picket line. With no money coming in, the family has to get by on what his daughter Germaine (Evelien Bosmans) brings in from working at the checkout in a supermarket in near-by Mol.

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