The 17th edition of the Leuven International Short Film Festival (3-10 December) again highlights talented short cinema from Flanders. With a strong Flemish short film competition, the VAF Wildcards and a number of professional activities, Leuven is for a short time the epicenter of short cinema in Flanders.
2011 has been a strong year for Flemish shorts with the Cannes Jury Award for Wannes Destoop’s Swimsuit 46 and the Grand Prize in Valladolid for Kevin Meul’s The Extraordinary Life of Rocky. Now the IKL fest has selected 20 short films from promising directors who may give us a new wave of international Awards in the future.
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Brothers recently won Best Belgian Student Short at the Ghent International Film Festival. The film is a modern parable about two young men. Karim and Nassim live in the same neighborhood. One works with kids, the other deals drugs. One is pious, the other is decadent. Their paths will inevitably lead to conflict. The directors can also start planning their next project as they won a VAF Wildcard. Other films include Michael Palmaers’s Nuru, Eva Cools’s third short Las Meninas, Anke Blondé’s Dura Lex and Frank Theys’s Night Fever amongst others.
Another section of the fest is the Flemish Animation competition with for instance Boris Sverlow’s Shattered Past (recent VAF Wildcard winner). In Shattered Past a man is writing down his memoires. In the middle of this he suddenly suffers a stroke. This catapults him back into his childhood during the Russian revolution and his family’s ensuing escape. Frits Standaert’s Rumours, which won Best Belgian animated Short at the prestigious Anima Festival in Brussels beginning of this year, also joins the line-up of eleven animated shorts in total.
December is not only prime time for Flemish shorts, the BE Film Festival (20-23 December) in Brussels celebrates the Belgian features of 2011. The line-up holds an impressive array of Awarded Flemish films such as Koen Mortier’s 22nd of May, Alex Stockman’s Pulsar, Hilde Van Mieghem’s Madly in Love, Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas, Michael. R. Roskam’s Bullhead and Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come As You Are.