The Misfortunates

Four Flemish features have been selected for competition at the 29th Festroia International Film Festival in Portugal (7-16 June). Brasserie Romantique, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Offline and Time of My Life are all in the running to take home some prizes. This year, the festival has also organised a focus on Belgium and pays homage to Flemish actor Jan Decleir.

Both Joel Vanhoebrouck’s Brasserie Romantique and Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown screen as part of the fest’s official competition. Peter Monsaert’s directorial debut Offline is selected for the competitive First Works section, while Nic Baltazar is competing in the Man and His Environment category with Time of My Life.

At film school students are taught that a movie is made three times. You write it, you shoot it, and you edit it. Felix Van Groeningen never forgot this lesson. At every stage of filmmaking, the director will push things to the limits. He writes versions of the same story until he goes crazy himself. While shooting, he keeps on going until the whole crew is exhausted. And while editing he takes radical measures to get to the point where the film is the rollercoaster it was intended, but never foreseen to be.

Felix rising

What sets Felix Van Groeningen’s heart racing is the moment when he can match an actor with a role. ‘When I see those two things come together, for me it’s like the feeling of falling in love,’ he says capturing that sence of excitement in a performance is what his cinema is all about. ‘At the moment itself, in front of the camera. It has to touch me. The director of such films as The Misfortunates and The Broken Circle Breakdown is happy to admit that  he finds writing difficult and that visual style is not uppermost in his mind when conceiving a film.

When everything comes together there’s nothing to beat being a film producer. ‘Finding an audience with a good film is amazing,’ says Dirk Impens of Menuet. It’s a big kick. It’s orgasmic.’ Impens felt the love early on in his career with Daens, which was nominated for an Oscar, and more recently with Felix Van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates, which was a huge success at home and in festivals abroad. Van Groeningen’s latest, The Broken Circle Breakdown, rolls out internationally at the Berlinale.

However, Impens wasn't so sure it would happen with van Groeningen's most recent movie. Where The Misfortunates attracted a young audience with its mix of comic bad behaviour and deep emotion, The Broken Circle Breakdown is about a more sobering subject: a couple driven apart when their small daughter develops a terminal illness.

Earlier this week, the NY Disappearing Act IV European film festival confirmed both Felix van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates and Nanouk Leopold’s Brownian Movement for the fest’s screening bill. It’s the very first time that the NY festival selects Belgian cinema from Flanders and they enthusiastically signed up for two films.

The Disappearing Act IV European film festival is organized by a number of  European cultural organizations in the framework of the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) in New York. The festival will screen 25 contemporary films from all over the Old Continent.

The Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) has approved funding for eight fiction feature projects in different stages of development this month. The list contains both established names such as Felix van Groeningen (The Misfortunates) and Caroline Strubbe (Lost Persons Area) as well as these of emerging talents.

Half of the greenlighted projects are still in the early stages of development and have received scriptwriting support. Lee & Cindy C., a tragicomedy on rock’n roll dreams and unpredictable love, will be produced by Eyeworks Film & TV drama and scripted by Stany Crets (Old Belgium). Manu Riche receives script funding for a feature film project titled Problemski Hotel.