Silent Campine is a 15 minutes drama written and directed by Steffen Geypens and was selected for the Flemish Competition: Fiction at the International Short Film Festival in Leuven. This short film is his 3rd selection for the Film Festival after Buitenspel (2002) and Zien (2003). As a former historic, Geypens was always fascinated by the American westerns from the 50s, this interest strongly influenced Silent Campine, which can be called a modern spaghetti-western.
The story goes as follows. A traumatised soldier called Albert (Jurgen Delnaet) and his son Juul (Brecht Dael) go hunting every day in order to survive. They also take care for the sick mother. Every day is a struggle, until there is no way back. Geypens wanted to show a troubled father-son relationship. Albert is very authoritarian and there is a quiet tension between them and the other characters in the film. This tension is visualised by gazes and expressions, and enforced by the dialogues.
It is very remarkable that there are no women in the film. You can only hear the sick mother in the backroom, which emphasises the absence of a mother figure and how it affects the son’s upbringing.
The entire film is shot from Juul’s perspective and how he perceives the men surrounding him as well as how he feels towards his own father. He gets confronted with an inner conflict: will he follow his father’s example or will he push himself off from his authoritarian behaviour?
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Chloé (Zoé Lejeune) -a woman in her 30’s- visits her hometown after a long time. She peeks inside the old house of her grandparents, until a young girl takes her inside to watch what changed. She is also reunited with her grandfather again after all those years. According to Moemen Attare, the film is “about memories and holding on to little details in order to keep the memories alive”. So for example the recurrent reference to the pear tree in the garden of Chloé’s grandfather. She is holding on to it in order to recall details from her childhood. Also their dialogues have a nostalgic tone.
The overall atmosphere in the shortfilm is very light, literally and in a figurative sense, by using light wooden details and rays of sunlight for example. This adds tones of frivolity and happiness to the film, as if in a dream.
Petit Ami is set on Christmas Eve in an obscure rendez-vous hotel. Jasper, who is now 20 years old, meets the older and mysterious Vincent (Thomas Ryckewaert). For Jasper this is a date like any other, but then he discovers the secret that Vincent carries with him.
The film ends with a shot of Jasper looking straight into the camera, which allows us to take a look into his soul. He clearly struggles with becoming an adult and with finding what he’s looking for in life. Jasper is still looking for his own identity, doing this by meeting men and reflecting on himself as a homosexual man. This is never explicitly confirmed in Petit Ami, so let’s say this is my subjective interpretation.
The story is about the sixteen-years-old Flament (Laurens Aneca), who visits a music festival with his best friend Kiwi (Klaas Duyck). After the first night, hanging with Polly (Verona Verbakel), he is hungover and being sick in one of those chemical toilets that we in Belgium call a ‘dixi’. When all of a sudden a heavy storm breaks out, he gets stuck in the toilet and badly injured. Too young to die, he desperately struggles to survive. Flament’s physical survival symbolises adolescence and the struggles of life in becoming an adult. (N. B. Out of the Blue, Into the Black reminded me of the Pukkelpop-storm in Hasselt in 2011, where several people got seriously injured and 5 people died.)
The 3 young actors, who are some unknown faces for the mainstream audience, look pretty experienced and leave a remarkable impression. The acting performances, together with great cinematography by Frederic Van Zandycke and a smashing soundtrack by the Belgian rock band 