Flanders director Lukas Dhont is one of the world’s foremost international arthouse directors. His debut film Girl won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2018 and follow-up Close won the Grand Prix at the festival in 2022 and was Oscar-nominated for best international film.
All by the tender age of 32. But curating the Future Five initiative of rising Flanders directors has served to remind Dhont of the dilemmas he faced in his early years as a director.
“In film school, you’re able to learn so many things but filmmaking entails so many other things as well,” he says. “You can only learn these by doing, by experimenting and choosing. By feeling your choices aren’t always right and then changing.
“For me, the key is to have an enormous amount of curiosity not only about subjects and themes and things to say but also about people - the people you work with.”
The young auteur talks of the strange contrast between working on a screenplay on your own or with a co-writer and then arriving on a bustling set full of people who “all have their input, personalities and artistic qualities.” Part of his challenge as director is harnessing their skills. “That is something you can only really learn by stepping on set and doing it.”
Dhont looks for on-set collaborators who will challenge him while respecting his vision “I’ve learn that generosity is an incredibly important quality - generosity toward an audience, generosity toward yourself and generosity toward the people you work with and the people around you in the industry,” the director explains.
Reunion
Dhont and his younger brother Michiel recently launched their own production company, The Reunion, through which they will not only make his films but will also nurture young talent, potentially including some of those in the Future Five.
Close and Girl were both produced by veteran Belgian producer Dirk Impens of Menuet who has now retired. Michiel is now taking over lead producer duties on his brother’s films, putting into practice everything he learned working alongside Impens on Close.
“Michiel is an incredible produce, very much an organiser, a diplomat,” says Dhont. He admits Michiel may be younger than him but has the force of personality to stand up to him.
When the Dhont brothers were casting around for names for the company, they asked their mentor Impens for advice. “Just choose: don’t think about it,” he told them briskly.
Dhont is now busy writing his third feature alongside working with other young filmmakers. He talks about “finding voices I believe in and who have something they want to express.” He was inspired to do so by US director Barry Jenkins who spoke of “the joy” of producing Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun in 2022, “of stepping into another universe and accompanying someone along the way”.
That brings him back to the Future Five. These are all young directors who, he believes, can attract a big international audience. He and Michiel may work with them through the new company. “For the moment, we are thinking about how many projects we want to do, but there some filmmakers there,” he says.
When not on film sets, the director is a voracious reader. He is devouring books in preparation for his next feature of which he is ready to reveal very little. “It’s still transforming,” he says. “It’s something set in the past which talks about the present. I’ve been reading a lot of books on that time period, the 1940s and the 50s.”
Books he enthuses over include Paul Buckland’s ‘Chorus Of Witches’, about a drag troupe travelling around the UK in the 1950s; ‘Change: Method’ by Edouard Louis and anything by Tash Aw. Next on his reading list is ‘The Dancing Man’ by Victor Jestin.
It was watching the work of fellow Flanders filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen, director of The Broken Circle Breakdown, Beautiful Boy and The Eight Mountains, that propelled Dhont towards a career in film and to film school in KASK (School Of Arts) in Ghent.
He hopes his example, and that of the Future Five, will excite the next generation of filmmakers in Flanders. “It’s about seeing each other excel and feeling we want to see each other excel,” he says of how Belgian directors are working to push each other to new heights.
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