Culture

The Palm Springs International Film Festival (5-16 January), traditionally the place-to-be for any feature with Oscar ambitions, has for the second year in a row selected five Flemish directors for its line-up. This year’s selected films are Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas, Geoffrey Enthoven’s Come As You Are, Nicolas Provost’s The Invader, Michaël R Roskam’s Bullhead and Christophe Van Rompaey’s Lena. John Shanks’s Last Winter, a co-production with Flanders, will also screen at Palm Springs.

Last year saw the selection of a record-breaking five Flemish features for Palm Springs. The selected films were part of a mini-focus – ‘the Flanders Five’ – that put the spotlight on the wave of Flemish talent and the diversity of films from Flanders. For its 2012 edition, Palm Springs has once again selected five Flemish directors.

Senior programmer of the fest, Alissa Simon, is ‘delighted to once again present another “Flanders Five” and welcome old friends like Geoffrey Enthoven and Christophe Van Rompaey and celebrate outstanding new talent like Michaël R Roskam, Bavo Defurne and Nicolas Provost.’ According to her, Flanders consistently produces ‘well-crafted features with strong humanist themes that satisfy both artistic and commercial bents. It’s a pleasure to find so many good films that are all very different in tone and style, and to discover so many exciting debut directors. Is there something in the beer?’

Palm Springs promises to be a testing ground for Bullhead, which is Belgium’s submission for the Foreign-language Oscar. Michaël R Roskam’s feature debut is surely not lacking attention in the US. Last month the film won the Audience Award and Acting Award (Matthias Schoenaerts) at the 25th AFI Film Fest in LA and just this week Roskam was honored as one of Variety’s ‘ten directors to watch 2012.’ The film, a production of Bart Van Langendonck for Savage Film, will be released in US theatres next year by Drafthouse.

Earlier this year Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas grabbed both the Silver Zenith at the Montréal World Film Festival and the main prize in the Alice in the City Competition at the Rome International Film Festival. North Sea Texas is a production of Yves Verbraeken for Indeed Films. US distributor of the film is Strand Releasing.

Geoffrey Enthoven is not a first-timer at the LA fest, his previous film, The Over the Hill Band, screened at Palm Springs in 2008. Come As You Are’s international career started earlier this year at the Montréal World Film Festival where the film won the Prix des Amériques, among other honours. Meanwhile the film has raked in 13 Awards and been sold to almost 20 countries. Come As You Are was produced by Mariano Vanhoof for Fobic Films.

The co-productions Lena by Christophe Van Rompaey (Moscow, Belgium) and The Invader by Nicolas Provost also feature in the Palm Springs line-up. Flemish coproducers are A Private View and Prime Time respectively. Another minority co-production screening in LA is John Shank’s Last Winter.

Palm Springs, and Hollywood in general, has been keeping a close eye on talented filmmakers from Flanders. Ever since Memory of a Killer, Palm Springs has invited one or two Flemish films each year. But in 2009 they doubled that and invited four films. A year later that record was already broken with the Flanders Five mini-focus. All films mentioned above were made with the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund.