12° FESTIVAL INTERNAZIONALE CINEMA GIOVANI
European Perspectives 19994 - Belgium
La vie sexuelle des Belges 1950-1978
by Jan Bucquoy
Country: Belgium
Year: 1994
Duration: 85'
In small Flemish town, young Jan Bucquoy grows up in family that includes an illiterate bluecollar father, a stingy mother, a kid sister Ariane, and an aunt, Martha. When his father dies, Jan spends his summer vacations in Blankenberg, and bemoans his first romantic rejection. After graduation, Jan becomes a modest office clerk, sinks into boredom and a feeling of exclusion, listens to "Negro music"... and decides he's still going to leave for the capital, In Brussels, he discovers a whole other world: through the many women he meets, Jan is initiated to Kama Sutra, political activism, structuralism, macrobiotics... He marries, divorces three years later, and remarks, laconically that "life with women is misery, without them, impossibile".
"I'd preferred to call this vast fresco of Belgium Le chagrin des Belges, but since that title was taken, I decided to use the word 'sexual' like any self-respecting Lacanian, short of driving the cultural elite of this land to despair on my behalf." (Jan Bucquoy).
Biography
film director
Jan Bucquoy
Born in Harelbeke in 1948, Jan Bucquoy studied literature, moral philosophy, political science and filmmaking at the INSAS., But rather than "have a career", as he puts in, he preferred to try his luck at a number of cultural projects - the theatre and comic strips, in particular. In Schaerbeeck in 1990, he opened a "museum of underwear", exhibiting famous people's underwear, the a "museum of woman", with live women on display, considering underwear and women an artistic concept. He dropped his pants live in a French television show, burned a real Magritte to make a new work (The Ashes of Magritte), attempted to decapitate an effigy of King Baudoin on the Grand Place of Brussels - which got him arrested. In 1993 he made La vie sexuelle de Belges, without State subsidies.
FILMOGRAFIA
La vie sexuelle des Belges (1994).
Cast
& Credits
Director and screenplay: Jan Bucquoy.
Director of photography: Michel Baudour.
Editor: Matyas Veress.
Sound: JeanGrégorie Mekhitarian.
Cast and characters: JeanHenri Compère (Jan Bucquoy), Noé Francq (Jan Bucquoy bambino), Isabelle Legros (Noëlla, madre di Jan), Sophie Schneider (Thérèse), Michèle Schor (Martha), Moreno Boriani (Moretti), Agathe Cornez (Daisy), Noël Godin (Pierre Mertens).
Production company: Transatlantic Films, 46, rue Quinaux, B1030 Bruxelles, Belgium, tel. +3222454742.
Foreign sales agent: Brussels Avenue Jochen D. Girsch, 1/48, rue des Visitandines, B1000 Bruxelles, Belgium, tel. +3225119156, fax +3225118139.
Director of photography: Michel Baudour.
Editor: Matyas Veress.
Sound: JeanGrégorie Mekhitarian.
Cast and characters: JeanHenri Compère (Jan Bucquoy), Noé Francq (Jan Bucquoy bambino), Isabelle Legros (Noëlla, madre di Jan), Sophie Schneider (Thérèse), Michèle Schor (Martha), Moreno Boriani (Moretti), Agathe Cornez (Daisy), Noël Godin (Pierre Mertens).
Production company: Transatlantic Films, 46, rue Quinaux, B1030 Bruxelles, Belgium, tel. +3222454742.
Foreign sales agent: Brussels Avenue Jochen D. Girsch, 1/48, rue des Visitandines, B1000 Bruxelles, Belgium, tel. +3225119156, fax +3225118139.
