Country: Belgium
Year: 2023
Duration: 82'
Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is on the verge of moving back home. He cooks up a big pot of soup with leftovers in his fridge, to hand out as a goodbye gift to friends and family. As he is ready to go, he meets Shuxiu, a Belgian-Chinese young woman who’s preparing a doctorate on mosses. Her attention for the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.
Biography
film director
Bas Devos
(Zoersel, Belgio, 1983) since graduating, he has made two shorts, The Close and We Know. His first feature, Violet, won the Jury Prize at Berlinale Generations in 2014 and was then selected for New Directors New Films at Moma New York, and in Competition at Torino Film Festival. His second feature, Hellhole, was selected for Berlinale Panorama in 2019. Ghost Tropic, his third feature, premiered three months later at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2019 in Cannes. Here is his fourth feature film, and was selected at the Berlinale Encounters. He teaches film at Luca School of Arts in Brussels.
FILMOGRAFIA
Taurus (cm, 2005), Pillar (cm, 2006), The Close (cm, 2007), We Know (cm, 2009), Violet (2014), Hellhole (2019), Ghost Tropic (2019), Here (2023).
Declaration
film director
“In the 1980s, science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a short essay with a beautiful title: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, she argues that early humans were primarily gatherers of ber- ries, fruits, grains and seeds. […] It was after reading this essay that the film I was trying to write really began to fall into place. The narrative was a simple one: a man who is go- ing away for a while empties his fridge and makes a soup with the vegetables that would otherwise go rotten. He then distributes that soup to his friends and family. This film is about boxes of soup, about seeds and roots and the soft moss under our feet. And consequently, it is a film about what it means to be human.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY: Bas Devos. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Grimm Vandekerckhove. EDITING: Dieter Diependaele. PRODUCTION DESIGN: Spela Tusar. COSTUMES: Manon Blom. MUSIC: Brecht Ameel. SOUND: Boris Debackere, Yanna Soentjens. CAST: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cedric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban, Saadia Bentaïeb, Alina Constantin, ShuHuang Wang. PRODUCER: Marc Goyens. PRODUCTION: Quetzalcoatl.
CONTACT: Rediance, Xu Jing jing@rediancefilms.com
