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It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that an 83-minute film qualifies as a work of Slow Cinema, but to classify the beautifully meditative “Here” as anything else would be disingenuous. Unfolding like a series of loosely connected memories, Bas Devos’ fourth feature is a portrait of a fleeting connection between two lost souls that unfolds with the voyeurism of a nature documentary and the comforting precision of a crisp Asmr recording. With a plot so sparse that even a one-sentence summary threatens to spoil an hour of the movie, “Here” manages to present some of the most striking moving images in recent memory by leaning into the same minute details that its protagonist struggles to recognize in his own daily life. Devos’ soft directorial touch elevates what could have been a simple short film into a reflection on the small joys we choose to miss that packs a punch far greater than its runtime.

Emerging on the international cinema scene with a trio of tender yet emotionally exacting features in Violet, Hellhole, and Ghost Tropic, Belgian director Bas Devos has turned a new leaf with Here. The Berlinale prizewinner is a moviegoing experience as gorgeous as it is tranquil, following Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian worker who begins forming connections with both nature and a bryologist named Shuxiu (Liyo Gong). The simplicity of the narrative is one of the film’s strong suits, Devos luxuriating in the gestures on display, from gifting soup to uncovering the ground beneath your feet.

I caught up with Devos at the U.S. premiere of Here at the 61st New York Film Festival, where we discussed the origins of the project, the film’s strong visual language, exuding a sense of compassion, the strange power of moss, and more. Ahead of the film’s theatrical run beginning this...

One of the most gorgeous, tranquil movie-going experiences of the year will surely be Bas Devos’ Berlinale winner and NYFF and TIFF selection Here. Picked up by Cinema Guild for a theatrical release beginning on February 9 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center, we’re pleased to exclusively premiere the first poster, designed by Brian Hung.

Here’s the synopsis: “Here follows Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels who is about to return home to visit his mother, and perhaps stay for good. Using the leftovers from his fridge, he cooks up a big pot of soup and begins handing it out as farewell gifts to friends and family. But while waiting for his car to be fixed, he meets Shuxiu, a Belgian-Chinese woman preparing a doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks. On the heels of Ghost Tropic (2019), Bas Devos offers another Brussels city symphony.

One of the most gorgeous, tranquil movie-going experiences of the year will surely be Bas Devos’ Berlinale winner and NYFF and TIFF selection Here. Picked up by Cinema Guild for a theatrical release beginning on February 9 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center, they’ve now released the first trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Here follows Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels who is about to return home to visit his mother, and perhaps stay for good. Using the leftovers from his fridge, he cooks up a big pot of soup and begins handing it out as farewell gifts to friends and family. But while waiting for his car to be fixed, he meets Shuxiu, a Belgian-Chinese woman preparing a doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks. On the heels of Ghost Tropic (2019), Bas Devos offers another Brussels city symphony. With a...

US singer and actress Debbie Harry and Give Me Pity! filmmaker Amanda Kramer are the latest to join the line-up of talks at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which runs from January 25-February 4.

Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, will join the US filmmaker for a discussion on Kramer’s new sci-fi documentary, So Unreal. The film is narrated by Harry, and examines the relationship between cinema and technology in the format of a long-form video essay. Kramer uses footage from the likes of Lisberger’s Tron and Trumbull’s Brainstorm to explore technical evolution as a key theme in...

Indie film sales agents from mainland China remain notably scarce for a market of such immense size. The reasons behind this reality are many: The still-developing state of China’s industry, a markedly domestic focus among most local studios, and a censorship and regulatory regime that adds risk to an already commercially challenging sector of the movie business.

Beijing-based sales and production company Rediance has made an outsized impact despite the odds. The company was founded in 2017 by former film curator Meng Xing with a mission to serve the growing international needs of a cohort of young, accomplished Chinese arthouse filmmakers. The outfit found its stride with impressive speed, representing European festival award winners like Cai Chengjie’s The Widow Witch (2017), Hu Bo’s Elephant Sitting Still (2018) and Li Cheng’s José (2018). The company also has expanded into financing arthouse titles from both emerging and established arthouse names from China and afar,...

For anyone keeping tabs on Bas Devos’ career, it’s notable that the drama of his latest film Here is set in motion by something as benign as a pot of soup. A charming portrait with a flânuerial spirit, the film follows a Brussels-based Romanian construction worker who, having decided to move home, cooks what’s left in his fridge, packages it up, then gifts it to family, friends and––much later––a Belgian-Chinese woman doing a PhD in moss. She is played by Liyo Gang and he is played by Stefan Gota. It’s 81 minutes long, has relatively little dialogue, and tugs the heartstrings in all the best ways. It might be the most benevolent film of this year.

It hasn’t always been like this for Devos, a 39-year-old filmmaker from Belgium. While 2019’s Hellhole––a eulogy for a city in mourning––had style to burn, its pessimism felt strained.

Without going into the specifics of the obstacles that were overcome by the heroic efforts of film distributors, 2020 was a stronger year for films released in the United States than could have been reasonably expected, though it only sparingly reached the heights of last year. Note the specific term “released”: all of the films on my list premiered before 2020 even began, which only further heightens the importance of both the festival circuit and the people dedicated to giving films their proper due, whether it be in repertory theaters or in virtual cinemas. One special mention: my favorite film released this year from the previous decade is Hong Sang-soo’s Yourself and Yours, which premiered in 2016 but only just received a release; my personal eligibility rules limit the films on this list to a two-year window, but otherwise it would be at the very top of this list.

Honorable Mentions: Lovers Rock,...

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week […]

The post This Week In Trailers: S#!%house, Ghost Tropic, The Swerve, Kingdom of Silence, Succor appeared first on /Film.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bad Vacations

I imagine your summer plans didn’t go as expected, but in at least a few films in a new Criterion Channel series, some characters have it worse off than having to quarantine inside. Titled Bad Vacations, the collection includes Bonjour tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958), La collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967), The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977), House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977), Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978), The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986), The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990), The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990), Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997), Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001), La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001), Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007), and Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012).

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Epicentro (Hubert Sauper)

“This is utopia, bright and burning.

New York boutique distributor Cinema Guild has picked up the Belgium drama Ghost Tropic for North America.

The third feature from Belgian director Bas Devos, Ghost Tropic premiered in the Directors' Fortnight of Cannes last year.

The drama follows Khadija (Saadia Bentaieb), a 58-year-old cleaning woman of Maghrebi origins living in Brussels who falls asleep on the last subway train, waking up at the end of the line. She has no choice but to make her way home, across the city, on foot.

Devos’s light touch with the issues of immigration, Islamophobia (the film takes place in the wake of the ...

New York boutique distributor Cinema Guild has picked up the Belgium drama Ghost Tropic for North America.

The third feature from Belgian director Bas Devos, Ghost Tropic premiered in the Directors' Fortnight of Cannes last year.

The drama follows Khadija (Saadia Bentaieb), a 58-year-old cleaning woman of Maghrebi origins living in Brussels who falls asleep on the last subway train, waking up at the end of the line. She has no choice but to make her way home, across the city, on foot.

Devos’s light touch with the issues of immigration, Islamophobia (the film takes place in the wake of the ...

In Ghost Tropic, a woman falls asleep on the last train home and misses her stop. Short on options and cab fare, she decides to walk. A mall security guard lets her use a cash machine after hours. A petrol station worker makes her a cup of tea. Some relatively less benevolent things happen too.

The film is the latest work from Bas Devos, an emerging filmmaker from Belgium whose previous feature–a hypnotic reaction to the Brussels underground bombings in 2016 titled Hellhole–premiered at the Berlinale just three months before this one opened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes. Devos remarkably shot and edited Tropic in that limited time period, a turnaround so swift it might have caught Takashi Miike off guard. It’s made even more impressive when one considers the distinct shift in mood. Even as far back as February, Hellhole–with all its narcoleptic public servants,...

Following our top 50 films of 2019, we’re sharing personal top 10 lists from our contributors. Check out the latest below and see our complete year-end coverage here.

Arguably the defining film discourse this year was ignited when Martin Scorsese compared Marvel movies to theme parks. Fans got defensive, which is understandable given the passionate, apparently inexhaustible love for Iron Man & Co. But when you take a look at the box office receipts of 2019, you realize it’s the moviegoers of this world who seem to have decided (with their wallets) that everything else they find at the cinemas are not movies.

This is not to suggest that no non-Marvel films did well financially. But that is becoming more and more the exception and the general consumer preference has gotten so lopsided it’s hard not to read it as a categorical rejection of anything original, unfamiliar, not based on pre-existing IP.

Beijing-based sales agent will also handle sales on Bright Future titles Damp Season and Together Apart.

Beijing-based sales agent Rediance has picked up international rights to three Chinese-language films that will premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) next month, including Tiger Competition title The Cloud In Her Room.

Directed by Zheng Lu Xinyuan, The Cloud In Her Room tells the story of a woman who returns to her hometown for Chinese New Year and embarks on a relationship with the father of her half-sister’s classmate. Zheng has previously made short films that have screened at Tribeca Film Festival,...

Other winners include ’Ghost Tropic’, ‘The Fourth Wall’ and ’A Certain Kind of Silence’.

Immigrant drama I Am No Longer Here, from Mexican director Fernando Frias, has won the Golden Pyramid for best film at the 41st Cairo International Film Festival.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Frias’ timely drama centres on a Mexican teenager forced to move to the Us after getting on the wrong side of a drugs cartel. Its young star, Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino, was feted with best actor.

Also in the international competition, Belgian director Bas Devos won the Silver Pyramid for urban night-time odyssey tale Ghost Tropic.

Ghost Tropic and A Certain Kind of Silence were among the European movies awarded during the 41st edition of the Ciff, as the event attained Oscar-qualifying status. Before the 41st Cairo International Film Festival (Ciff) announced its award winners, the event received a distinction from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences: Oscar-qualifying film-festival status. From now on, any short film that wins Cairo’s Cinema of Tomorrow competition will be eligible for consideration in two Oscar categories: Animated and Live-action Short Film. This year, the opportunity was given to Ambience by Wisam Al Jafari (Palestine), which scooped the Youssef Chahine Award for Best Short Film. The International Competition Jury, led by Stephen Gaghan, decided to give the top recognition, the Golden Pyramid Award for Best Film, to I Am No Longer Here by Fernando Frias (Mexico/USA), which revolves around a 17-year-old boy who has to leave his native Mexico.

Premiering one film at Berlin and another at Cannes all in one year would already be quite the feather-in-the-cap for any rising young filmmaker, but “Hellhole” and “Ghost Tropic” director Bas Devos took it one step further by making the latter project in the period between the two festivals.

“It was a peculiar year to say the least,” says Devos with a laugh. “When I was in Berlin this year [to promote “Hellhole”], I was somewhat distracted because I knew that once I got back home I would almost immediately start shooting the next one.”

Working at breakneck pace, the Belgian director shot the dreamlike “Ghost Tropic,” which follows a working-class woman’s nightlong odyssey across Brussels, over the course of 15 nights in early March, and then rushed to have the final edit ready to premiere in Directors’ Fortnight some two months later. “Within less than a year we went from literally nothing to a film premiering,...

“I’m No Longer Here,” a drama about immigration and identity by young Mexican director Fernando Frias, was the big winner at the Cairo Film Festival, which wrapped Friday.

“I’m No Longer Here,” which turns on a 17-year-old urban tribe leader forced by conflict with a cartel to leave Mexico for Queens, scooped Cairo’s top prize, the Golden Pyramid, for best film. It also took acting honors for newcomer Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino, who plays Ulises Sampiero, leader of Los Terkos, who are known for their dance moves and extravagant hairstyles. In Queens, Ulises winds up either sparking hostility from other immigrants or being treated as a fashion curiosity. The pic, which launched internationally in Cairo, is generating buzz after recently scoring the top prize at the Morelia fest in Mexico.

The Cairo jury, headed by Oscar-winning U.S. writer-director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”), awarded the Silver Pyramid to “Ghost Tropic” by Belgian helmer Bas Devos,...

Documentaries and dramas impressed industry professionals at the Ghent event.

Flanders Image’s CONNeXT event in Ghent showcased documentary films for the first time, some of which impressed industry professionals even more than the usual fiction projects.

Pieter Jan De Pue’s Four Brothers, about four Ukrainian siblings torn apart by war, won the work-in-progress award.

The international jury praised how “the story ambitions and scope of the project leaves an undeniable impression…how war can tear apart even the tightest of bonds.”

Bart Van Langendonck of leading Belgian production company Savage Film produces. The project previously won the Cph:Dox Eurimges Co-Production Award.

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Flanders Image’s CONNeXT event in Ghent showcased documentary films for the first time, some of which impressed industry professionals even more than the usual fiction projects.

Pieter Jan De Pue’s Four Brothers, about four Ukrainian siblings torn apart by war, won the work-in-progress award.

The international jury praised how “the story ambitions and scope of the project leaves an undeniable impression…how war can tear apart even the tightest of bonds.”

Bart Van Langendonck of leading Belgian production company Savage Film produces. The project previously won the Cph:Dox Eurimges Co-Production Award.

Another doc, Janet van den Brand...

A cleaning lady falls asleep on the last subway after working late in Ghost Tropic, and this seemingly mundane mistake is the beginning of a beautifully observed, hushed nocturnal odyssey as the middle-aged woman has to travel across much of Brussels to try and get home. This is the third feature from Flemish filmmaker Bas Devos, whose exquisite debut about a boy in mourning, Violet, won the Berlinale Generation’s Grand Prix in 2014 and whose second work, the bleak Brussels-in-times-of-terrorism tale Hellhole, premiered in Berlin’s Panorama strand just a few months ago. Here, hope seems to have returned as the ...

A cleaning lady falls asleep on the last subway after working late in Ghost Tropic, and this seemingly mundane mistake is the beginning of a beautifully observed, hushed nocturnal odyssey as the middle-aged woman has to travel across much of Brussels to try and get home. This is the third feature from Flemish filmmaker Bas Devos, whose exquisite debut about a boy in mourning, Violet, won the Berlinale Generation’s Grand Prix in 2014 and whose second work, the bleak Brussels-in-times-of-terrorism tale Hellhole, premiered in Berlin’s Panorama strand just a few months ago. Here, hope seems to have returned as the ...

Bas Devos’ Ghost Tropic is premiering in Directors Fortnight, while Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief is in Cannes Classics.

Beijing-based sales agent Rediance has picked up international rights to Tian Zhuangzuang’s classic drama The Horse Thief, which is screening in Cannes Classics, and Bas Devos’ Ghost Tropic, selected for Directors’ Fortnight.

Tian’s 1986 classic is being presented by Xi’an Film Studio and China Film Archive, with the latter organisation financing and over-seeing a 4K digital restoration. The Tibetan-language film tells the story of a tribesman who is sent into exile after he steals a horse to support his family.