Julien Schoenaerts

Ellektra is a story about comfort. The main character Sam finds real comfort and is released from her virtual comfort, drugs. Her true comfort is the sixteen year old girl Ellen, who puts people suffering from severe misfortune into contact with each other through SMS, and gives new meaning to their lives.

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The story of Lieve, a young orphan who lives with her aunt in a house for elderly people. When she finds a wounded pigeon, she integrates it in her world of fantasies and is persuaded that the pigeon is Jesus.

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A lighthouse guardian leads a young prince towards an imaginary world, Taxandria, where the boy learns about the power of love and the value of liberty. A totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watches have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefore has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror.

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Tragicomedy about a man who hears he has got one more week to live and who brings his two water turtles to the sea to set them free.

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A female writer bases her newest book on the affair she had with her publisher in this Dutch drama. Lin is the glamorous writer who finds herself pulled out of a canal by two riverboat men. Her story is told in flashback. Her recently published book "Wildgroei"(Dutch for "Wild Growth") chronicled her one-sided passion for her publisher Emile who chose Lin's sister Marot instead.

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An actor and poet falls in love with a former mortuary photographer turned waitress. They find themselves caught up way over their heads in a dirty political and financial affair, an art smuggling case that touches them merely for the fact that it may separate them, be it through death or exile.

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Father Daens returns to Aalst, where workers suffer from poverty, child labor, and exploitation in the textile industry. Driven by his sense of justice, he takes their side, even if it means confronting the church and the upper class. A detailed historical drama about the fight for justice.

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The story follows Philip Boran, an ex-convict who has managed to turn his life around and become a movie star. However, his new life is disrupted when his brother is murdered following a bank robbery. Driven by grief and a desire for justice, Boran sets out on a relentless mission to avenge his brother's death His quest targets a corrupt police officer. As Boran takes matters into his own hands, the investigation twists against him, and he soon finds himself suspected of being a criminal

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The story takes place in 14th-century Flanders, a region suffering under the oppressive and bloody occupation of the French King, Philip the Fair. Tensions between the arrogant French nobility and the proud Flemish guilds reach a boiling point. Following the bloody uprising known as the Bruges Matins, an armed conflict becomes inevitable.Without their imprisoned leader, Robert of Bethune—the "Lion of Flanders"—craftsmen, peasants, and local nobles unite. This leads to the legendary Battle of the Golden Spurs on July 11, 1302, near Kortrijk, where an untrained Flemish citizen army faces the elite French cavalry.

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Unrelenting pessimism dominates this slow-paced, dark film, the debut feature from director Digna Sinke dedicated to an archetypal born loser named Marian (Josee Ruiter). Marian is a journalist who has been working in Latin America and who arrives home just after her father dies to find out that the man she had married for purely political reasons might be deported because the authorities found out he was not living with her. Meanwhile, Marian is upset that her mother and sister are keeping her mentally handicapped brother in an institution, and she goes there to get him released into her custody -- a mistake it turns out. He is actually worse off with her, and vice-versa. On top of everything, Marian cannot break away from the depression she feels over a tragic incident that happened while she was in Latin America -- and anything she does is colored by that moment from the past. These burdens become almost too much to bear, both for Marian and the viewers.

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De Mantel der Liefde is a bizarre, over the top and at times hilarious settling of scores with the Catholic Church, commercial movie culture and 1970's petit bourgeois Dutch culture in general.

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Paul Flanagan is released from jail after serving for 8 years. He only has two things on his mind. First: to retrieve the money from the robbery he was convicted for. Secondly: to get revenge on his partners in crime (his half-brother Paul and his ex-lover Cathy), who got away Scot free and never once visited him in jail.

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A bitter, miserable man runs a chaotic secondhand store, mistreating both his assistant and his customers. One day, a young brother and sister enter his shop, hoping to sell a cherished golden watch. Their arrival disrupts the owner's stingy routines, plunging the children into a surreal, unpredictable world managed by eccentric adults. Frans Buyens’ mid-length feature is a whimsical, satirical fable exploring the clash between childhood innocence and adult greed.

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In this documentary, we become acquainted with the Virgilian Bruegel of the vast landscapes and the sarcastic Bruegel of popular moral tales. We see the Bruegel of the peasants and the Bruegel of the humanists, Bruegel the earthy and Bruegel the thinker, the Bruegel of everyday life and the Bruegel who ventures into the boldest flights of imagination and fantasy. The Flemish version is narrated by Ludo Bekkers en Julien Schoenaerts and the French version by Daniel Gelin and Philippe Noiret

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The captain of a ship in port has been entrusted with a secret government mission. He gives leave to the crew, but orders them to report back each morning. As the days go by, and the sailing date still remains a secret, the crew are thrown into a state of increasing uncertainty. The film concentrates on two crew members whose experiences are coloured by the omnipresent reality of the ship which is about to depart.

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An nobleman question an aged grave warden, whose sickness seems to be due to the ghosts who haunt his workplace.

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About the friendship between a Western tourist and a coachman from Morocco.

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Kamiel steals the famous Brussels statue of Manneken Pis to impress his girlfriend Denise, the daughter of the man who is supposed to guard it. The Belgians, however, wrongly accuse the Dutch of having stolen their statue and hit back by stealing the statue of Hansje Brink.

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The film follows the occasionally slapstick misadventures of Sergeant Sestig, a fire brigade sergeant and widower, with his attractive daughter Martje by his side. At one point, three women attempt to woo him as a husband, but after a whirlwind of panic-filled complications, Sestig decides, with quiet resolve, to remain a dedicated firefighter—and a widower..

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A pessimistic urban drama, with a musical score by Jack Sels and Max Damasse, charts in strongly expressionistically lit black-and-white images the wanderings of a tormented man through the cosmopolitan port city of Antwerp. The only people to show him understanding are an orphan and two disillusioned women.

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Essentieel (1964) is a short experimental film made by Belgian abstract painter Jef Verheyen in collaboration with poet Paul De Vree. A cinematic equivalent of Verheyen’s attempts in representing the warmth and vibrations of light in his monochrome or ‘essentialist’ paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s, the film plays on the tensions between abstract color surfaces and natural elements.

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