Which film projects tempted festival programmers at Flanders Film Days 2025?

International festival programmers attending the inaugural Flanders Film Days (FFD) in Ghent on October 7-8, found plenty to interest them from the almost 70 projects presented at the Flemish showcase.

Among the titles creating buzz after their works in progress presentation was Patrice Toye’s The Assignment, a ’Lord Of The Fiies’-like drama set in a youth camp in 1947 in which teenagers play power games. This sparked strong interest among several festival programmers.

Also widely liked was Mahboul, a feature doc directed by Jan Vromman and Jannes Callen, produced by Visualantics, about a psychotherapeutic institution where patients with often severe mental health issues are given freedom and the chance to play.

Koen de Rooij, programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam, was optimistic about potential pickings for the festival’s next edition. “Some projects were already on my radar but there were also some nice surprises,” he observed.

Several sales agents spoke with similar enthusiasm about the grimly compelling footage shown of Teodora Ana Mihai’s Heysel 85, a drama set against the backcloth of the catastrophic crowd trouble at the 1985 European Cup Final.

Meanwhile, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s new feature doc, Mariinka, about brothers who end up on different sides after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was being tipped for festival selection in early 2026.

Festival programmers were also keeping close tabs on All Roads Lead To Rieme, the new documentary from David Bert and Joris Dher about a tough but colourful industrial town on the Terneuzen Canal in Belgium whose survival is under threat.

Star power

FFD featured several of the best-known names in Flemish filmmaking. Oscar-nominated directors, Felix van Groeningen, Lukas Dhont and Stijn Coninx all had new projects.

There was strong buzz around van Groeningen’s latest, Let Love In, a Bergmanesque relationship drama starring Luca Marinelli and Charlotte Vandermeersch as a couple with a child fighting to save their relationship. The director and Vandermeersch, who co-scripted the film with van Groeningen and Anne Paulicevich, recorded a special video from the set which producer Hans Everaert off Menuetto played to delegates.

In the film, Vandermeersch plays Josie, a dancer who cheats on her partner. The eclectic supporting cast includes renowned relationship therapist, Esther Perel, who also advised on the script.

Stijn Coninx pitched Oh Lovely Belgium, produced by Phlypo at A Private View. This is a quirky romantic comedy about the break-up of Belgium and that features two politicians/lovers, minister-presidents Johan from Flanders and Florence from Wallonia. Delivery is expected to be in 2027.

The bigger budget movies included Lukas Dhont’s First World War drama Coward, and Robyn Pront’s €12m colonial epic The Devil Of The Equator, set in the early 1900s, as the Congolese rubber plantations of Belgium’s King Leopold II generate huge wealth but leave immense human misery. It is being produced by Hilde De Laure through FBO and is in preproduction.

Intensive event

“The big advantage for us is that Flanders Film Days is an event we can really follow up on,” said Jasper Nijsmans, head of FFD organiser Flanders Image, of how he and his team will now look immediately to capitalise on the early interest at FFD at markets and festivals in the coming months.

With projects ranging from €100,000 experimental works to €10m features, FFD gave international buyers and sellers a huge array of films to chew over.

As the successor to Connext, the showcase last held in 2023, the new event was effectively presenting two years’ worth of new feature films financed by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF).

Most delegates were very positive about their experiences, even if some felt they were swimming against the tide as they sat through pitch after pitch, often from filmmakers with projects at very early stages.

“Those two days in Ghent were an intensive and effective way to have an exclusive insight into the upcoming productions from Flanders, a territory that has been delivering many film gems, and to connect with the local producers and industry,” said Patra Spanou of the boutique German sales agency, Patra Spanou Film.

UK sales agent Denis Krupnov of Reason8 welcomed the increased number of films in development and works in progress. “We had a full landscape of what is going to happen in Flanders over the next one or two years,” he noted.

“I thought it was very exciting, very diverse projects, some of them at very early stages for the pitches. There were many documentaries which was quite unexpected on my side but good,” agreed Johanna Mayer, head of acquisitions & coproduction at France’s Jour2Fête Distribution/ The Party Film Sales.

Some were hesitant to commit to projects still in their infancy.

“For documentaries, it is always difficult to get on board without seeing images, so all the pitches were way too early for me,” said Kilian Kiefel, documentary sales, festival and acquisition exec at Mediawan. His focus was therefore on the works in progress.

Local producers welcomed the chance to alert the international industry both to projects nearing completion and to some at very early stages.

“They can’t track something they don’t know about,” said Dries Phlypo of Belgian outfit A Private View of the international industry.

He was presenting several projects including Anke Blondé’s psychological drama Dust, inspired by a noxious real-life fraud case and which is already in post-production, and Domien Huyghe’s Amari, about a disillusioned father and his activist teen daughter, and which won’t be ready until 2027.

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