Why Belgium’s Panenka is moving into film with Flanders and Tallinn premiere ‘Sunday Ninth’

Belgian production outfit Panenka is venturing into feature with Kat Steppe’s Sunday Ninth, screening at the inaugural Flanders Film Days this week, prior to its world premiere in competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in November.

The Antwerp-based company, founded by Tom Lenaerts and Kato Maes in 2014, savours offbeat originality. It is named after the famous Czech footballer Antonin Panenka who audaciously dinked his penalty down the middle of the goal in a match during the 1976 Euros.

Panenka has long been a powerhouse in the Belgian TV industry but has thus far steered away from films, partly because of the financial challenges involved in indie film financing.

In the case of Sunday Ninth, though, the company was keen to support director Steppe on her debut fiction feature after working with her on many documentary projects including the hit series Taboo, in which a comedian spends a week with different groups of vulnerable people.

Sunday Ninth is about two elderly brothers who want to settle scores but an Alzheimer’s diagnosis gets in the way. Steppe shot the movie in a real residential facility for people suffering with Alzheimer’s. “Having already made her mark in documentary and nonfiction storytelling, Kat wished to retain a documentary element in the backdrop of her first feature,” explains Panenka producer Sofie Rooseleer, “It’s a vision we have been developing with her over the past five years now.”

According to Rooseleer, the director went to extreme lengths to ensure the film was both respectful and authentic. During the research phase, she volunteered three times a week over many months in a care home for Alzheimer’s patients. Meanwhile, Josse De Pauw (who plays the brother suffering from Alzheimer’s) spent time in the care home before the shooting started, to make sure the patients would be familiar with him being there. Their families and guardians gave their approval for the filming and Rooseleer says the main theme of the film is “taking care of each other”.

The €2.8m feature is a Belgian-Dutch coproduction with Els Vandevorst’s Isabella Films in the Netherlands, and with support from the VAF, the Netherlands Film Fund, Eurimages, the Belgian tax shelter and TorinoFilmLab among other partners. Paradiso is handling the Belgian distribution, with a release planned for February next year.

The Panenka team sees Sunday Ninth as an elevated arthouse title.  “We want to make a a crossover movie,” says Panenka producer Kristoffel Mertens. ”We really believe in strong word of mouth from viewers to reach as many people as possible.”  

Mertens acknowledges the company’s first feature has been a challenge, from financing to the effort involved in finding an audience. 

“Financing a feature film is much harder than making a series,” he says. “The reach is also possibly more limited. We hardly had any TV shows in fiction that didn’t travel and have big audiences.”

Panenka is now gearing up to premiere the first two episodes of its high-end TV drama series This Is Not A Murder Mystery in Film Fest Ghent’s Serial Madness strand. Directed by Hans Herbots, it is an English-language drama set in the flamboyant 1930s that imagines surrealists René Magritte and Salvador Dalí trapped in an English country house where a serial killer is at large. The international cast includes Pierre Gervais, Stephen Tomkinson and Florence Hall.

“We were lucky to have secured funding from New8 which is the new alliance between the eight public broadcasters from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.” Mertens says of the partnership between ZDF (Germany), NPO (Netherlands), VRT (Belgium), SVT (Sweden), DR (Denmark), YLE (Finland), RUV (Iceland) and NRK (Norway).

Two other Belgian broadcasters, RTL and Proximus, are also aboard as is Deadpan Pictures. Public support comes from Creative Europe Media, the Pilot Programme for Series Co-Productions, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), Screen Flanders, Screen Ireland, Screen Brussels and the Belgian Tax Shelter Studiocanal is handling international distribution.

Panenka’s main focus is always likely to remain on series like these but Mertens says there will also be room for films. 

“We are definitely open for bold ideas from talented filmmakers,” he says, confirming that Panenka is already developing further feature projects with Steppe. “But in this market, it is important that you think early enough about the financing models.”

• Why Angelo Tijssens is known as the “magic bullet’ of Flemish screenwriters