Belgian cinema sets out on Hollywood adventure
Belgian cinema received some particularly good news from the United States this week! Yesterday, December 15, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the nominations for the upcoming Golden Globes, offering Belgians the pleasant surprise of seeing the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid With a Bike [+see also:
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film profile] picked as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Award. After having only just missed out this year on the honour of representing Belgium in the Oscar race (which in the end went to Michael Roskam’s Bullhead), the Dardenne brothers will thus take their first steps in Hollywood! We’ll find out on January 15 whether they get to take home a beautiful golden statuette, as we await the Magritte Belgian Film Awards on February 4, followed by the Césars on February 24, two ceremonies where the film has a strong chance of being nominated.
In early January, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which will run from January 5-16, 2012, will screen no fewer than seven Belgian features. Traditionally, the festival serves as a prestigious showcase for Oscar hopefuls. Bullhead should thus attract a great deal of attention, especially as its director has just been picked by Variety trade magazine as one of the 10 young directors to watch in 2012.
The festival will also be an opportunity to discover other Belgian productions, in particular Flemish ones. The line-up will include two films that have already won prizes in America, Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas (Silver Zenith Award at the Montreal World Film Festival) and Geoffrey Enthoven’s Hasta la Vista (Grand Prize of the Americas at the Montreal World Film Festival), as well as Lena by Christophe Van Rompaey (Moscow, Belgium).
Moreover, the festival will give pride of place to the debut films by two young, up-and-coming directors, unveiled at this year’s Venice Mostra: Nicolas Provost’s The Invader [+see also:
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