16/01/2013 - Two Belgian films on the bill, on childhood and adolescence: Kid by Fien Troch, and Kadija Leclère’s first feature film Le Sac de Farine

Kid [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Fien Troch, and Le Sac de Farine [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (lit. A Bag of Flour) by Kadija Leclère (photo) are being released in cinemas today. Coincidentally, they both discuss childhoods fraught by the absence of parents, two childhoods hurriedly erased by the confrontation with a harsh reality.

Kid is 7 years old. He lives on a farm with his mother and elder brother. Life a little wobbly due to his father’s departure, a daily struggle to keep their heads above water. Then fate strikes when Kid's mother dies. Taken in by his uncle and aunt, catapulted into a residential suburb, oppressive and sleepy, he tries to accept the absence of his mother. With Kid, Fien Troch continues her work on the subject of grief. While her previous film, Unspoken [+see also:
trailer
film profile], addressed the unfinished mourning of a couple confronted by the loss of their daughter, but deprived of her body, she now tackles that of an orphan. The film produced by Prime Time is co-produced by Versus with the support of the VAF  and CCA. Cinéart is distributing the movie in 8 theatres.

Sarah is 8 years old. She enjoys a quiet life in a foster home in Belgium. One day, her father, whom she has never seen, comes to pick her up for the weekend. A weekend that will never end: her father has in fact torn her away from the foster home to take her to live in exile with his family in Morocco, where he abandons her a second time. Sarah must then forget Belgium and take on a new identity. We find her a few years later, at the time of an up-rising. While protests spread across the country (we are in 1984, in the midst of hunger riots), Sarah decides to fly in the face of convention to achieve her goal: to return to Belgium. Le Sac de Farine, Kadija Leclère’s first feature film, is partly based on her own experience. A film about women, it is borne aloft by the performances of two magnificent actresses, Hiam Abbas and Hafsia Herzi. The film is jointly produced by Panache Productions and La Compagnie Cinématographique Européenne. It received the support of the CCA, the VAF, Bruxellimage, the RTBF and the Moroccan Cinema Centre. Anga Distributions (a structure created by the two companies), is releasing the film in 5 theatres.

(Translated from French)