“Cinema is a way of being seen”, interview with Lukas Dhont, director of the sublime Close

A real gem will be released in theaters on Tuesday 1 November. Sweet, violent and moving, To close is a film of rare density and intelligenceworn by two young actors with hypnotic talent (Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Wael).

On the occasion of the release of the film we met Lukas Dhont, a young Belgian director to whom we also owe the beautiful Girlwho spoke childhoodfrom masculinity and of tenderness.

Close, what is it about?

Leone and Remi, 13 years old, they have always been friends. Until one o’clock unthinkable event separates them. Léo then approaches Sophie, Rémi’s mother, to try to understand …

Interview with Lukas Dhont (without spoiler)

To miss. Can you tell us the genesis of the film?

Luca Dhont. After Girl, I found myself in front of a blank page. I had to find something to tell. It is as if I have been traveling for a year and a half with Girl.

After being in constant analysis of this film, I needed a return to an essence, to an origin. A Return also to the child for whom And due from which Today I make films. So I went to the city ​​of my childhood.

Why did you choose to set the film in childhood?

When I was a kid, I felt pretty lonely. I felt like I belonged neither to the girls group nor to the boys group. And for this I immersed myself in creativity. For me, the cinema was therefore the first a way to escape.

My relationship with cinema changed during adolescence. I started watching movies where I found out characters I felt connected to. And then, suddenly, I understood it cinema can also be a way to feel seen, to show some perspective on the world.

Immersing myself in the history of cinema, especially in those films that talk about kids who grow up, like naked childhood, The 400 shots or Catch mice, I had the feeling of not finding myselfeven if these films are very beautiful.

I wanted to show a portrait of a boy of that age, of that time, transition between childhood and adolescence. I wanted to talk about this period of life as a tribute to the child that I was.

Your film tells the difficulty that two young friends encounter in being tender towards each other while growing up …

When I thought about what I wanted to say about this period, I realized that I also wanted to talk’friendship. It was then that I read research that was very important to me. An American psychologist followed 150 children aged 13 to 18. At the age of thirteen, she asked about their male friends : And they speak of it as love stories, with a lot of tenderness.

However, when he asks these same kids these questions once they are grown up, they speak completely differently: they did lost their vocabulary of vulnerability. Suddenly, adolescence only took away the language of emotions from them. They are taught that this language belongs to the ” female world “.

Masculinity is one of the main characters in the film …

I found this study very interesting because it tells us something about masculinity. Show how very earlykids are taught not being in touch with their inner world and distance yourself from others. And that’s a feeling I had myself as a child.

I was starting to do it being afraid of some intimacy with other guysbecause it was systematically seen by others through the prism of sexuality. Tenderness in the world of male childrenI find these to be rare imagesthat we never see. I wanted to show them on a screen.

Despite the sweetness of the film, the guilt is consumed …

Alongside this topic related to masculinity, I also wanted talk about the loss of innocence which is closely related to the transition between childhood and adolescence. Childhood is the time when we first understand this our actions have certain consequences. This is an enveloping sense of guilt, it also happens that we can never talk about it. That’s why I wanted to do it.

Can you tell us about your relationship with violence? Did you want to show it in a raw way, or rather soften it, leave it off screen?

I wanted to make a soft film, about softness, but who does not avoid violence. It is important for me to talk about violence in a brutal world. When I look at the newspaper, I see war, men who abuse their power, I see many images of brutality. When I wrote the film, I had two words in mind: brutality and fragility.

I wanted to talk about like this the imagery of brutality corrupts the world of tenderness. It was very important to talk as much about the flowers as about the shadows, which perhaps we all protect. I tried not to copy these violent images, but rather to find a more abstract way to talk about the impact of violence rather than the violence itself.

Featured Image Credit: © Menuet / Diaphana Films / Topkapi Films / Versus Production