Koen De Graeve
Tensions rise at a classy restaurant. Both the staff and the guests show their true faces. A story about two social classes with their own secrets and facades.
Five people fight themselves more than each other, in this existence that's so beautiful and incredibly hard at the same time.
Masha (37) is in an overwhelming relationship with Luuk, father of two and separated. Nothing seems to stand in their way until Luuk turns incurably ill, leaving Masha without status.
Life is good for Nino van Doorn (8). He has a terrific brother Lucas (14), wise father Bruno and an angel of a mother, Marla. When Marla dies, Bruno can't cope with her death. Also the values like order, responsibility, love and care they represented. The two brothers create their own world. But soon the anarchistic world is threatened by the outside world. The two brothers are prepared to fool the system but what happens is that they really become a family again.
An unmarried thirty something businessman drives to work, being stuck in a traffic jam. He gets calls from his overprotective mom, as well as from his most helpful assistant. But today he feels a little more lucky, since the mysterious woman he has been following pulls up just next to him. He tries frantically to get in contact with her, but basic communication is not as evident as it seems to be ....
Based on a true story, 'Tot altijd' introduces us to a band of friends in the eighties, who spend their days enjoying their youth and turbulent (love) life. Years later, Thomas, a recent medicine graduate and Mario's closest friend, gets stuck between a rock and a hard place when he diagnoses Mario with MS (Multiple Sclerosis). Though not a fatal disease, it slowly consumes the patient's bodily functions and - in some cases - their minds. Mario becomes the leading spokesman for the action group "Waardig Sterven" ("Dignified Death") in support of the Belgian legalisation of euthanasia. Thomas does everything in his power to avoid losing his best friend, but also can't stand the sight of his continued degeneration...
A young journalist starts working for the local Antwerp newspaper and has to deal with the disappearance of a young girl. What was first regarded as another silly story, soon appears to be a suspicious case with linkages to the political world. Just when the election campaign in the city of Antwerp is fully erupted.
A frank and funny romantic comedy set in Antwerp, filmed in a quirkily inventive style, Madly in Love has a lot to say about human relationships. It focuses on the four women of the Miller family: teen daughter Eva, her mother Judith, aunt Barbara and older half-sister Michelle, as they work their way through the chaos called love. The result is a roller coaster ride of first crushes, lust, affairs, baby fever, and indestructible love. The four women are beautiful, courageous and sensible, but are also sometimes a bit lost. Can their male counterparts handle this dangerous cocktail of determination and female hormones?
In Crazy About Ya, different characters meet. Sometimes their stories are closely interwoven, sometimes they just brush past each other. But sooner or later everyone runs into the hero of this story, Saint Jan. As a true sanctus ex machina he makes sure that in the end, they are all a bit crazier about each other again.
13-year-old Gunther Strobbe grows up surrounded by alcohol, trash and his completely useless father and uncles. Slowly but surely, he's being prepared for the same hapless life. Can he defy his destiny?
A journalist is about to settle with his girlfriend when his life and views get shaken up by the young and beautiful Pakistani refugee Nadia. At work his ideals are more and more confronted with the harsh reality of modern urban society, while his flamboyant grandfather fights his last personal battle - a battle for his right to die.
When Black Kelly gets back from New York, she discovers that more has changed than just her hair color while she's been away. Frederic found himself a girlfriend and plans to move. Kurt and Blonde Kelly live together with their one-year-old child. And Patrick's gone. Reunited with the old gang, Black Kelly realizes that life went on during her absence and that things will never be the same...
Guy Moeyaert is a well-meaning colonial official in a jungle district of the Belgian Congo in the last years of white colonial rule, after the Second World War, a paternalistic system where the state, unable to be properly present all over the vast, sparsely populated country, collaborates systematically with the Roman Catholic missions -in his post, father Alexis- and private enterprise, in case mainly the mining company -locally represented by engineer Lenaers- which also helps out with money and labor for such public tasks as road building. Even his grip on the natives is weak, as they live under hereditary tribal leaders, which must take from its people what they are legally obliged to deliver to the state in taxes and labor; coercion is done by force, including whipping on the bare buttocks, which Guy hates. Guy also starts a love affair with Hélène Vermarcke, who gets estranged from her husband Luk (the three were already friends in Belgium) as he devotes all his efforts the their plantation, leaving her alone with the native staff and their son, or is it Guy's? The adultery makes his position in the white community far weaker then is compatible with his position of theoretical authority without sufficient independent means. He also depends heavily on his educated black clerk Gabriel Ndazaru and ambitious white deputy Arthur. It all gets worse for everybody as the call for 'dipenda', black independence as in Ghana, gets stronger, in time even accepted 'in principle' by the Belgian government which plans a gradual transition which the idealist Guy supports but all other whites oppose, while the natives have neither patience nor insight and start attacking every symbol of the old regime, regardless of its objective value, and soon white people and 'collaborators' too- it gets physically dangerous, but Guy won't budge or flee...
Sammy Raes, a nice, naive law-freshman from a simple family, dies in a form of hazing known as the 'flying carpet'. The father of the arrogant fraternity president Guy Bogaerts who ordered this reckless procedure abuses his connections to prevent a judicial homicide conviction, while the college authorities prefer to avoid a scandal in the press. However Sammy's freshmen friends Tom Smits and Denn
In a high-class restaurant, the working staff and their wealthy guests both have to deal with secrets and keep up appearances, until the façade comes crumbling down.
