7/30/2023 0 Comments Lukas memory master![]() Lukas Dhont: Yes! This Garden of Eden concept is very interesting given that my main actor is named Eden. It would be great to hear a bit about capturing this state of being between your young actors, Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele, particularly in the lyrical first part of the film, which suggests a Garden of Eden utopia in its freedom, sensuous use of nature, color saturation, music and feeling. It beautifully illustrates that undefinable adolescent moment when you have all of these strong feelings yet do not quite know what to do with them. ![]() It sits in the intersection of many different life experiences, including friendship, perhaps love, coming of age, peer pressure and family relationships. Lee Shoquist: Close is euphoric but also deeply painful. I recently caught up with Lukas Dhont for a chat at Chicago’s Four Seasons hotel, and in an unusually substantive conversation-as anyone who has seen his films might expect-Dhont was rich with abundant observations on adolescent fragility, his filmmaking processes and his artistic drive to address taboos in his pictures. As an artist, Dhont does so with immense compassion for his young actors, their characters and his audience. ![]() Nominated last week for this year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar, his Close is a masterful, humanist reminder of cinema’s power to confront and dismantle established norms with heroic authenticity. Writer-director Dhont, the thirty-one-year-old Ghent-born filmmaker educated at Belgium’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts whose equally sharp-eyed debut Girl took Cannes’ Caméra d’Or in 2018, made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe tally in 2019 and has, with Close, proven that his freshman film success was no mere fluke. The severance is made thrillingly poignant by never-acted-before star Dambrine, who carries the weight of guilt, and the world, on his young shoulders, holding the camera in close-up with preternatural poise. Exquisitely observed and deeply felt, Lukas Dhont’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Close is an adolescent coming-of-age picture told with such heartstopping sensitivity that it instantly ranks amongst the best films ever made about childhood loss-that of our friendships, our innocence and, sometimes, those we hold most dear.Ĭharting the delicate, idyllic union between two thirteen-year-old Belgian boys (the unforgettable Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele) that will be shattered by inevitable intrusions of peer pressure and social conformity, Dhont imagines a utopian, carefree world of protective brotherhood-and perhaps of potential first love, too early to be articulated-and then forever fractures this equilibrium. ![]()
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