14/03/2025 - The Luxembourgish director unpacks the importance of the location for her debut feature and the significance of art in the grieving process

At the Luxembourg City Film Festival (LuxFilmFest), Cineuropa sat down with Désirée Nosbusch, a seasoned Luxembourgish actress (Bad Banks, Superchamp Returns [+see also:
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trailer
film profile]) and television personality, to discuss her debut feature as a director, Poison [+see also:
film review
interview: Désirée Nosbusch
film profile]. It centres on two characters played by Tim Roth and Trine Dyrholm, who reunite ten years after they son passed away. They meet at the cemetery and start talking about the past. The main scenes were shot in Luxembourg’s Vianden cemetery. Nosbusch unpacks the importance of the location and the significance of art in the grieving process.

Cineuropa: Poison has just been shown at the LuxFilmFest, and it was partly shot in your homeland, Luxembourg. How important is it for you to work here?
Désirée Nosbusch: I have to be honest: in Luxembourg, we’re lucky to have a generous film fund. We’re being supported as artists, and it is a close and intense collaboration. That is a very fortuitous circumstance because, in a case like my film, if you don't get subsidised by a film fund, it’s hard to pull off these days. Even though the fund supported us, it took us eight years to get the financing. Altogether, it took 13 years to make this movie. And as for the shooting location, for me as a filmmaker, it’s very important for me to know how my story smells, how it feels, how it sounds and how it is embedded in the surroundings. So, in this case, I felt at home, and I knew what the Vianden cemetery was like.

Your film is based on a famous stage play by Lot Vekemans. In such cases, it’s important to develop a cinematic language so that it does not simply feel like theatre on screen. What was your artistic approach to this?
I always knew that I needed to open the story up and that I couldn't just put theatre on the big screen. The challenge for me was to open it up but still stay truthful to the authenticity and the pureness of the play. For example, Lot Vekemans would never have allowed me to tell this story with flashbacks. When I tried to convince her to give me the rights to try to develop this, she asked how I would want to tell this story. And, thank God, we agreed on that point. I wasn’t interested in putting a face on the child or showing how the accident happened. I was interested in the moment now – what happens when these two people meet again after ten years. Where do they stand individually, and how do they go about it? For me, the big “aha” moment of the play was realising that, apparently, we cannot grieve or mourn together; everybody has their own individual way of doing that. And the person who runs away is not necessarily the bad person or the one who doesn’t grieve as much as the one who gets stuck and left behind.

It was important to find a location that would almost become a third lead. I looked at many cemeteries in Luxembourg, and I almost gave up because I couldn't find what I was looking for. In my vision, I always needed the element of water as a metaphor, and none of the cemeteries I was looking at had any. I thought I might not have any other choice but to go to the Netherlands and shoot at a cemetery there. Then, my production designer called me from Hamburg one night and said: “I'm on Google Earth; I’ve found a cemetery in Luxembourg that has everything you need.” When she said “Vianden”, I couldn't believe it. It’s the place where every child in Luxembourg goes on their first school trip. I had been there many times, and I had forgotten all about it. I drove there the next morning, and it had everything I’d wished for.

In one of the scenes, Tim Roth’s character reveals that the thing that helped him to start the grieving process, or maybe to come to terms with what happened to him, was singing. Would you agree that singing or maybe, more broadly speaking, artistic expression is something that helps us process and understand what's happening in life?
Maybe not necessarily always to help us understand, but what it can bring you is a moment of peace, where you suddenly forget. I thought, what if things were to just stay like this? What about hope? That is something I changed compared to the stage play; it doesn’t have that notion of hope. I added it because I think that once we lose hope, we lose everything. So, I think when you have hope, you also hope for peace. It's something that was important to me.