25/11/2025 - The Belgian director breaks down how she bridged fiction and reality inside a fully operational care home

In her feature debut, Sunday Ninth [+see also:
film review
interview: Kat Steppe
film profile], which won the Special Prize for Best Editing for Jan Van Der Weken after it screened in Tallinn Black Nights’ First Feature Competition (see the news), Belgian director Kat Steppe bridges fiction and reality inside a fully operational care home, where Alzheimer’s residents become part of the movie’s emotional fabric. Drawn from a year of volunteering and shaped by a long-standing fascination with memory, the film follows two estranged brothers as they confront old wounds while a past love resurfaces.

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Cineuropa spoke to Steppe about working with vulnerable people, shaping a visual language around fading recollections, and why humour has its rightful place even in stories marked by loss.

Cineuropa: You spent nearly a year volunteering in a real care home before writing the script. What was the moment when you realised this experience needed to become a fiction film, rather than a documentary?
Kat Steppe: A fiction film is what I wanted to make from the start. I once read a line in an Irish poem: “There is a place where all our vanished days secretly gather, and that place is called the memory.” It struck me immediately because I’ve always been obsessed with the past and the passing of time. As a child, I would wonder for hours where time goes. I spent every holiday with my grandparents – nothing ever happened there, and still time slipped away.

Who you are is shaped by your past and by your ability to recall it. But how are you perceived when that ability starts to fade? That was the moment I decided to volunteer in the care home, to understand Alzheimer’s and dementia from the inside, so I could write about it in the right way. The character of Horst is based on a man I befriended there, who sadly passed away. Much of what Horst says comes from him. He even had notes he carried around with him about wanting euthanasia because he was afraid he would forget his own wish. The final conversation in the film is based on a real conversation I had with his doctor.

Sunday Ninth blends a fictional narrative with the presence of real residents with Alzheimer’s. What emotional or cinematic truth did this hybrid approach allow you to attain that pure fiction or pure documentary couldn’t?
I know that when something is real, it has a direct impact. In the series Painkiller, about the OxyContin crisis, they opened each episode with real victims’ families. No exposition, no backstory – just the simple knowledge that these are real people who lost someone. It’s immediate. But fiction with actors has another kind of power. A fictional character slowly gets under your skin and becomes part of your inner world. When a film or series ends, I sometimes feel lost – and my husband has to remind me that it’s not real. Bringing real people into a fictional story gave that story a different emotional charge. You could say I used their presence as a dramatic tool, but always in a way that honoured them.

The brothers’ conflict is rooted in a family mystery and decades of unresolved emotion. Why was sibling rivalry an important lens through which to explore memory, guilt and the need for reconciliation?
Some of my favourite westerns revolve around sibling rivalry – The Sisters Brothers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jacques Audiard
film profile], The Proposition [+see also:
trailer
film profile]… It’s a powerful lens for exploring memory, guilt and the longing for reconciliation. And it’s something many people relate to. My sister and I fought for years. We’re close now – she’s my best friend – but it took time.

On screen, Alzheimer’s is often portrayed as purely tragic, yet your film allows moments of humour and lightness to shine through. How did you calibrate the emotional tone so that joy never felt disrespectful and sorrow never felt sentimental?
I didn’t want to make a dark, heavy film about Alzheimer’s. The opening scene already signals that there will be humour. The early drafts were even lighter – I imagined the film as a dark comedy – but once you work with real people, you have to protect them through tone. In my personal life, I rarely allow sorrow to exist on its own. It might be part of my nature to look at a situation from above and notice what is also slightly funny about it. Beauty exists next to the ugly. Sorrow and joy sit side by side.

How did you navigate consent and ethics while involving vulnerable residents, especially in moments when memory, identity and lucidity were shifting on a daily basis?
Most residents were able to give consent themselves; when they couldn’t, their families did. They knew my earlier work, which also dealt with difficult topics in a respectful way. Before filming, I spent nine months simply being present and getting to know everyone. The actors did the same – creating bonds was essential. I wrote a “character bible” for every crew member, so that even on their first day, they already knew who lived there, how they liked to be addressed and what they enjoyed.