16/09/2010

Over two years ago, Cinéastes Associés embarked on the exciting but perilous adventure of making low-budget films. This initiative stems from a double movement that is both international (like the UK’s Microwave programme, Rookie in Sweden and Microfilms in France) and national.

Perhaps keeping in mind their predecessor Man Bites Dog, made on a shoestring by some film students in the early 1990s, a new generation of Belgian directors in the 2000s have moved towards spontaneous films made on small budgets, but free from the administrative complexity of conventional financing combining grants and private funding.

Vincent Lannoo (Strass, Ordinary Man), Philippe Blasband (The Colour of Words [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Red Poppies, Motherly) and even Joachim Lafosse (his first two features Private Madness and What Makes You Happy [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fabrizio Rongione
interview: Joachim Lafosse
film profile]) make limited-budget films in a short space of time, driven by a pressing desire to work and put their skills into practice, convinced that it is “through practice that we make progress”, as stated in Cinéastes Associés’s declaration of intent.

Whereas Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier invented Dogme 95, an artistic manifesto advocating films stripped of all artifice (and abandoned by Von Trier himself ten years later), the wave of micro-budget films is more a pragmatic manifesto, which aims to give free expression to unusual talents that could potentially be “lost” in the traditional financing system.

Cinéastes Associés, with support from the Belgian French Community and Arte, offers a framework for this marginal creation. The programme currently backs two features per year, with a maximum budget of €280,000 per project. Four features have thus been completed, the most recent being Bernard Halut’s Miss Mouche [+see also:
film review
film profile].

The “2011-2012” call for projects has just been launched, and will close on November 15. Cinéastes Associés offers directors the opportunity to “film freely, with eyes wide open, without any obligation to profitability or conformity, but within freely agreed limits that give rise to high standards and boldness.”

(Translated from French)