29/01/2024 - Wannes Destoop delivers a sensitive first feature which foregrounds a rare heroine in film who asserts her right to happiness

This Friday 26 January, young Flemish filmmaker Wannes Destoop had the privilege of opening the Ostend Film Festival with his debut feature film Holy Rosita. Wannes Destoop first turned heads back in 2011 with his short film Swimsuit 46, which bagged the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Ten years later, he distinguished himself in TV with Albatros, which nabbed the Europa Prize for Best European Series of the Year and racked up 14 Ensor nominations. The series explored fatphobia with great accuracy, a subject also featuring in Holy Rosita, which is brave enough to foreground a heroine of a kind we don’t often see.

The film begins without false modesty, in bed, with Rosita. Rosita sells her charms with benevolence. She has a few regular clients attracted by her generous, enveloping body, which sits outside of the canons of beauty. Her job as a laundrywoman in a sheltered workshop certainly is enough to pay her rent, so she has to earn a living somehow. Especially since this complementary activity might very well help Rosita to fulfil the dream which has thus far been refused to her: becoming a mother. Here, Wannes Destoop depicts a thwarted woman whose body is controlled by others: her family and society too. Constantly infantilised by the system and her loved ones, Rosita takes her destiny into her own hands, takes on whatever’s presented to her as off limits, and hides the pregnancy she’s wanted for so long so that she can see it through to the end. Rosita has the soul of a child; in fact her best friend is 8 years old. She plays with her as much as she plays like her, losing herself in these moments of freedom which help her forget the rest, a daily life characterised by constraints and precariousness. Rosita also has a somewhat battered soul, a conflicted relationship with her mother, her determination to have a child potentially aimed at proving that she could be a good mother.

Wannes Destoop demonstrates great sensitivity, genuine gentleness and a real talent for filming this body which we don’t often see in film, presenting it up-close, in a 4/3 format which helps us to feel each and every one of her emotions. He opens up new paths for fiction, invents new models and fights alongside his heroine against the fatphobic, ableist discrimination which stop her from advancing in life. Evidently Rosita needed to be embodied, she needed a voice, a body, and this opportunity provided theatre actress and director Daphne Agten with her first big role in film, delivering a performance full of grace and intensity. She is magnificent in this journey of emancipation, which doesn’t shy away from melodrama where the situation requires it, whilst also daring to indulge in joy and hope.

Holy Rosita is produced by De Wereldvrede, a Flemish firm who are very active in TV and are now on their second feature film after Cargo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gilles Coulier
film profile]. Cinéart are due to release the film in Belgium on 14 February.

(Translated from French)