Belgian filmmaker Kat Steppe makes an affecting, deeply humane debut with Sunday Ninth, unveiled in the Black Nights Film Festival’s First Feature Competition where it received a Special Jury Prize. A hybrid of drama, dramedy and social portraiture, the film probes the fragile terrain of fading memory while charting an improbable late-life reconciliation. What emerges is a moving, well-calibrated work anchored by two exceptionally attuned performances and a quiet philosophical pulse which grows in resonance as the story advances.

Steppe opens with a quote from John O’Donohue — “there is a place where our vanished memories secretly gather. The name of that place is memory” — signalling her intent: to explore memory not as chronology but as emotional truth. This premise unfolds through Horst (played by Josse De Pauw), an ageing man whose life is marked by missteps and regrets, now living in a nursing home as Alzheimer’s steadily dismantles his past. His brother Franz (Peter Van Den Begin) - absent for thirty years and suddenly back in the picture for reasons that are part financial, part existential - enters this fragile microcosm in search of some sort of inheritance but also, perhaps involuntarily, a reckoning.

The dynamic that develops between the two is the film’s strongest asset. Steppe structures their encounters as near-constant confrontations, visually underscored by Renaat Lambeets’ cinematography, which frequently places the men opposite one another or side by side in tight, almost chamber-piece compositions. This spatial tension effectively mirrors their emotional impasse: two lives running parallel, occasionally touching, rarely fusing. Their flashbacks — dotted throughout and elegantly integrated into the story — gradually shed light on a shared history marked by envy, affection, betrayal and hidden wounds. A jilted bride, a mother lost in Lourdes, the debris of old resentments: each recollection appears like a flare in the darkness, illuminating just enough to unsettle us without fully revealing the whole picture.

The pacing is controlled and deliberate, allowing these fragments to accumulate until the narrative subtly shifts into more philosophical territory. This evolution is aided by the presence of the other nursing home residents populating the film. Their gestures, routines and fleeting interventions function not as background texture but as moral counterpoints, reminding us of the universality — and the solitude — of ageing. The final sequence, buoyed by their collective presence, lands with quiet yet profound emotional force.

Technically, Sunday Ninth boasts an understated elegance. Pieter Van Dessel’s score is both moving and soothing, never overwhelming the performances but gently shaping the emotional climate. The production design by Gert Stas favours muted colours and lived-in textures which reinforce the story’s melancholic tone, while Jan Van Der Weken’s editing keeps the delicate interplay between past and present sufficiently fluid and coherent.

What sets Steppe’s debut apart isn’t so much the film’s narrative novelty as the sensitivity with which she handles her themes. Sunday Ninth recognises that memory is never a fixed archive but a shifting constellation of truths and wounds, and that reconciliation, when it arrives, often does so imperfectly. The result is a tender, perceptive first feature which stays with us well beyond its final frame.

Sunday Ninth is produced by Panenka (Belgium), Isabella Films (Netherlands) and VRT (Belgium).