Belgian directorial duo Noëlle Bastin and Baptiste Bogaert have presented their newest feature, Vitrival – The Most Beautiful Village in the World [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Noëlle Bastin, Baptiste Bo…
scheda film], in the Tiger Competition of the 2025 IFFR. We spoke to them about their capturing of a somehow odd, and yet probably very common, form of everyday life in the countryside. 

Cineuropa: How did you choose this village? 
Noëlle Bastin: It's the village where I grew up. We wanted to cast Benjamin and François, the man sitting at the crossroads, who we'd already filmed in another movie. They're both my cousins. All of the people in the film are from the village or are part of my family. Apart from that, in relation to the subject of the wave of suicides we wanted to talk about, we thought it was interesting that it would take place in one, fairly small place. That way everyone knows everyone and the wave of suicides seems all the more strange. 

Baptiste Bogaert: For us, it's really important to know the places and people we're filming very well. It also means that the range of locations is not limitless and that we really only film the few places that we know very well. 

How did you develop the different characters? What was the starting point? 
BB: We asked ourselves how we could create a kind of fictional engine that would allow us to explore the village and the different links between its inhabitants. We quickly came up with the idea of developing a couple of policemen who would be both policemen and also citizens of this village who are really well integrated into local life. What interested us about the police officers was not so much that they would be the ones leading the investigation, but rather that they would be neighbourhood officers and that they would be there to patrol the area to check that everything was going well. We see them as fictional vehicles that allow us to get to know the village and also, at times, to have scenes that are purely documentary. 

NB: The police officers are the most fictional characters, and it's on them that we project the most elements. The spectators themselves patrol the village with them, so we can stop off just about anywhere, depending on what interests us in terms of village life. We created characters for the different people by matching them to people we knew and with whom we wanted to develop a situation with the two policemen.

BB: Most of the people play themselves and we film them in their own homes. It was important to us to interfere as little as possible with our fiction in the way people really live and the way they occupy the village. 

NB: Of course we selected what interests us in the different people. It all adds up to a village life compressed into less than two hours.  

How precisely did you write the dialogue and scenes? For example, there's the moments with the radio moderator, who passes on the message that someone has lost his scarf. Is that a real observation?  
NB: This scene was written. Jean-François from the radio station was asked to say a few sentences like this. Then, there's this radio station that really exists, just outside the village, and you really hear things like this. We liked the idea that little comments like that would create this bond between people.  

BB: Another thing about writing dialogue is that we, and Noëlle in particular, know how people talk. What we always tried to do was to work out the roles according to them and never try to let them play what would be off. If certain things sounded wrong, we had to rewrite them on the spot. 

So you've worked only with non-professional actors? 
BB: In all our films, we always shoot with non-professionals. Given that they all have fairly busy lives and work on the side, it was difficult to do rehearsals. So it was impressive to see that they had such an uncanny ability to memorise dialogue, like we'd never seen before.

NB: Pierre and Benjamin, the two policemen, in particular. They were the only ones we really rehearsed the scenes with, a few days before shooting. But they, too, given that the film was made over several shoots due to the different seasons in the story, on the second or third shoot, they just read the script, the two of them rehearsed, and then afterwards we did it, so they knew the script straight away.