Agenda

EN

Ive Stevenheydens: Your film focuses on working newcomers such as Reginald from Romania and Nikki from Greece. How did you come up with this idea and theme? What lies at the foundation of Kapital Europe?

Ben De Raes: The film is a continuation of my earlier documentary short Waiting Working Hours from 2019. That film revolves around workers waiting on a Brussels street corner, hoping to find a day job. By talking extensively with these people on the street, I gathered a wealth of information. Even after completing the short film, some things remained untold. Kapital Europe explores how labour can be depicted, something often missing in fiction films. In fiction, you might see physical labour briefly at the beginning of a film to set up a character’s social situation.

After that, everything revolves around drama and narrative. I wanted to explore how you can portray work itself in a film as something constructive, as something that keeps the economy running. And how can you create tension around that? I shot the film on 16mm, and it was later converted to digital. This gives the work a certain texture, a particular flair. But it also imposed a restriction during filming: we had to use the material sparingly, which helped us respect the timing and performances of the players in the film. I see this as a Marxist approach: labour is the driving force of the film. This is particularly evident in the first story, where we follow Reginald. We see him begin and end a workday, which forms the structure of his chapter. With the second protagonist, Nikki, it’s different. As a bike courier, she works in a new, precarious job where people are supposedly their own bosses. In reality, that’s not true. She cycles through the city in an endless loop, with no clear beginning or end. Her work is perpetual, and the worker is completely interchangeable. It doesn’t matter who delivers the meal. Nikki’s work has barely any value. After Waiting Working Hours, I developed these themes further in Kapital Europe. [...]

Brussels also plays an important role in your film. The city – with its traffic, architecture, hustle and bustle, lesser-known corners, and chaotic charm – even takes on a starring role. How do you view your home city? Where do you place yourself in the film?

The title Kapital Europe is a wordplay that refers both to Brussels as the official capital of Europe and to the place where Karl Marx wrote his critique of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. I’ve been living in the city for almost ten years now. Brussels is in constant transition. I fully embrace the city’s extreme diversity. The locations in the film are often construction sites, through which I want to raise the question of where this city is actually heading. Every Western city seems to resemble the others in this era, but in Brussels, there seems to be a mindset that wants to resist and can resist generic development.

Ben De Raes in conversation with Ive Stevenheydens1  

• 1Ive Stevenheydens, “Labour as the Heartbeat of the City. Ive Stevenheydens in conversation with Ben De Raes,” Kapital Europe press kit.

EN

“I don’t want to steal images. I am not a thief. My camera is not a surveillance camera, it is more like... not surveillance, but bienveillance.”

Nicolas Philibert

“The outcome is a poetic meditation on the passage of time and the progress of a child’s education, framed by the changing seasons and filled with everyday laughter and dramas, from the theft of an eraser to a 4-year-old’s first encounter with a photocopier to the (temporary) loss of a tiny girl in a tall field of wheat during a spring picnic. ‘At its heart’, Mr Philibert observed, ‘the film speaks about how difficult it is to grow up.’”

Leslie Camhi1

Richard Falcon: A lot of documentaries today are shot on DV and/or shown on television. How important was it for you how the film would look on a big screen? For instance, there’s a very cinematic movement between the close-ups of the children’s faces and the shot of the countryside.

Nicolas Philibert: My culture is cinema. I detest television. Television is obscene in its transparency – it’s a place where people lay bare their lives for very little return. Cinema isn’t transparent – it uses elements like the grain, the depth of the shot, the play of light and shadow. Cinema is the art of ellipsis: the language is metaphorical and every film has its secrets and mysteries.

Mr Lopez describes teaching as a process that demands great patience and takes time but is very rewarding. Is this how you feel about documentary filmmaking?

The roles of the teacher and the documentary filmmaker both involve the transmission of knowledge and require patience and the ability to keep an appropriate distance from your subject. Documentary filmmaking demands an aesthetic and moral distance. So the shots of nature in the film are very important because they create a contrast between this small class and the rest of the world. We open with the snow, the whistling wind and the cows being herded; we thus recognize the school as a refuge from the violence of the world outside. The first shots you see of the school itself are the tortoises creeping across the floor: it’s a way of saying that the viewer needs to be patient as the film is going to take its time and will illuminate its subjects only gradually.

Richard Falcon in conversation with Nicolas Philibert2

• 1Leslie Camhi, “A Schoolroom Where Life Is the Curriculum,” The New York Times, September 14, 2003.
• 2Richard Falcon, “Back to Basis,” Sight & Sound, July 2003.