Reviews
Here
Reviewed by Roger Gook
The film shown at the Keswick Film Club last Sunday was an antidote to the rush of modern life, encouraging us to slow down, look closely and live in the moment. "Here" by the Belgian director Bas Devos follows a few days in the simple life of a young Romanian living in Brussels. There's no real plot, just a gentle narrative of warm and very human encounters as he makes soup and takes it round to his friends.
The director was inspired by a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native American biologist and author who writes about our relationship with the natural world and how vital this is for the health of the planet. She is best known for her book, Brading Sweetgrass, but has also written "Gathering Moss". Bas Devos was intrigued by this and contacted a bryologist in Brussels. He went out walking with him and found that studying moss involves a lot of sitting, looking, thinking and bringing your focus right down to the detail. He began to see mosses as small worlds, contained within themselves but relating to the surrounding world.
This brought him to think about the communities in Brussels where there is a large and complex mix of ethnicities and languages. And so the film was born – a series of small encounters leading to a chance meeting with a young Chinese woman studying moss in the woods. The two rather lonely people connected through looking closely at moss, and there were signs that the relationship between them might develop – not least because he gave her some soup.
The film itself had a calm, almost meditative feel to it. The stationary camera fixed a shot, held it and then a small scene developed, but it might be just the movement of the leaves. There were rarely more than two people in the shot and never in close up. The sound track and dialogue were minimal, and the noise of the city rarely intruded – Brussels seems to have a lot of leafy paths through woods.
At one level this could be seen as very boring, and certainly many in the audience seemed to find this. But if you immersed yourself in what the film was trying to do, paid attention to the small things and looked closely, the charm and warmth of the film enveloped you.
The director was inspired by a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native American biologist and author who writes about our relationship with the natural world and how vital this is for the health of the planet. She is best known for her book, Brading Sweetgrass, but has also written "Gathering Moss". Bas Devos was intrigued by this and contacted a bryologist in Brussels. He went out walking with him and found that studying moss involves a lot of sitting, looking, thinking and bringing your focus right down to the detail. He began to see mosses as small worlds, contained within themselves but relating to the surrounding world.
This brought him to think about the communities in Brussels where there is a large and complex mix of ethnicities and languages. And so the film was born – a series of small encounters leading to a chance meeting with a young Chinese woman studying moss in the woods. The two rather lonely people connected through looking closely at moss, and there were signs that the relationship between them might develop – not least because he gave her some soup.
The film itself had a calm, almost meditative feel to it. The stationary camera fixed a shot, held it and then a small scene developed, but it might be just the movement of the leaves. There were rarely more than two people in the shot and never in close up. The sound track and dialogue were minimal, and the noise of the city rarely intruded – Brussels seems to have a lot of leafy paths through woods.
At one level this could be seen as very boring, and certainly many in the audience seemed to find this. But if you immersed yourself in what the film was trying to do, paid attention to the small things and looked closely, the charm and warmth of the film enveloped you.