Forum of Independents - Competition 2009 / Menteur / Belgium 2008
Antoine is a 25-year-old loser who endeavours to prove to his family that he isn’t the idiot they take him for. He tries to find that dream job but, because he hasn’t the qualifications or intelligence for it, he embarks upon a tragicomic road from one failure to the next, which only fuels his despair... This agonizing study of the need for recognition is the feature film debut of Belgian director Tom Geens.
Antoine is an idiot. At least, that’s what his suburban lower middle-class family thinks, for whom education and success are all-powerful magic formulas. Antoine is twenty-five, he’s out of work and, although he diligently studies books on how to turn fear into success, his hopes at finding a better job than his last one as a sales clerk in a hardware store, are pretty minimal. Things get really bad when his younger brother is given a company BMW. Desperate for recognition from his family, Antoine tries to find a decent position but, after one failed interview after another, he starts to lose all sense of reality: he dreams up a fantastic CV, forges a university diploma and gets progressively more entangled in a web of absurd lies. The more effort he makes, the more inexorably he fails, which only fuels his growing anxiety and aggression... Tom Geens’s video film begins to resemble a hurricane: from its curt and simple starting point, it gradually whips itself up into a whirlwind, sucking in more and more characters with increasing inner tension and velocity. The movie draws on the viewer’s emotions, pulling him right into the eye of the storm – a liberating catharsis.
78 min / Color, HD CAM
International premiere
Director Tom Geens
/ Screenplay Tom Geens
/ Dir. of Photography Zvonock C. L.
/ Music The Liars
/ Editor Sophie Vercruysse
/ Producer John Engel
/ Production Cinéastes Associés
/ Cast Jean-Benoît Ugeux, Luc Brumagne, Christelle Cornil, Hélène Theunissen, Corentin Lobet, Colette Sodoyez
/ Contact Cinéastes Associés
Tom Geens is a filmmaker from Belgium who began his career in London in 1993. While he taught himself the tricks of the trade, he gained experience as an actor, screenwriter and director of commercials, music clips and promotional films. His filmography as a director amounts to more than a dozen short films, such as Shame (2005), Wrong (2005), awarded at festivals in Milan and London, and Compassion (2006), which won Best Screenplay at the Brussels Independent Film Festival. Liar is Geens’s feature film debut.
Cinéastes Associés
97 avenue Louis Lepoutre, 1050, Brussels
Belgium
Phone: +32 234 545 05
Fax: +32 234 369 92
E-mail: [email protected]
Marie Queffeulou
Producer
Tom Geens
Film Director, Film Director
John Engel
Producer
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