Cannes Film Festival 2025: Belgian Selections

Several Belgian-funded titles will be screening at this month's Cannes Film Festival (13–24 May), including Cédric Klapisch's Colours of Time, Sylvain Chomet's The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol and Momoko Seto's Dandelion's Odyssey. In Colours of Time, four cousins discover they share a mysterious family history; in 1895, their ancestor Adèle, then aged 21, leaves her hometown to search for her mother in a Paris bustling with newfound avant-garde creativity. As her descendants retrace her steps, they unravel Adèle's past. The two timelines of 1895 and 2024 intertwine and collide, confronting the cousins’ contemporary attitudes with life in late 19th-century Paris, leaving everyone’s future forever changed.

Animated Luxembourgish co-production The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol focuses on the eponymous author. At the height of his fame, Pagnol is commissioned by the editor-in-chief of a major women’s magazine to write a literary serial, in which he is free to recount his childhood. As he pens the opening pages, the child he once was—little Marcel—suddenly appears before him. In fellow animated title Dandelion's Odyssey, four dandelion achenes that survive a series of nuclear explosions are propelled into the cosmos. After crash-landing on an unknown planet, they set out in search of soil where their species might survive. However, they must face countless obstacles: the elements, fauna, flora, the climate.

Source/images: THE PR FACTORY

Summer's Camera (Divine Sung, 2025)

Divine Sung's feature debut Summer's Camera, which had its world premiere at this year's BFI Flare, is a charming coming-of-age tale that examines the themes of first love and grief.  This Korean-set film follows Summer, a teenager who becomes enamoured with Yeonwoo, the standout football player at her high school.  Summer—who has a wonderfully analogue hobby in the form of film photography—is seldom spotted without the camera of the title, which once belonged to her father and houses a roll of film he began before his untimely death.  Quite understandably, Summer can't bring herself to take the final few photographs.

This changes, however, once Yeonwoo quite literally enters the frame, stirring emotions in Summer that inspire her to click the shutter of the Nikon until the film runs out.  Once the photographs are developed, Summer studies both her shots of Yeonwoo and the pictures taken by her dad, and in the latter set she notices a man she doesn't recognise.  It's not exactly the severed ear that kickstarts the events of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, but given that Summer seems unconvinced by the official version of her father's death—it's said he died in a car crash—the stage appears to be set for a mystery in which she will play detective.

Yet Divine Sung proceeds to wrongfoot her audience by having Summer track down the mystery man—who, it transpires, owns a hair salon—in short order, leaving the film to unfold as a character study, one that deftly captures the peculiar combination of joy and awkwardness that is so often a feature of first love.  Sung is aided by a note-perfect performance from Kim Si-a as Summer; hitherto best known for her prominent supporting role in the Netflix film Kill Boksoon, Kim is entirely convincing as the high schooler attempting to reconcile the emotions of a grieving daughter with those of a new girlfriend.

Sung's movie is beautifully shot, with much emphasis on the warm, tactile nature of "real" photography as Summer carefully handles her camera equipment.  The film possesses an oneiric quality that serves to place Summer in a tolerant, gracious society, with this ethereal atmosphere only undercut by the incongruous punk rock songs that bookend the film.  Yet such dissonance reflects both the protagonist's jumble of feelings and the difficulties of navigating those oh-so-tricky teenage years.  Summer's Camera may look controlled and measured, but an undercurrent of divine chaos lies beneath its sweet, stately surface.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Departures (Neil Ely / Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, 2025)

Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely's largely Amsterdam-set Departures, which screened at last month's BFI Flare, is not for the easily offended.  This horribly watchable film presents an unflinching look at toxic behaviour as it follows Benji, played by co-director Eyre-Morgan, who meets the conceited Jake (David Tag) in a departure lounge at Manchester airport.  Both men are heading to Amsterdam, and end up spending a chaotic few days together.  This trip proves to be the first of many, with Benji and Jake nipping off to the Netherlands on a regular basis, where their conduct sees them firmly adhere to the stereotype of Brits abroad.

But, at Jake's behest, contact between the two needs to be limited to these Dutch excursions, and radio silence fills the gaps between the pair's hedonism-filled jaunts.  Benji appears both baffled and rather unhappy with this arrangement, but goes along with it as he cherishes his time with Jake.  We have a pretty fair idea of where this is all heading, as the film opens in medias res with Jake berating Benji at what is quite clearly the terminus of their relationship.  But quite how they got to that point is the question on which Departures hinges, and we witness the frequently unpleasant events that have left Benji so broken.

Despite this grim journey, Ely and Eyre-Morgan's film is by no means without humour.  Yet it is slightly problematic that the controlling, manipulative Jake's almost invariably dreadful behaviour is often masked by comedy, which somewhat dilutes the impact of his deeds.  But weirdly, the film never feels atonal, and it's made with such spirit and energy that it is only upon stepping back that the viewer can see Jake's actions are far from amusing.  Departures is a highly immersive film, one whose raucous demeanour tends to distract from the insidious way in which Jake tightens his grip on the smitten Benji before casting him aside.

As Departures winds towards it conclusion, there are signs of green shoots of recovery for the traumatised Benji in the form of Kieran (Liam Boyle), a man who has recently grappled with his own demons yet cautiously looks to brighter days ahead.  Both Tag and Eyre-Morgan give brave, committed performances—the film really wouldn't work if they didn't go full bore—and they're ably backed by a fine supporting cast, of which Tyler Conti and Kerry Howard, as Benji's friend and Jake's aunt respectively, provide the most eye-catching turns.  As uncomfortable as it is compelling, Departures is a film destined for cult status.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI