Dir. Bas Devos
2023 | 84mins | Belgium
French, Romanian, Chinese, Dutch, with English subtitles

Winner of the Berlin 2023 Encounters section and Best International Film Galway Film Festival 2023

Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is on the verge of moving back home. He cooks up a big pot of soup with leftovers in his fridge, to hand out as a goodbye gift to friends and family. As he is ready to go, he meets a Belgian-Chinese young woman who works in a little restaurant while preparing a doctorate on mosses, her attention for the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.

Can a lucky encounter change our fate? We don’t know what Stefan’s future looks like, but we do know that it might now be a bit different, that his presence in the world will be changed. In Here, Bas Devos sketches out his poetic, highly pictorial, urban tableaux, which are shot almost in square ratio, as if suspended outside of time, and tinged with a contagious humanism which might push us to see the things (and the people) we didn’t previously see, differently. It’s a cinematic approach of few words and effects yet brimming with moving contemplations.

“Manages to present some of the most striking moving images in recent memory. A reflection on the small joys we choose to miss that packs a punch far greater than its runtime” IndieWire

“Bas Devos’s delicate, gracefully paced tale of two strangers. Every moment signifies in this lovely, unexpected movie” New York Times

“Achingly tender, Here is fully present and dazzlingly alive. Remarkable” Screen International

Showing Times

• Fri 12 Jul: 5.45pm
• Thu 18 Jul: 5.45pm

∆ BBFC Rating Details:

Rated PG -infrequent mild bad language