Roskam's 'Le Faux Soir' Crowns Walloon Cinema's TIFF Year — SkimNews
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- Michaël R. Roskam's 'Le Faux Soir' world premieres at Toronto International Film Festival, then screens as the closing gala at San Sebastián — a homecoming for the director after recent Hollywood projects
- The film dramatizes a 1943 Belgian resistance operation that produced a fake edition of Le Soir, the country's largest newspaper, which had been repurposed by the Germans as a propaganda machine
- The high-profile Toronto premiere coincides with the 40th anniversary of Wallonie-Bruxelles Images (WBImages), the agency tasked with internationally promoting Walloon and Brussels-Capital film and audiovisual works
- WBImages director Hervé Le Phuez points to recent international co-productions including 'A Man of His Time' and 'Forever Your Maternal Animal' as evidence that Walloon films now travel widely and producers regularly work across borders
- Wallonia's broader TIFF slate includes Lukas Dhont's Cannes-winning queer war drama 'Coward' (a majority Flemish production made with Wallonia) plus world-premiere shorts Ronni Shalev's '2:Love' and Sameh Alaa and Robin Vouters's 'The Day I Smoked a Cigarette With My Father'
- Filmmaker Ronni Shalev credits Belgium's 'statut d'artiste' — a social status that pays artists a salary via social security during weeks they lack a work contract — with enabling creative risk-taking, while noting the program is currently under threat from Belgium's right-wing government
Why it matters: Filmmakers credit Belgium's three-tier public financing system and the 'statut d'artiste' welfare program with sustaining an ecosystem that lets auteurs take risks — but the article itself notes that welfare program is under threat from Belgium's current right-wing government, putting the institutional foundation of this celebrated creative surge in question.
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