aan zee Tour de France The Bloody Olive Man of steel Minoes Kika en bob Zigzagkid Rhapsodie contact

BIO

Like many other people, I was born. (hurray). Unfortunately I will die too, but hey, lets keep it positive.

As a child I devoured comic books and played in the youth theatre founded by my mother. One of the plays was even turned into a short film by the great Jaco Van Dormael.

I studied film directing at the Sint-Lukas school in Brussels, where I flunked the third year. Nobody’s perfect, right? Luckily, things got better when I directed my third year short film Aan Zee, which got selected for quite a few film festivals and won some awards. I graduated in 1994 with the short Tour De France, which did even better on the festival scene. After graduation, I directed The Bloody Olive, based on a comic book by Lewis Trondheim. This film noir spoof went on to win more then twenty awards at film festivals around the world.

After shooting some commercials, and a side step in the theatre with the Simenon adaptation Footsteps In The Night, it was time for a feature film.

Man Van Staal (Man of Steel) was well received by the press but did only modestly well at the box office (understatement of the year). The film won the International Jury Prize at the 2000 Berlin Kinderfilmfest. Long live the Germans.

Participating in a film festival jury, I met Dutch producer Burny Bos and we decided to work together. Minoes, based on the book by famous Dutch writer Annie MG Schmidt, was a great success. Drawing in about a million viewers in Holland and Belgium, and gathering more then fifteen awards worldwide, it was quite a satisfactory experience.

In a master class about interactive television I teamed up with Colette Bothof and in half an hour we invented the basic story for Kika & Bob. (It took six more years to complete the series.)

At the moment I’m developing four live action feature films, co-writing two animation features films, developing a second series for Kika & Bob and doing the laundry. I still have no driving license.