Meeting Bas Devos during Film Fest Gent started with a confession. A few days before, strolling along Ghent’s canals on a small break from the festival, I had found myself crying. Somewhere next to some ungodly beautiful Gothic church, there was a construction site, and through the scaffolding I could hear these discreet words in Romanian. I instantly thought about your film, I told Devos. I’m not sure what exactly moved me, maybe it was this Western European beauty of the church that contrasted with what I know about my country, construction and labour. As I came to find more and more Romanian labour migrants all around Ghent, I kept thinking about Here.

Winner of the Encounters competition in Berlinale, Here is perhaps the most sincere film of the year – a cinema that radiates with warmth, a graceful celebration of fragility in humans and nature alike. Following Ștefan (Ștefan Gota), a Romanian construction migrant that is just about to return home, the film takes us on melancholic strolls through Brussels, as he goes on to say small goodbyes to other migrant friends. Along the way he meets Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a Chinese-Belgian researcher studying moss. He also reconnects with some mechanics, among them Mihai – Teodor Corban in a last role on film, beaming brightly and delivering an absolutely heart shattering performance.

Ștefan Gota had warned me about Bas Devos: „He is just the sweetest guy ever. „He is the film.” He was, evidently, right – chatting with Devos at the festival, I was met with the same welcoming and warm presence as his film. We spoke about representing the Romanian diaspora, looking at things with care and with generosity, and his desire to make films that create intimacy.

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It’s hard to hide how much your film has moved me, as someone coming from Romania. We’re not really used to watching ourselves on the screen from another point of view – and, especially, I don’t think we’re used to being looked at with such a warm gaze. How did you approach otherness in your film? Were you aware of how Romanian and Chinese identities in Belgium have been represented on screen? Did you try to show a different side of that?

This is one of the most important questions that you can ask, but it’s also a question that is difficult to talk about. It goes back to how you want to be with people. Whether you want to look at others with sincerity or with the idea that they are part of your story. I don’t want to talk about this as if I was doing it correctly; these things are very difficult and fragile. But, at the same time, I strongly believe that we should make films about people other than ourselves. We should be able to look at people who are not us. That does bring a certain responsibility and a certain care that is different from when I might be making a film about a white guy with glasses who lives in Belgium or speaks French [like myself].

A lot of it [for this film] also starts with Ștefan [Gota], who is a friend of mine. So, already, on one level, I can speak about a friend. That is a way of coming closer [to the subject]. The second thing would be research. We went together with Ștefan and interviewed Romanians in Belgium. I had already interviewed Romanians who work for European institutions, for another film. I kind of wanted to stay away from the European institutions, because… [whispers, jokingly] it’s kind of boring. But also, depending who you talk to, they are not necessarily so concerned with Brussels [as a city]. Whereas, if you have to live there, you are concerned with the city. Even if – the one thing that I could say on a more general note about the Romanians is that the question of “returning” is very alive.

Sometimes that is almost like in a dream form. There is the dream of returning. You’ll speak to a man who is 50 and who has kids who have grown up in Belgium, and still he’ll be speaking about going home as if it was something that will happen tomorrow. Listening to him, of course, you’ll know that this most likely will not happen. There is melancholia, which is probably very common in many communities of people working abroad, but I still found it very touching. Partly because we all live in this European space where you are free to move. There are Romanians who take a flight every Friday night to Bucharest and get back to Brussels on Sunday night. There is this mobility and there is this seemingly freedom, but there is this burden and violence of non-freedom.

43 000 Romanians in Brussels alone, that is a gigantic community. And I didn’t know. There is, of course, this other idea that we belong to Europe and somehow this is a unified space or a culturally shared space, which is not true. It’s way more complicated, more intricately different while, strangely, connected. One of my first thoughts was how can you speak about this without making it a miserabilist story about otherness.

Very often an economic lack of freedom.

Mainly an economical lack of freedom. I tried, first of all, to absorb this as much as possible and then I said: “OK. I don’t think I can speak about the generalised experience of Romanian labour migrants”. But I can speak about my friend Ștefan, and about this longing that also exists in Ștefan, or the question about what is [his] relationship to this place. And what is his relationship to this other place that he belongs to, or that he feels he belongs to, but that is so far away.

With Liyo’s character, I approached her mostly in the same way. When you start writing, there is a certain imaginary freedom, but then you will have a confrontation with someone who is real. That is, Liyo, and who she is, and her knowledge – which is much more knowledge than I have, of course, about what it is to be Chinese but Belgian-born. You have to be open and ready to change what is written. If I remained stuck in my imagination [about a story], then that’s what the film would be, imagination, and nothing more. I spoke a lot with Liyo and she was very strict, in a good way, so as to find a place where we would both be comfortable. It was important that she felt comfortable with a character that was much more in line with her own experience, than with what I’d picked up from speaking with Chinese-Belgians.

Sorry, this is a very long answer to what was your first question. But this is a question that I spend a lot of time dealing with. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I live in Brussels – which is a city of migrants. I myself am not born or raised in Brussels. It’s a smaller step than when you would be coming from China or Romania, but it’s a step, nonetheless. To come from a small Flemish-speaking village to a multilingual, hyper-complex city that is amongst the most diverse in the world, where language is almost always an issue, where you are constantly confronted with the Other. Living there makes these stories inescapable. It would be strange for me if I saw Brussels in a film depicted like a one faceted, one language-d city, it would be unreal. I feel Brussels has been a companion on my cinematic journey. It’s my teacher and my friend, and my sometimes-complicated lover.

When discussing Here, and its relationship with the Romanian migrants, you’ve often talked about “an invisible world”. Talking with Ștefan, he pointed out to me how that invisibility sometimes applies to Romanians abroad – it’s hard to recognize us, whereas for other ethnicities or nationalities, it’s easier to tell, by the way they look, by the way their communities organise and so on.

It’s very striking, what Ștefan pointed out. If we speak about the Other, in general, we think about someone [who looks differently]. You could be sitting on the bus next to a woman with a headscarf, and there might be a certain ‘otherness’ you could sense. The thing is that most likely that woman is born and raised in Brussels. But I can sit next to a Romanian guy, who has just arrived, doesn’t speak the language and has no idea about Brussels – who is the Other in a much more concrete way – but you would not sense this. I found that very striking. 43 000 Romanians in Brussels alone, that is a gigantic community. And I didn’t know. There is, of course, this other idea that we belong to Europe and somehow this is a unified space or a culturally shared space, which is not true. It’s way more complicated, more intricately different while, strangely, connected.

One of my first thoughts was how can you speak about this without making it a miserabilist story about otherness. In a context where there is a lot of political imbalance in Europe… this is not something that paralyzed me, but all the time I felt that there needed to be a balancing act in getting this story right. In making something that would speak about my affection for people, and not about my being different from people. I didn’t want to put out a “oh, poor you” attitude as a… Belgian white dude. I didn’t need people that I felt sorry for. I did feel that the consequence of them being here is something that I feel sorry for. The underlying structural imbalance – that is a violence. But many of these [migrants] are very strong, and have a very strong plan for themselves. This miserabilism that exists, and has existed, before the free movement policies, when families were genuinely torn apart…there is much more to talk about than just this violence.

This “invisible world” in your film also seems to refer to the natural world, to these microscopic plants we never really care to look at. Brussels has always been very present in your films, but now you also shift your gaze to nature, and we get to see this lush and very delicate nature in Here. A lot of filmmakers have been looking more intently at nature, recently, and there’s been the question if there isn’t some eco-anxiety that comes with it. Like a need to capture nature on film before it’s gone.

I didn’t think about it in apocalyptic terms, but more in the sense that I think for us to come to terms with a changing planet we need to look at our connection with the natural world in a different way. [Our current way of looking at it] is something that is deeply painful, because it’s a very Western way of excluding ourselves from the world as human beings. I was attracted to moss specifically because of the intricate relationship one needs to have in order to see it. Going through the forest you can enjoy the trees and whatnot, but in order to see moss you need to stop, and then to kneel and bring your face very close to the ground, and preferably you need a magnifying lens. So, it demands a different kind of attention. By engaging in this relationship, I felt, physically, for myself, that this connects you [to nature] in a way that I haven’t been connected, even if I grew up spending time outdoors as a kid.

Once you see this invisible word, you cannot unsee it. And it is everywhere! I was just sitting here and was looking at the greenery outside [growing on the wall]. This realisation and how it alters the way you look at the world felt like a seismic shift for me. And it’s not about [nature] being spectacular. I don’t mean it as some kind [of divine awe]. It’s about how these non-human presences become actors in the world. I wanted to have the natural world in my film without it becoming the background. I wanted for it to have its own story, up to a point, and also for people to know something about this plant after the film.

The way Liyo’s character approaches moss in the film feels like a combination between science and poetry. Or rather, it shows that there can be something very profound in the relationship that you can form with your object of study.

I was out quite a lot with a bryologist in Brussels, going to many of the places where we also filmed the film. I kept firing these lines at him about how there was something spiritual about it, and he kept refusing them. But the more we spoke about it, we eventually met in the middle, in a grey zone between his scientific work and my semi-poetic, semi-spiritual understanding of the world. I think this small plant is a teacher for us – it was the first land plant, it’s still here, it’s virtually unchanged, it has survived many climate changes. There must be something we can learn from it. It must be doing something right that we are not doing. There’s a lesson in its modesty. It takes less from its environment than it gives back. Which is the opposite of what we do.

In your other films, very much so in Ghost Tropic (2019), the night has been a very present element, often guiding the rhythm of the film. With Here, we still have the night, but I felt like it was the weather that was anchoring the rhythm. I thought a lot about the rain in your film – there are these pauses and periods of waiting that rain creates by default, in real life, too. There’s a certain communion that happens when people wait together for the rain to stop.

What I think I thought about is a very simple observation, you know, about how we say that when we have nothing to talk about, we talk about the weather. Actually, the weather now is the most important conversation that we can have. From the greatest banality it’s becoming the most important subject of discussion. I also wanted weather to be present for what it is, and not as some metaphorical element. I wanted to make it feel tangible, to make you feel the sun when it is burning, to feel the rain and the thunder that is approaching. I wanted to show these powers that are so much greater than us, that we have tried to subdue for a long time and are now starting to see the cracks in our failure.

Your decision to shoot on 16mm obviously enhances these sensory qualities that you are describing. I was wondering if this choice to go for film also meant a need for a more concrete relationship, or attachment to the physical, see natural, world.

These are exactly the two lines of thought that went into choosing film to shoot on. It was not an upfront choice; because we were speaking about this microscopic world, we initially wanted to see as much detail as possible, so digital [seemed most appropriate]. It was embarrassing how many lenses we tested. But there was no joy that neither me or the DoP were feeling. When we put 16mm on the table, there was joy. And that goes back to what you’re saying – [film stock] is a life, it’s matter, it’s in the world, it’s of the world. Digital is in the cloud. I can’t say that I’ll never shoot digitally again, because I might find a film that needs it. But this film – and we tried otherwise – really needed 16mm.

I feel there’s also a timeless quality that comes with it. The aspect ratio enhances that, I think, not that it is classical, but there is a certain melancholia, or, actually, a familiarity that you can feel just by looking at the film. It’s like you’re creating a screen that welcomes you.

I think a lot about forms of intimacy. How can we become intimate without having to know someone, or without pretending that we know someone? In film, it’s often the other way round; I have a feeling I know [the characters, the people] inside-out, because their psychologies are spelled out, but I don’t feel intimate at all. I’ve always wanted to invert that. I’m trying to do that, I don’t know if it works, but I rely on my instinct and intuition. The format, and the way we frame things, is part of that attempt to create a more intimate space.

In terms of intimacy, one other thing that felt very important in your film is the way you depict masculinity. With Romanian society, there’s still a very strong insistence on a certain kind of strong, alpha masculinity, as they say. Ștefan’s character, on the other hand, is someone who is very sensitive, and very quiet. Were you interested in broadening this description of masculinity that we so very often insist on?

I was aware that I was making a film about a man and about a manly occupation, and about all the traps that are set up with it. But I was making this film with Ștefan, so there was also no worry. Because Ștefan is what you see in the film. He is very physically masculine, but he has [what you would describe as] a very feminine soul. He is kind, and very generous; he is very soft-spoken. And –  this is very important – there is something in his sensitivity that I picked up in almost every interview that I did with these other men. I thought, but of course, because I am also like that. I am also a man, but I don’t feel ‘manly’. I also do a relatively male profession, you know, the Mr. Director thing, but I don’t feel like I am conforming myself to an image of what is expected. I just stumble through life, and I also fuck up a lot.

I was reassured in the moment that I understood that the image of a ‘man’ is just an image. And it’s a boring one. Let’s get over that. It’s deeply boring and deeply painful how we portray women, as well, and how we have been portraying them for so long.

This sensitivity you’re mentioning seems to extend to the mechanics, as well, especially in the scene where they just sit and eat. There is this kind of serene existence that you wouldn’t associate with the job. It’s also a scene about ordinary things. I remember at some point around Berlinale you were speaking very appreciatively about Hong Sang-soo and about the small gestures in his films. You too care about… the soup, about these very simple moments in life, that are, well, not necessarily beautiful, but they just exist.

In the film there are these two spaces. A space of the characters, and a space of the film itself. In the space of the character, the soup is something he is doing, it might be a good soup or a bad soup, it might need some more meat or vegetables. In the space of the film, it also becomes an object of interaction, of communication, of, maybe, projected desires or longing. Sometimes these are all intertwined.

In general, the more a filmmaker looks with generosity and sensitivity to the world, the more I will likely appreciate their work. Director Hong is that kind of filmmaker. He doesn’t need anything; he needs something that he likes. He likes people, and he likes drinking, he likes beaches, he likes all the right things. But it goes way beyond Hong Sang-soo’s films. It has to do with a focal shift in what kind of stories we want to tell. I am bored of the same story, where there’s a hero that has to overcome shit by bashing in other people’s brains. I am also sometimes saddened by emotional storytelling, which is not actually about grief or dying [like it’s pretending to be]. I’m looking for emotion where it really resides. And it does not reside in large gestures, but in small ones. It resides in this coffee cup on this table with this tiny bit of coffee left. Thinking about the world like that, there are so many teachers. We just don’t know them so well.

When we filmed the scene, the first take we did, Teo started crying. I didn’t write it like that, I thought, I didn’t write it to be emotional. But it became emotional for him. I thought “This is it” from the first take, but we did two more, and ended up using moments from the first and the last take. I expected it to be a really hard scene to film. But he was just so beautiful – actually way more beautiful than I anticipated.

Here has also been very special for the Romanians in the audience because it is dedicated to Teodor Corban, and is one of his last appearances on film. His character delivers this very emotional monologue that talks about life and its great fears and its beauty, and I couldn’t help thinking that moment simply transcends the screen.

I did feel something when we shot this scene that does touch upon this near-death kind of experience, [even if I didn’t know about what he was going through]. It took a long time to convince Teo to play in the film, he initially refused, saying he didn’t have the time. [We tried to persuade him] by assuring him it would be only two days and we would make him as comfortable as possible. In the end he said yes. What made him change his mind, I have no idea, maybe he read the scene and saw something there that touched him. I really don’t know.

We first met on Zoom, and I had Ștefan translate for me, who was very nervous about meeting him. But Teo was such a sweet and kind man that Ștefan was at ease immediately. We rehearsed the scene just three times, and this is one of the longest pieces of text in the film. By the third time he just knew everything by heart, this surprised me. I tried to explain where this story came from, that it’s something that came from a family member [of mine], and it’s also a mix of something my father once told me. It speaks about this fragility and this precarity of being alive. Every time something happens to you that alters the status quo, it brings you to that point, even if it is just moving to a place where you are not sure what you will find. I think Ștefan [the character] and [his character] are, strangely, in the same place.

When we filmed the scene, the first take we did, Teo started crying. I didn’t write it like that, I thought, I didn’t write it to be emotional. But it became emotional for him. I thought “This is it” from the first take, but we did two more, and ended up using moments from the first and the last take. I expected it to be a really hard scene to film. But he was just so beautiful – actually way more beautiful than I anticipated. I knew him from Radu Jude’s film, where he can be loud, but here he was just… spot on. It feels so true, people think this is a real guy just telling his story. [I’ve been asked if he is an actor]. I was like, yeah! And a big one!

It was very bizarre, because the day I was writing him an email to invite him to the Berlinale, I learned about his death. It’s weird to realise that someone’s last filmic moments are in your film. But I suppose it’s even stranger given the specific nature of this scene in particular. I am confused about it, about all these connections. [I wish we had got] the chance to meet for the premiere and hug and say “Well done”. 

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.