Here

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 as a goodbye gift for friends and family. As he is about to leave, he meets a young Belgian-Chinese woman who is working in a little restaurant while researching her doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.

A hunter-gatherer of beauty in urban landscapes, Bas Devos knows how to tell stories through images. Berlinale audiences beheld this talent in his films Violet (Generation, 2014) and Hellhole (Panorama, 2019). In Here, the Belgian filmmaker’s ability to register the invisible and the untold performs many a small c. Unfolding in beautiful tableaux in 4:3 format, his work features characters in whose presence we want to feel the here and now, just as they do. Observing his central duo, played by the radiant Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong, as they discover each other, Devos’ gaze is as moving as it is delicate. And what more solid way for a bond to grow between two people than with their feet firmly rooted in Mother Nature’s soft carpeting? It is more fragile than cement, but it is our true terrain.