A Farm in a desert area of South Africa, a crumbling mansion, a Farmer and his daughter: the Old man, the life, and a woman who never lived. This is the constellation in Marion Hänsels second feature film “Dust” that ran in 1985 at the Venice film festival. At the time, Marion Hansel, won a Silver lion for best young film, and also its lead actress, Jane Birkin was mentioned by the judges for particular praise. It is a highlight in the career of the Belgian Director was not the only one, but the most important thing.He made it to the fixed address in the European theater, which was in transition during those years, because the old master moved back and a new, less marketable talents in their place moved in.
Andreas Kilb
feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
F. A. Z.
Marion Hansel was their Belgian colleague, Chantal Akerman or the French Claire Denis to a Generation with the films of the Nouvelle Vague, the masterpieces of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Rohmer grew up was. After school, she had studied in New York at the Actor’s Studio acting and Agnès Varda in “one sings, the other not” played a small role.However, the encounter with the twenty-year-older Director gave her the impulse to find their own voice in the cinema.
First, you held on to literary works (a novel by J. M. Coetzee in “Dust”, an award-winning book by Yann Queffélec in the following Film “Barbaric wedding”).Later, she wrote more and more your own scripts. In “the conspiracy of the children” (1992) won her the scathing reviews, but in “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” is told with great aplomb and tenderness the story of the Seaman Nikos (Stephen Rea), who becomes friends with a ten-year-old girl who arrives in Hong Kong to see him on the ship.
it is believed to be able to people with the camera to enchant
Africa and the sea the return remained themes in the filmic work of Marion Hänsels, in the family drama “As the Wind touched the Sand” (2006), as well as in the “Black ocean” (2010) and “upstream” (2016). She was never satisfied with the reality in their stories just reflect. Their reality was for dreams and aspirations-permeable, so that the viewers were left to figure out whether the rescue of the Starving at the end of “As the Wind touched the Sand” only a wish, fantasy or a fact.
In a world, the more nightmarish trains developed, firmly held to the Belief that the people and things with the camera to enchant. In addition to Chantal Akerman, Marion Hänsel was the most important Belgian film Director of the past decades. On Monday, she died at the age of seventy-one years.
