King of the Belgians nominated for Lux Film Prize
The absurdly funny Flemish movie King of the Belgians is one of 10 to be nominated for the prize that rewards cinema that represents Europe today
‘Post-truth era’
A panel of 21 film industry professionals will whittle down the 10 nominations to three later this month, with the ultimate winner announced in November. The final three nominees will be screened during the annual Lux Film Days in 40 cities across all 28 EU member states.
King of the Belgians (pictured), which has screened at more than 50 festivals worldwide, finds solar storms grounding flights in Turkey just when a visiting Belgian king (Peter Van den Begin) must hurry back to his country during a national crisis. In what turns into a road trip he’ll never forget, he and his entourage must travel by any means possible across the Balkans to get home.
The film “addresses the current post-truth era that we live in,” said the festival jury, “as well as social and political extremism, bordering on the absurd”.
It is the sixth Belgian film to be nominated for the Lux prize and would be the third win. Le silence de Lorna by the Dardenne brothers won in 2008, and The Broken Circle Breakdown by Flemish director Felix Van Groeningen won in 2013.
Other nominees to make the long-list are the Iceland-Denmark coming-of-age drama Heartstone and the Bulgarian-Greek co-production Glory, which sees a railway worker’s life turned upside-down after he finds a huge sum of money spilled onto the tracks.
