Now Blue Bird is set to make its national debut at the Flanders International Film Festival in Ghent, followed by screenings at Bozar in Brussels and venues around Flanders from 19 October.

Both Van den Berghe’s films are unusual. Little Baby Jesus of Flandr is based on a 1924 Christmas play by Felix Timmermans, in which a group of beggars have a religious encounter while travelling the Flemish countryside in winter. Van den Berghe shot the story in striking black and white, with a cast of mentally disabled actors.

Blue Bird also has a Flemish literary source, a 1908 play by Maurice Maeterlinck about two children who go on a quest to find the blue bird of happiness. Once again Van den Berghe has made things challenging, shooting the film with non-professional actors in the West African state of Togo.

His story is only loosely based on Maeterlinck’s play. A small boy and his sister are playing with a blue bird, and when it wanders off, they set out to find it. On the way they meet other kids and their father, but also more fantastical characters, such as their dead grandparents, wood spirits and children waiting to be born. When they return home, they have subtly changed. They have grown in a day.

In Togo, says Van den Berghe, Maeterlinck’s ideas would not seem out of place. “I had to find people who believed in nature in the way that Maeterlinck believed in nature,” the Flemish director explains. “I think he really believed in the souls of the forest and so on, and to make this film in Europe would have the wrong connotation. It might even sound as if I was mocking Maeterlinck, and that’s definitely not what I wanted.”

At the same time, Van den Berghe didn’t want to present Africa in a clichéd, exotic way. His solution was to use a wide, narrow image format and filter the light so that everything appears blue. “It’s like eyes that are half-closed,” he says. “It’s an in-between format, just like the blue is not day, not night, not dream, not reality. It’s an unconscious colour.”

But it was the children who convinced him that Togo was the right place to film. “The moment you go to their level, you see a whole new society – of younger and older children, leaders and followers, and the games they play. They just hang out, wander the fields or go from house to house. We don’t really have that strong community of children here.”

Working with these very young actors was a challenge, and Van den Berghe concentrated on getting them to behave in a way that fit the story rather than speaking the lines that we read in the subtitles. “It was about them being themselves, with the language they know,” he explains. “I think that’s more honest than making them say something they wouldn’t say.” Besides which, there is no word in the local language for the colour blue.

Blue Bird
premiere Flanders

15 October, 20.00
Kinepolis
Ter Platen 12, Ghent

Blue Bird

premiere Brussels

17 October, 20.00
Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23

Both screenings are introduced by the director