Belgian film-maker Michael Roskam mixed cows, farmers and ruthless mafia bosses to turn his first feature-length film, Bullhead, into a contender for the best foreign language film Oscar.
This is local, but it is also universal
Taking a cue from one of his idols, Hollywood legend Martin Scorsese, the 39-year-old director chose a story close to home to make a crime thriller that he describes as a contemporary “Flemish western”.
“This is local, but it is also universal,” Roskam, who filmed in the province of Limburg where he was born, told AFP in an interview ahead of the February 26 Academy Awards.
“As Scorsese says, ‘you start by telling stories that are close to you’.”
Roskam always dreamed of making a crime thriller but wanted to avoid importing Hollywood cliches, so he took inspiration from the real-life tale of Belgium’s notorious “hormone mafia”.
In 1995, a Flemish veterinary inspector investigating growth hormone trafficking was assassinated, putting a spotlight on the surprising connection between cattle farming and the criminal underworld in Belgium. “I wanted to use a crime scene that is existent and close to me. Not that I grew up in the hormone mafia, but we all know in Belgium that it exists,” Roskam said.
“It was kind of a gift to have this crime” in Belgium, added the bearded, blue-eyed director.
The characters speak in local Dutch accents and dialects so obscure that Roskam had to use Dutch subtitles for Flemish audiences. But the film is not just about gangsters and ranchers.
Roskam used the hormone mafia story as a vehicle to explore fate and the inevitability of tragedy in life. The testosterone-driven plot gives way to universal feelings like helplessness, compassion and betrayal.
These feelings are embodied by the film’s lead character, cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille, who is haunted by a childhood trauma that led to his use of hormones and steroids, pumping up his body into a muscular machine.
In this dark thriller running on emotions and outbursts of violence, Vanmarsenille is approached by a crooked veterinarian with ties to the hormone mafia in the northern region of Flanders.
The farmer, beefed up on steroids, enters into a deal with a notorious meat hormone gangster, but the killing of a detective investigating the mafia turns his life upside down.
“The moment I created this character, the hormone mafia became not just a background but also an allegory, a metaphor,” Roskam said, adding that “destiny is a very important theme in my work”.