Olivia ROCHETTE, Gerard-Jan CLAES
KP
Billie and Lucas, a young Brussels couple, both leave for university facing a year rife with change. Visions of the future, doubts about relationships and the expectations of adult life make up the main material for their conversations with friends and each other. KIND HEARTS paints a candid portrait of the formative but also uncertain facets of every (first) love.
Kind Hearts combines documentary and dramatic direction to tell about love and concerns of teenagers. The co-directors Olivia ROCHETTE and Gerard-Jan CLAES met Billie and Lucas in a Belgian high school and created the film by first observing the relationships the couple share in everyday life and then dramatically recreating those in their work. The biggest question that hangs between the young lovers is the life after the last summer in school. What will they do when they become an adult? Where will they go and what will they study? Or, what kind of work will they do? More importantly, will they still be able to stay with each other then? It seems that it was an outstanding choice to mix documentary and dramatic film to express the emotional up and downs shared by the couple who face all these uncertainties. Another achievement of Kind Hearts is that it shows the portrait of Z-generation young adults through their own perspectives and voices. Here, there is no nostalgia of the grown-ups that color so many youth films. There are only the most plain reality and unknown future.
Olivia ROCHETTE
Olivia Rochette is a director, cinematographer, and co-founder of the online film magazine Sabzian and Avila. Since 2009,Gerard-Jan CLAES and she provides audiovisual work for choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her dance company Rosas.
Gerard-Jan CLAES
Gerard-Jan Claes is a filmmaker, lecturer, author, both founder and artistic director of the online film magazine Sabzian and co-founder of Avila. With Olivia Rochette, they shared filmography consists of RAIN (2012) and KIND HEARTS (2022).