Belgica

Jo runs a small bar. His brother Frank turns up and proposes expansion: more nights, more music, more people. The bar takes off, fills up, and the brothers fall out precisely as the success grows. The subject is not nightlife but brotherhood. Jo is careful and sets limits, Frank recognises none; neither works alone and together they cannot be sustained. That, rather than the drugs or the fights, is where the film's darkness comes from. The form stays inside the place: crowd, sweat, light and bass. The camera moves around the dance floor and scenes are often cut to music. The soundtrack was written for the film, with separate tracks produced for the bands in it, so the music playing in the bar was not picked from an existing catalogue. Felix van Groeningen wrote it out of the bar his own family ran in Ghent. He had drawn international attention with his previous film, The Broken Circle Breakdown; the tone here is rawer. It won a directing award at Sundance in 2016. Stef Aerts plays Jo and Tom Vermeir plays Frank. Who it is for: viewers who like nightlife films and stories of brothers at odds. Who it is not for: anyone who will find sustained noise and a dark room hard going; almost all of this happens inside the bar.