Everybody's Famous!

Jean works in a factory in Belgium and dreams of writing songs. He has pinned all his hope on his seventeen-year-old daughter Marva and drags her from one contest to the next. The girl is shy and not cut out for the stage; she never wins anything. When Jean is laid off he is left completely desperate and does something unthinkable: he kidnaps Debbie, the most famous pop singer in the country. Dominique Deruddere's film was nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2001. The mould is comedy, but something hard sits underneath it: a father loading onto his child what he could not manage himself, and taking that for love. The film does not make Marva ridiculous; the ridiculous one is the father. Josse De Pauw plays Jean and Eva van der Gucht plays Marva. Ninety-seven minutes, and it mocks the fame industry too.