This is an excerpt from the Visions Du Réel jury statement about Gerrets’ film: A loving relationship and a proper distance between a director and his characters makes possible a sensitive and accurate social portrait of souls adrift without ever placing us as a voyeur, however profoundly intimate the story that unfolds before us.
The portable phone, a tool gadget becomes the ideal camera and the director’s play of shadows and lights reveal a poetry of survival and melancholy until the very climax of the reggae blues at the end of the movie[8].
The Hollywood Reporter wrote, ‘At once stylish and gritty, this is a solid, serious and promisingly distinctive feature-length debut’[10], veteran film journalist Jennifer Merin described it as ‘a dramatic documentary that, despite its darkness, illuminates the dignity of his subjects’[11] while Open Democracy states that ‘Director Boris Gerrets demonstrates that dignity and humanity can exist even in the most seemingly undignified and inhumane living conditions’[12].
Gerrets was among the filmmakers who were asked to contribute to the 2014 documentary survey conducted by Sight and Sound[17] and has been a member of the jury at Visions du Réel, Nyon (2012) and IDFA, Amsterdam (2011).
2013 Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, The Netherlands 2014 Laureate of the Aster Award, Macedonia 2004 Garden Stories 2006 Driving Dreams/Droomrijders 2010 People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am 2014 Shado’man 2020 Lamentations of Judas 1987 Pompeii 1997 Invisible