A Distant Neighbourhood

A life is made up of memories. But regrets also. To our parents, our childhood friends, to all those who are no longer here, we’d like to be able to say what wasn’t said, to do for them and with them what we didn’t do before…
He’s in his fifties, married, and a father. The unbearable boredom of his existence weighs on him. On his way home from a business trip in the provinces, he gets on the wrong train and goes the wrong direction. The next stop is none other than the town he spent his childhood and adolescence in. He hasn’t been back there for a long time. He takes advantage of this unplanned detour to visit his mother’s grave. He thinks of her, of his father who disappeared forty years earlier on the evening of his birthday, never contacting them again. Feeling dizzy, he faints. When he regains consciousness, he discovers that his mother’s name is no longer on the headstone. He realizes that he is in the body of an adolescent boy, himself at fourteen, but with the mind and experience of his adult self. Around him, things have changed. He’s still in the town where he was born, but it’s now 1967. Precisely the year that his father abandoned them. He wonders if he is dreaming or if he has traveled back through time. Trapped by his adolescent appearance, he has no other choice than to go home and see his parents, his little sister and his dog once again. He also has to go back to school, where he sees his friends, his teachers, the young girl he was once secretly in love with at the. But from the start, he’s noticed an essential difference between this childhood and his precedent one: his father is still there, he hasn’t abandoned them. Or at least, not yet. Could the reason for this return to the past be that he has to stop this foretold disappearance? But can you change your past by reliving it? …

• Best Production Design (Véronique Sacrez), Magritte Award, Belgien