A familiar face on Belgian and French screens in recent years, Bouli Lanners works as a director alongside his acting career and his films have been hailed by both critics and audiences. ULTRANOVA, ELDORADO, and more recently LES GEANTS, have forged his reputation as a filmmaker with a strong visual world and a melancholy yet generously humane approach.
From his studies at the Liège Fine Arts Academy, Bouli Lanners' films have retained an undeniable pictorial aspect, resembling mobile tableaux that glorify the landscapes of his flat land. Having entered the world of the big screen by chance, after beginning his career on TV with the Belgian-oriented humour of Les Snuls, Bouli Lanners found this new means of expression to be the ideal medium for staging his dreams of nature and wide open spaces, of slightly dysfunctional families, often reconstituted via a series of encounters. At the end of the 1990s, he appeared more and more regularly on the big screen, first in the background, then in increasingly important roles, gradually imposing his gruff, dreamy and debonair physique as a popular figure in French cinema.
At the same time, he began directing films in 1995, stepping up the pace in 1999 with his short film TRAVELLINCKX, his first road movie, already produced by Versus Production. In 2001, his next short film MUNO, marked his first Cannes selection (Directors' Fortnight).
His first feature, ULTRANOVA (2005), confirmed the birth of an atypical filmmaker whose keen gaze casts a new light on his land, the Walloon area of Belgium, and helped to redefine the contours of the Belgian cinematic imaginary world, with the precious help of his staunch ally, the director of photography Jean-Paul de Zaeytijd.
This was followed by ELDORADO (2008), which marked his return to Cannes and pursued the idea of Walloon westerns, a bucolic and melancholy road movie shot in Cinemascope and with a lot of emotion, in which guitar riffs punctuate the tale of the mythical quest for a hypothetical Eldorado.
He took to the road again with LES GEANTS (2011), journeying along a river one summer during which three boys recreate the family that has abandoned them. With LES GEANTS, a blend of children's tales and adventure stories, Bouli Lanners once again questioned modern society from the angle of the family. He also confirmed his ability to make popular art-house movies, uniting critics (the film was once again selected for the Directors' Fortnight) and audiences since the film did excellent business both in Belgium and France.
Bouli Lanners returned in 2015, performing in front of his own camera in LES PREMIERS LES DERNIERS, which was shot in the Beauce region of France. He devised this film as if it were his last, a testament. It is marked by his questions, concerns and anxieties. He and Albert Dupontel play Gilou and Cochise, two bounty hunters on the trail of a smartphone containing embarrassing material. In the course of their journey, they come into contact with Suzanne Clément, Michael Lonsdale, David Murgia and Aurore Broutin. Once again, his characters are on the move, as if each one of his films were a stage in a long road movie making up his filmography. While these leitmotifs remain, the landscapes change, with the scenery of La Beauce replacing the Walloon region and Luxembourg, as Pascal Humbert's folk and slide guitars provide the mental and musical landscape of the film's original score. The film was released in France on January 27 and on February 24 in Belgium, as well as being screened at the 2016 Berlinale Panorama.
