Janet van den Brand
Belgium | 2018 | 73 min
Swiss Premiere
Language : Dutch
Subtitles : English, French
In Roman mythology, Ceres taught man the art of cultivating the soil. Considered the goddess of agriculture, fertility and crops, the Romans willingly sacrificed pigs to her during annual processions around the fields. It is precisely with a Hymn to Ceres—composed in the 11th century—and the image of a new-born piglet, that Janet Van Den Brand begins the film in which she is going to roam, with a tactile camera, in the company of her protagonists, the natural cycle of life — and death — in the farms of the southern Netherlands. Koen, Daan, Sven and Jeanine are in fact all destined to take over their respective family holdings one day: only ten years old, they have to involve all of their senses in order to touch, feel, listen to and understand an environment that they will, in their turn, transform in the near future. With a background in fiction, the young Belgian filmmaker composes, in Ceres, a fictional documentary ode to those who still dream, as only children can, of the ancestral art of producing food from the earth.
Emmanuel Chicon
