“Dorothée van den Berghe's Moment”

Dorothée van den Berghe has worked as a director and screenwriter since the 1990s. Her best-known fiction films are Girl (2002), My Queen Karo (2009) and Rosie & Moussa (2018), but she has also made documentaries and worked for television.

Van den Berghe herself looks back most fondly on the period in 2004 when she worked on the screenplay for My Queen Karo. 'The Cinéfondation award from the Cannes Festival allowed me to do a residency in Paris with five other international filmmakers. It was a very personal film, inspired by my own youth. It was fantastic to have six months to find my own voice while living together with other directors who were also going through that process on a daily basis. That was one of the most beautiful moments for me.'

Portraits and stories of women are often central to van den Berghe's films. 'Initially, I was not aware of that and I simply took it for granted that I was telling stories from a female perspective. It was only gradually that I noticed that there were not that many female feature filmmakers, certainly not in Flanders. From conversations with other filmmakers it also became clear that it was not easy for us to build a long-term career. Based on these observations and experiences, we founded film collective WANDA in 2020.' (Film Een Geschiedenis)