Latest news with #JulieKeepsQuiet
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Where is the adult?': how Leonardo Van Dijl filmed the story of a child tennis star's abuse
Leonardo Van Dijl smiles: 'If you told me a year ago that I'd be speaking to the Guardian, I'd have asked: 'What about?'' Last May, the 34-year-old from Belgium took his debut film Julie Keeps Quiet to Cannes. (Where, he says, everyone was much friendlier after a four-star review in the Guardian.) Ever since, he has been living out of a suitcase, grabbing five or six hours' sleep. It's not just media interviews and Q&As keeping him busy: 'We are a small movie. I'm the in-house graphic designer. I do the social media …' He stops, looks down at my phone, recording. 'But I don't really want to talk about that. I'm grateful, and it's not that interesting.' What Van Dijl really does want to talk about is the urgent issue his film raises about safe spaces for children. Julie Keeps Quiet is a tense psychological drama about a talented 15-year-old tennis player called Julie, played by real-life tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck in her first acting role. When Julie's male coach at her tennis academy is suspended after the suicide of a teenage girl he trained, pressure falls on Julie to speak up. After all, she's his new favourite. But Julie is not talking. It is immediately clear to the audience from texts and calls, however, that her coach is a predator. Mercifully, we only see him in a couple of scenes: just enough to get across what a disgusting narcissist he is. I tell Van Dijl how relieved I was that the coach hardly appears in the film. 'It's like a ghost movie.' he agrees. 'Like he's haunting her.' But not everyone is OK with the scant screen time Julie's abuser gets. People have asked Van Dijl, what really happened? 'But I think the movie shows enough red flags to know that this is not a good person. That he should not be around children.' He looks pained. Does it upset him, when people want to know all the details? 'Yeah,' he says softly. 'It does.' Van Dijl became interested in the subject of children in sport while making a short film about a 12-year-old star gymnast who doesn't tell when she picks up an injury, and pretends everything is OK. What he's noticed is how children in sport are treated like mini adults. 'And it's wrong.' We see this form of adultification in the film. Julie is just 15 but she is often alone unsupervised with adults – her physio or coaches at the tennis court. 'These children who play sports, they go places. It becomes a normality,' says Van Dijl. Interestingly, he has observed some people treating the character of Julie as if she were older than she is too. A journalist asked him a question about portraying Julie not as a conventional victim, but a 'strong, independent young woman'. He was horrified. 'It was very triggering. First, what is a conventional victim? A victim is a victim. Then, I was like: 'A strong, young, independent woman? She is a child. What does she do in the movie? She plays a few balls. She cuddles her dog. She goes to high school and reads comic books at night. Where is the adult in my movie?' This is exactly the language that somebody uses to groom a girl like Julie. By making her believe that there is equality.' Right from the start, Van Dijl decided to cast a tennis player rather than an actor. 'I had six months. I could not prepare a kid who acts to play tennis in six months. Then Tessa walked in and she was obviously a superstar.' He invited Van den Broeck to take part in a six-week workshop, then gave her breathing space, two months to think about whether she wanted to be in the film. 'I told her we were considering a few girls [for the lead]. It was a lie, but I didn't want any pressure on her.' On set, he put his money where his mouth was when it came to Van den Broeck's wellbeing. 'I wanted a happy child on set.' He told her parents that they were welcome on set, that he would prefer them to be around: 'I said to the parents, we need to communicate. We need to talk about Tessa's wellbeing. If there's something wrong, tell me or tell production.' He cast young players from Van den Broeck's tennis club to surround her and gave firm instructions to his young star too: 'I said to Tessa: 'The moment I say action, you're Julie. The moment I say cut, you're instantly back to Tessa.'' His research into safe child practices informed the set. 'I never wanted to be alone with the kids. I was always like: there needs to be a third person in the room. We also rehearsed at the tennis clubs, in public spaces. I encouraged them: just ask us questions. It starts with the small things. If a child doesn't dare to ask: 'Can I leave 15 minutes early?' how will they talk about the horrible things that Julie has endured.' Julie Keeps Quiet has an impressive list of producers. It is co-produced by Belgium's most famous film-makers, the Dardenne brothers. Van Dijl himself studied documentary film-making while working at Vice magazine as a fashion editor: 'I love clothes. There it is, it's out,' he grins. Today he is sharply dressed in white shirt and skinny black tie. Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka signed up as executive producer too. Van Dijl says she is an inspiration to teenage players after speaking up about her mental health. Osaka was famously fined after pulling out of media commitments at Roland-Garros in 2021 to protect her mental health. 'She put that option of saying 'no' on the table. She did that for the girls. That's extremely valuable.' He says he still can't believe Osaka is attached to his film, which was Belgium's entry for the best international film at this year's Oscars. 'It's what I said. Even six months ago if you told me I would be here, I wouldn't believe it. When I say I'm very grateful, I really mean it.' Julie Keeps Quiet is released in the UK on 25 April In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Scotsman
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Film reviews: The Accountant 2 Den of Thieves: Pantera
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Accountant 2 (15) ★★★ Den of Thieves: Pantera (15) ★★ Julie Keeps Quiet (12A) ★★★★ A moderate hit for Ben Affleck when it was first released in 2016, The Accountant was a fairly disposable action thriller with an entertainingly goofy premise: an autistic forensic accountant (Affleck) with a shady roster of clients turns out also to have been trained by his bully of a father since childhood to become a lethal killing machine. Playing like a cross between Rain Man and Batman, the oddball film embraced both comparisons with some blatant nods to the former and Affleck's casting bringing to mind the latter (he played the Dark Knight in that year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). Though a sequel didn't necessarily seem like it was on the books, the imaginatively titled The Accountant 2 suggests someone finally did an audit and realised there was enough of an audience to warrant one. Thus, here we are, nine years later, with a film that feels an unerring need to expand whatever garbled mythology was in place last time round. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Accountant 2 | Warrick Page/Prime Not that it really matters if you don't remember all that much about that first film; returning director Gavin O'Connor knows this is supposed to be undemanding blockbuster fun and that's what he sets out to deliver. With no Anna Kendrick to bounce off this time, Affleck's neurodivergent superhero Christian Wolff finds himself re-teaming instead with Braxton (Jon Bernthal), the estranged hitman brother he briefly reconnected with during one of the first film's convoluted twists. It's Bernthal who helps The Accountant 2 fulfil its full dumb-fun potential as a hyper-violent action caper. Finding just the right level of tongue-in-cheek masculine energy, he offsets both Affleck's more pronounced comedy schtick (which goes a little more Forrest Gump in places), as well the film's own errant, barely comprehensible plot, which involves the murder of a former colleague, the search for a missing migrant teenager, an investigation into a human trafficking ring, and a mysterious female assassin (Daniella Pineda) whose gradually returning memory results in her leaving a trail of violence in her wake while she pieces together who she really is. An expanded role for Cynthia Addai-Robinson (as a financial crimes agent working in semi-cahoots with Affleck's character) and a cameo for JK Simmons (as her now-retired boss) adds yet more continuity with the first film. But if the mangled plot sometimes gets in the way, the oddly endearing sight of Affleck and Bernthal's mismatched siblings bonding through proficiently executed violence — of which, mercifully, there's plenty — makes it very watchable. Gerard Butler & O'Shea Jackson Jr in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera | Signature Entertainment If The Accountant 2 shows the huge difference casting can make to a fairly nonsensical film, Den of Thieves: Pantera reinforces the point in a much more negative way. A sequel to 2018's Gerard Butler-starring crime movie of almost the same name, this straight-to-streaming follow-up sees Butler reprising one of his least charismatic characters: the hard-bitten, toss-the-rule-book-out cop Nicholas 'Big Nick' O'Brian, whose dogged obsession with nailing O'Shea Jackson's arch criminal Donnie Wilson for getting away with robbing the Federal Reserve in the first film is less Al Pacino in Heat (the film it thinks it is) and more like a gone-to-seed Paul Walker in the first Fast and Furious film. The sequel certainly echoes that film's plot (which was itself ripped-off from Kathryn Bigelow's action classic Point Break). In this one, the newly divorced Big Nick crosses over to the bad-guy side and finds it much more fun after pursuing Donnie to the South of France and discovering him planning a diamond heist with a gang of well-financed Euro-criminals known as the Panthers. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The resulting film is as unmoored as Butler's frequently sozzled character, with far too many tedious and indulgent bonding scenes between Butler and Jackson drawing the running time out to a punishing 145 minutes instead of getting down to business with actual action. It's a shame because Butler's particular brand of machismo has found some decent vehicles in recent years with the disaster movie Greenland and the entertaining Plane. Alas, this exposes his limits more than his strengths. Set against the backdrop of an elite Belgian tennis academy, Julie Keeps Quiet serves up a coolly internalised portrait of a young prodigy as she navigates how best to handle a brewing sexual abuse scandal involving her beloved coach Jeremy after another player takes her own life. Co-writer/director Leonardo Van Dijl keeps his camera close on the titular Julie at all times so he can subtly sketch out — on the face of excellent newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck — the emotional rollercoaster Julie is quietly enduring as she chooses to say nothing about her own experiences with her coach after the truth of his suspension starts leaking out. There are no big melodramatic fireworks here; instead, with masterful precision, the film tracks how Julie's diligence and determination on the court gradually reveals her strength of character off it.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Julie Keeps Quiet' Review: Coping at Her Own Speed
'Julie Keeps Quiet' ignores the usual movie playbook on post-trauma drama with its unusually internal portrait of a teenage tennis player, Julie. After her ex-coach is suspended under murky circumstances, she prefers not to share details of his behavior. But her feelings in the aftermath run deep, and this Belgian film's virtue lies in its fidelity to her path and her pace. Her life is rooted in the routine and repetition of training and school among (supportive) peers, whether serve-and-volleys or German class. She evades questions from administrators and friends about Jeremy (Laurent Caron), her former instructor, even though he still calls her with doom-laden pep talks. You wonder when the story, written by the director, Leonardo van Dijl, and Ruth Becquart (who plays Julie's mother), will tip her into a spiral. Instead, her low-key confidence as a player — her biggest smile in the film comes with success on the court — slowly manifests in her growing resolve and clarity in addressing the Jeremy situation. She recalibrates with a new coach, Backie (Pierre Gervais), and takes breathers with her dog. (The tennis star Naomi Osaka lends her imprimatur as an executive producer.) Tessa Van den Broeck, a newcomer, plays Julie with zero affectation. She seems plucked from a high school roll call, or maybe from a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose company co-produced this one. Nicolas Karakatsanis's twilit 35-millimeter cinematography mirrors her character's preoccupied state, echoed by Caroline Shaw's cracked-lullaby score. It's a film that maintains that Julie's story is available only when she's ready to tell it.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Spanish Horror ‘The Wailing' Set for U.S. Theatrical Release After Film Movement Pickup (EXCLUSIVE)
Film Movement has announced the acquisition of U.S. distribution rights for Pedro Martin-Calero's unsettling horror feature debut 'The Wailing' ('El llanto'), a standout during its world premiere at last year's San Sebastian Film Festival. The announcement was made by Michael Rosenberg, president, Film Movement and Vicente Canales, managing director of Film Factory Entertainment, the film's sales agent. More from Variety Sexually Charged Indie Comedy 'Paying for It' Lands U.S. Distribution With Film Movement (EXCLUSIVE) Surveillance Thriller 'Stranger Eyes,' Venice Golden Lion Nominee, Nabbed by Film Movement for North America (EXCLUSIVE) Naomi Osaka-Produced Tennis Drama 'Julie Keeps Quiet,' Belgium's Oscar Entry, Gets North American Deal With Film Movement (EXCLUSIVE) The film, a Spain-Argentina co-production, earned Martin-Calero the Silver Shell for best director at San Sebastián and was nominated for the Spanish Academy Goya Award for best new director. It is set for a theatrical release in 2025, followed by digital and home entertainment releases. In the film, three young women separated by decades and thousands of miles are terrorized by the same ethereal threat that nobody, not even they, can properly see. The entity manifests more like a trick of lighting than anything corporeal. In each case, when the women attempt to confront the presence, they hear the same horrific wailing. Martin-Calero co-wrote 'The Wailing' with Isabel Peña ('The Beasts,' 'The Candidate'), an extremely accomplished scribe who frequently works with Rodrigo Sorogoyen. The film was produced by up-and-coming Madrid label Caballo Films, backers of partner Sorogoyen's films, including 'The Beasts' – co-written by Peña – which won the Spanish Academy Goya award for best picture in 2023 and a French best foreign film Cesar. The film's non-linear narrative has drawn praise from critics in Spain and abroad. Film Movement's Rosenberg says of his company's latest pickup: 'For his first feature-length film, Pedro really turns the horror genre on its head, creating something that is wholly original, deeply thought-provoking and rich with atmosphere. Between the superb turns from the trio of female leads and surprising narrative twists and turns, North American audiences are sure to leave the theater thinking about 'The Wailing' for a long time.' In addition to 'The Wailing,' Film Movement has acquired a range of international films, including Sean Devlin's 'Asog,' Sook-Yin Lee's 'Paying for It' and 'Julie Keeps Quiet,' which debuted at Cannes. Best of Variety What's Coming to Disney+ in March 2025 What's Coming to Netflix in March 2025 New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
