Daniel Bruylandt

When the mysterious woman in the room next door disappears, a debonair 70-year-old ex-spy living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d'Azur is confronted by the demons and darlings of a lurid past in which moviemaking, memories and madness collide.

This movies examines a period in modern Belgian history which is as heavily mocked as it is revered: the wave of UFO sightings recorded at the end of the 80s.

With a heavy haul of 250 kilograms of gold bullion, the grizzled criminal mastermind, Rhino, and his ruthless gang of cutthroats, head to a ramshackle retreat somewhere in the Mediterranean to lay low on a scorching day of July. However, the unexpected and rather unwelcome arrival of the bohemian writer, Bernier, his muse, Luce, along with a pair of no-joke gendarmes further complicates things, as the frail allegiances will soon be put to the test.

Returning home from a business trip to discover his wife missing, a man delves deeper and deeper into a surreal kaleidoscope of half-baked leads, seduction, deceit, and murder.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

Santos Palace is a coffee shop in Belgium. There, a waitress serves a strange client. Their eyes meet, minutes pass and we seem to witness a love story that hasn’t began or may have already started, with its potential jealousies and passions, or which may never happen at all; another type of romance. The feeling of seeing or being seen, the rhythmical editing, the use of cinemascope to make objects and spaces appear as abstract forms, the predominance of detailed shots: these are all obsessions, forms and audiovisual ideas that explode in this surprising film.