La Régate

Bernard Bellefroid graduated from the directing department of INSAS, in Belgium, in 2003. He made his first documentary in 2005 on the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda, les collines parlent, which went on to win international awards. In 2009 he made his first fiction feature, La régate (The Boat Race), which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival Workshop in 2006. The script won the SOPADIN Best Screenplay Junior Prize, and won the CNC 1st Screenplay Trophy. Bernard Bellefroid came to the Festival Premiers Plans in Angers in 2003 for his graduation film Quand on est mort, on ne respire plus. "I know Alexandre well. For a long time I have looked at the world through his eyes. Like him, I suffered from "domestic" violence, "private" violence, which always remained hidden. At the time I didn't realise that it was serious. I ended up thinking that violence was a language, just like any other. There is no peaceful way out of such a "relationship". A separation is nothing more than a heartrending wrench. With hindsight, flight seemed, and still seems, to me to be the only moral way out. Personally, I left so as to rebuild myself better elsewhere. La Régate is not a film on war for war's sake. It is a film about a warrior. A warrior who refuses war. A deserter. It is not a film which gets bogged down in violence, it takes the opposite path. It is the story of a man who is constantly evolving, who is fighting against himself. It is the story of an inner struggle to become a free man. It is the story of Alexandre, who rises up against the fatality of violence to go in search of his own humanity, which is buried away, but which has not disappeared" (B.Bellefroid).