HOW FAR ARE you allowed, on your own terms, to allow your own boundaries to be threatened? This is the narrative underpinning Leni Huyghe’s beautiful film Real Faces, which screens on this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and online via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.

A carefully edited piece of work, it takes us through major decisions informing the life of Julie (Leonie Buysse), a 29-year-old directorial assistant, who needs a brand-new chapter in her life. And brand new is what she finds, but it might not be precisely what she thought it would be.

It takes her to Brussels, and the pragmatic bits and pieces of being a young adult in the world – her job, her accommodation – are sorted quickly, but not completely flawlessly. It is in the context of everything, that she meets Eliott (Gorges Ocloo), a botanist with a speciality in lichen and a dream of being in Greenland, where lichen predominates in all its understated glory.

It is also in this context that she is assigned to find the ‘spark’ in strangers and curate the sparks she finds to create a platform for her difficult and slightly smarmy boss David (Yoann Blanc) to throw his weight around in. The professional brief she’s given treads on people’s values with callousness. It thrusts them from being flippantly flattered as they’re going about their lives in the streets of Brussels, into the kind of intimacies that threatens to rob them of their values without asking permission. And for Julia, this contorts and confronts who she thinks she should be. A number of imperatives about being human, adult and independent in a social world, are cast into the fabric of the tale, but none of them are offered as two dimensional morals or silly platitudes on which to hang your belief systems.

Buysse is a magnetic performer who wears a sense of vulnerability with candour. She is beautiful within the French rubric of being, and she’s childlike in her whimsicality. She faces the harsh and crude cut and thrust of an advertising world, which contains big personalities who take themselves very seriously. Too seriously for credibility, in fact. And her friend Eliott offers her an inroad into the magic of holding a piece of growing lichen between her hands.

The work is delicately constructed. It’s witty without forcing its humour on you, and tragic without blurting out its sadnesses. It takes the embarrassing stickiness of casual sex after too much to drink and offers it as a corollary to friendship that has the possibility of continuity, but doesn’t promise intimacy at all. Maybe ever. With a cat named Wasabi and an underlying reflection on the beauty of strangers and what made the relationship between classic characters Orpheus and Eurydice tick, this is certainly one of the must sees of this year’s festival.

•  Real Faces is directed by Leni Huyghe and features a cast headed by Yoann Blanc, Sander Blok, Leonie Buysse, Robert Cionca, Oscar Louis Högström, Günther Lesage, Joely Mbundu, Nathan Naenen, Gorges Ocloo, Warda Rammach, Nouha Rannoun, Karlijn Sileghem, Rabi Siouda and Misha van der Werf. Written by Leni Huyghe and Vincent Vanneste, it is produced by Elisa Heene and features creative input by Grimm Vandekerckhove (cinematography), Zohra Benhammou, Magali Coremans and Sebastian Moradiellos (casting), Natalia Trevino (production design) and Alexandra Sebag (costumes). In Dutch and French with English subtitles, it is part of the 12^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, as well as online via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.