[ad_1]
Mystery thriller Moisnet, which had its world premiere this week at the Cannes series of television festivals, is set in the quiet Belgian village of Moisnet, but dark forces lurk beneath its peaceful surface.
Variety spoke with writer Jeff Hoogmartens and director Frank Van Passel about the Newen Connect-distributed show.
The series centers on a group of adults who were friends as children, but are traumatized when one of them, Dern, murders another for no apparent reason.
Twenty years later, Dern’s younger brother Ben returns for his father’s funeral, and his friends gather in the village again, except for Dern, who is locked up in a local mental hospital. The friends decide to dig up the time capsule they buried on the night of the murder. Inside, they find Dern’s diary. On the last page, Ben discovers a list of names with the dates of his friends’ deaths. Within 10 days, they each die.
Ben and his friend Zoe, a journalist, race to prevent their predicted deaths. Their quest leads them to Talamus, a German neurotechnology multinational owned by the illustrious Nobel Prize winner Robert Lorin and his successor and granddaughter Eva.
Van Passel explains that there are multiple undercurrents at work in this story, one of which is a clash between two philosophies. One believes in the malleability of life, the other believes in the inevitability of destiny.
Van Passel said: “We want to connect that to a very modern sense of anxiety, a sense of anxiety that people have in a very logical way, with political evolution, a sense of environmental apocalypse, a sense of danger from technology and AI. .
“So we wanted to connect with these general feelings of anxiety. It also connected a little bit, in our minds, to film noir from the ’50s and ’60s, when people were really afraid of the Cold War.” I did.”
The series also looks at how people respond to trauma.
Hoog-Martens says: “We didn’t have this idea from the beginning, but it actually evolved into a story about trauma and loss, and kind of a sad undercurrent to it, because, yeah, we wanted to make something that was funny. It’s a TV show that has some edge-of-your-seat moments, but we also wanted to give that unsettling feeling that something was happening. We needed to find a way to empathize with or touch that anxiety, which is inherent in any sense of loss or trauma yet to be faced. ”
Van Passel continued, “I think that feelings of loss and sadness have a lot to do with time, whether you accept it or not, and whether you accept or not your fate.
“While preparing for the series, we were reading Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s book on ‘Homo Deus’, in which he said there are so many people in the world that could already be 150 years old. He explained that there are wealthy people in the world, such as the “Six Billion Man,” who simply introduce bionics and a part of their body changes. And in some ways this is very absurd. Because what in God’s name matters? I understand that people want to become gods and find a way to continue living, but there is beauty in accepting the fact that life is short and can end in a day, and that you can accept it or not. There is a sense of dignity. This emotion defines you as a person.
“And in that sense, almost every character in this series has some sort of battle with that emotion. Grief is something we’re all familiar with, to be sure, but luckily, Just wanting to be some kind of “homo deus” means you don’t accept the meaning of life. So that battle is the battle we’re talking about. And it’s a battle that everyone is fighting in some way, whether they realize it or not.
“I think this is the underlying emotion of this series. It’s the melancholy of dissatisfaction that almost everyone has, unable to come to terms with the events that have happened in their life. Again, what defines you as a person? The main character, Ben, has a lot of trauma inside him, but he never deals with it. He doesn’t want to be on the show, so he’s been running away from it all his life. But that makes him an interesting protagonist. He wants to escape as quickly as possible. It’s a feeling that we also recognize.”
There seems to be a contrast between the younger and older characters, including Eva. All the young people seem shy and lack confidence. They’re always a little nervous, like a cat groping around in a dark room.
For Van Passel, things are not clear-cut or black and white in this series. “So in a mystery-thriller story like ours, you tend to think it’s a story of good and evil, but that’s not the case. Everything is good and bad in its own way. There’s also. There’s always some ambiguity. It’s not always obvious. What looks good is bad, and what looks bad is good. So the character always has a sense of what’s in front of him. There is a kind of hesitation, a kind of distrust.
“I think we are entering an age of technology, and of course now everyone is always talking about AI and things like that. But the philosophical question is, what is it to be human?” What are we? Are we still our bodies? Are we our minds? Are there any data in our computers? – It’s becoming very important.
“But we also need to rethink ourselves. And we need to rethink the idea of ’what is human?’ In that sense, I think the approach of the characters in “More’s Net” is very modern. I have this hesitation. I don’t know what the next step will be. In other words, there is a kind of hesitation towards reality. Is reality still reality? ”
Hoog-Martens added: “The younger characters seem to have more doubts and are less single-minded, but the older characters, like Robert, have doubts as well, but are unable to express them. Your entire life has been thrown away because expressing can mean: In episode 2, Eva says, “Am I making a mistake?” what will he think of me? ” In a way, she has the gift of being young and doubting herself and being able to take a different path. My personal story is that when she had just turned 40, she felt like, “What if I can’t become a screenwriter?” I have to convince the world that I’m good at this because I’m 40 and can’t do anything else. ” I don’t mean to show any doubts. So I think there is that kind of awareness. In a way, I think the older you get, the more questions permeate you. There are some very interesting dynamics between the age groups in this story, but at the end of the day, it’s about what it means to be human and what it means to be human. Are you living knowing you are going to die? ”
Robert Lorin seems to be kind of your typical bad guy, but there’s another side to him as well. Director Van Passel said, “Robert Rollin is a very complex character who appears to be a first-class villain, but there are many secrets behind him. I have to say that when I wrote a biography of Robert Rollin, it was about 30 pages long, packed with how this character was built. It’s very complicated in a way because it has a lot to do with the fact that he is a descendant of a long line of businessmen living in Moresnet. He has a lot to do with his past. He hates his father and his There is a great sense of revenge inside, and this has something to do with family history.
“What he’s doing, I don’t want to spoil too much, but I think it’s very tied to our philosophical ideas of what it means to be human. I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I believe in what he’s doing. And of course he’s also a man of his time. He grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, and like my parents, they were They didn’t talk much, they didn’t analyze much. They did it. That’s exactly what they did. They were ambitious. They weren’t stupid. I think they were smart. Robert had a lot of success. He is an accomplished scientist working on technology that is making great advances. What he wants for himself is what he wants for the rest of the world, but in order to achieve that goal, He has to be extremely selfish.”
Eva and Robert represent different views of science. Eva wants to free the company’s patent so people can access the drug, but Rob wants to be in control of things. But they are also quite different in their willingness to change.
Hoog-Martens says: “Eva, in a way, is supporting change and showing that there’s another path we can take. That might be a little naive, but I think it takes a little bit of naivety to change. There’s a little bit of “Let’s leave things as they are” and a little bit of “No, let’s change them.”
“Keeping things the same while experiencing change is a constant struggle, and that’s the essence of Moresnet. A lot has changed.
“And it’s similar with Ben, refusing to change who you are. So we wanted to infuse that into all of our characters, but on a big business level, Robert and Eva is pretty much the idea of tent poles.
“Robert is a character who doesn’t really like to do things differently. He’s also someone who tries to do things that are basic and natural as a human being in a different way. So that too. It is subtle.
“I’m sure there are differences between a young woman leading a company and a man in his 70s. But that doesn’t mean that Eva’s way of thinking is the be all and end all of business. She wants to introduce Because things can be catastrophic. That’s what always happens with change. It could be for the better. It could be for the worse.”
[ad_2]
Source link