Henri Morelle

Movies

My Father's Stories
Sound
Lyon, 1960s. Emile is twelve years old. His father is a hero. He says he is a judo champ, a parachutist, a soccer player and even a personal advisor to General de Gaulle. Now he wants to save French Algeria! Fascinated and proud, Emile willingly follows his father in missions of utmost danger: tailing, spying, delivering top-secret letters. Emile carries out his orders in all seriousness. He even recruits Luca, a new classmate, into his secret combat. But what if the father’s exploits were all phony, and far too dangerous for children?
The Book of Vision
Sound Engineer
Eva, a mysterious doctor, searches for an answer to her urgent dilemma as she unravels Dr. Anmuth's Book of Vision. Henry gets involved in her life and is forced to confront his own nature, as Eva faces the biggest decision of her life.
There Was a Little Ship
Sound
A woman, hospitalized for a relatively long period, observes what surrounds her. She has time to dream, to revisit certain moments of her life. These memories, like small bubbles begin with her birth in Marseille in 1949 and bring us to Antwerp, Paris, New York, England… to end in Flanders in 2015, after she gets out of the hospital. There Was A Little Ship is a filmic-biographical essay, sincere and poetic.
The Exception
Sound Mixer
A German soldier tries to determine if the Dutch resistance has planted a spy to infiltrate the home of Kaiser Wilhelm in Holland during the onset of World War II, but falls for a young Jewish Dutch woman during his investigation.
The Source
Sound
A comedy/drama set in a village and centered on a battle of the sexes, where women threaten to withhold sexual favours as long as the men refuse to install a water pipe.
Sounds of Sand
Sound
On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.
Live and Become
Sound
In 1980 the black Falashas in Ethiopia are recognised as genuine Jews and are secretly carried to Israel. The day before the transport the son of a Jewish mother dies. In his place and with his name (Schlomo) she takes a Christian 9-year-old boy.
Man Carrying
Sound
The man carrying his body, his reels of film, his bag and his old Nikon, is Boris Lehman, he's also Sisyphus, Jesus Christ, and Ixion as told by Alfred Jarry in La Chandelle Verte. An essay on heaviness and lightness. The carrying man would like to fly, vanish into thin air, into light. When he meets another machine-man, who carries electronic pictures, his dream will come true.
A for Adrienne
Sound
Adrienne is not my mother. She is not Jewish. I met her five years ago, at Edouard’s, where I’d gone to ask my friend to lend me a dinner jacket for the premiere of my film “Life Lessons”. She came to see the film and we began to meet often (Boris Lehman).
Story of My Life Told by My Photographs
Sound
Through many photographs, he tells the story and allows his story to be told by those photographed. This is where the brilliant documentary reversal takes place.
Transfixed
Sound
Bo is a transexual prostitute in Brussels who left home after being abused by her father. She's infuatuated with a neighbor and suspected by the police in a series of transexual murders. In order to clear herself she must turn detective.
On Guard
Sound
France, 17th century, during the reign of Louis XIII. When a dear friend, the Duke of Nevers, is treacherously assassinated by a powerful relative, a skilled swordsman, the noble Henri de Lagardère, seeks his rightful vengeance as he tries to protect the innocent life of the duke's last heir.
Life Lesson
Sound Director
To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."
One Hundred and One Nights
Le curé-nageur (uncredited)
Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made. Also a line of movie stars comes to visit him giving him back the pleasure of life - but amongst them there are also some young students only striving after his money for the realization of their film projects. The two stories - Monsieur Cinema's and the young people's life - are told in parallel until they come together in the end when the old man plays a role in the film made by the students.
Priest Daens
Sound Engineer
In the 1890s, Father Adolf Daens goes to Aalst, a textile town where child labor is rife, pay and working conditions are horrible, the poor have no vote, and the Catholic church backs the petite bourgeoisie in oppressing workers. He writes a few columns for the Catholic paper, and soon workers are listening and the powerful are in an uproar. He's expelled from the Catholic party, so he starts the Christian Democrats and is elected to Parliament. After Rome disciplines him, he must choose between two callings, as priest and as champion of workers. In subplots, a courageous young woman falls in love with a socialist and survives a shop foreman's rape; children die; prelates play billiards.
The Lovers on the Bridge
Sound
Set against Paris' oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, while it was closed for repairs, this film is a love story between two young vagrants: Alex, a would be circus performer addicted to alcohol and sedatives and Michele, a painter driven to a life on the streets because of a failed relationship and an affliction which is slowly turning her blind.
Earthen Man
Sound
From the construction of a sculpture "life size" in the earth, the director Boris Lehman imagines a story that staged a sculptor (Paulus Brun) struggling with an impossible order. The man of land is "golemise", takes life in the countryside, and ends up dying on an opera stage.
Silent as a Fish
Sound
From pond to plate, we are shown the journey and destiny of one carp among many. This particular carp will be eaten stuffed during a family meal. Carp stuffed (in the Polish fashion), also called in yiddish (Gefilte Fish) is a traditional dish eaten by Ashkenazi Jews. It is cooked, sweetened and served as a cold dish at the start of the meal. The head is reserved for the head of the family. The film, set in Brussels, on the day of the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), aims to show the culinary preparation together with the accompanying prayers and ritual. It focuses particularly on the sacrifice of the fish and on the issue of mass extermination.
Mauvais Sang
Sound Designer
Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.
Mélo
Sound
Pierre Belcroix and Marcel Blanc are violinists and lifelong friends living in Paris in the 1920s. While Marcel has become famous and Pierre has not, both are happy with their lives. Pierre is happily married to Romaine, a stylish young flapper. However, Marcel meets and falls in love with her, which Marcel little suspects.
Jean-Gina B.
Sound
This film is based on the true story of Jean Bella, who served as an officer in the Belgian Marine while being convinced, from an early age, that he was in fact a woman. Director Jean-Pol Ferbus follows Jean Bella and makes him talk about his life, psychological and spiritual experiences and reveals the true poet who remained undisclosed for most of this person's life. The film ultimately isn't about transexuality but about loneliness one can experience when he/she feels very deeply that she/he belongs to the two sexes and this in a deep, almost religious, fashion, to such an extent that sexuality itself is being erased from one's life. Jean-Gina Bella is a woman in the body of a man who bravely lived a life on the sea, eventually fighting the elements, talking to God when lost on the immense solitary ocean. This testimony is a very touching and poetic one.
Spelling Love
Music
The filmmaker goes back to her childhood, to the roots of the tragedy, to her desperate efforts to be accepted by her mother, to her permanent feeling of failure. Du verbe aimer A remarkable autobiographical account, constructed like a very inventively written essay. (Belgian Cinematek)
Couple, regards, positions
Sound
A two-way mirror. Water and fire. Water extinguishes fire, and fire boils away water. There are many difficulties preventing them from understanding one another.
Le Lit
Sound
Martin (Heinz Bennent), a sculptor, is dying in his bed on a barge that floats along a fog-shrouded waterway. As he agonizingly descends into a final oblivion, his second wife is at his bedside, comforted by his first wife -- also present.
Toute une nuit
Sound Designer
Following over two dozen different people in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, Akerman examines acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance.
Hôtel des Acacias
Sound
Several young men and women arrive one after the other at Hôtel des Acacias, full of hope, desire and vitality. In the bustle of this hotel, everyone is looking for love. Hôtel des Acacias was an exercise guided in 1982 by Chantal Akerman at Belgium’s INSAS audio-visual college.
Le Grand Paysage d'Alexis Droeven
Sound Engineer
When his father dies a young man has the choice to continue the farmwork of his old man who suffered because of the hard labour and all the regulations.
A Sweet Journey
Sound
Lucia and Elena are best friends since childhood. They take a car trip from Paris to the country. Their conversations are overtly intimate, but more revealing is their tacit understanding of each others' personality and desires.
Short Memory
Sound Designer
In this thriller, a UNESCO translator stumbles across a group which is hiding and supporting Nazis and facilitating their travel around the world. She had been given an assignment to study the work of a writer who recently had died, and the conspiracy is revealed in materials he left behind. She comes upon a young man who is going through the writer's papers, and she immediately assumes he must be one of the conspirators. However, he soon convinces her of his innocence in that regard, and the two together begin a search for the ringleader.
The Meetings of Anna
Sound
On a trip across Western Europe to promote her newest release, filmmaker Anna encounters several individuals—familiar and otherwise—and attends to their discontents.
Burned Bridges
Sound
In the Belgian hamlet of Verbrande Brug, former lovers Monique and Louis reconnect at a carnival, stirring up drama with their current partners.
One Sings, the Other Doesn't
Sound
In this story of friendship and reproductive rights, 14 years in the relationship between two very dissimilar women are chronicled. Pauline is a middle-class city girl, at odds with her very conventional family. Suzanne is several years older, a country girl with two illegitimate children and another (whom she cannot support) on the way. Pauline loans Suzanne money for an abortion. At this point, the two separate and communicate mainly through postcards. Some years later, they meet at an abortion rally, and they have many adventures and stories to share with one another.
Equilibres
Sound Designer
A silent teenage girl who works as a tightrope walker tries to keep her balance while crossing Paris.
Ganga
Sound
Documentary on the river Ganges.
La fille dans la vitrine
Sound
Les Lèvres rouges
Boom Operator
Ostend, Belgium. In a decadent seaside hotel, Stefan and Valerie, a newlywed couple, meet the mysterious Countess Báthory and Ilona, her secretary.
Malpertuis
Sound
Malpertuis is the name of an old, rambling mansion which is in reality a labyrinth where characters from Greek mythology are imprisoned by the bedridden Cassavius (Welles). He manages to keep them (as well as his nephew and niece) prisoners even after his death, through a binding testament. As Jan, the nephew, (Carrière) unravels the mystery, he discovers that he cannot escape the house because Malpertuis is far more significant than he was led to believe.