New York City’s Millennium Film Workshop, located in Bushwick, is hosting its second short film screening of antifascist short films. Here, co-curators Leander and CJ share their short manifesto on the power of film to dream up antifascist futures. 

17 Dec 2025

Molly Lipson

Raf Reyntjens, dir. Papaoutai

Short Stuff: The set is very stylised with a brightly coloured grade that gives it a sense of being unrealistic - what was the reasoning behind that choice and how did you go about creating it? Did the set influence your approach to directing this and if so, how?

Raf Reyntjens: Our first idea was to shoot in an exterior location. We needed a fake looking suburbia world that would fit the concept. As we didn’t find the right location, I made the blunt decision to shoot in a studio. Basically like Lars Von Trier did with Dogville but more colourful. It needed some convincing but finally everyone agreed. We had a crazy good Production Designer, Yves Verstraete, who built the sets from scratch with cheap materials and old furniture he could find in his stock. He gave us way more than we hoped for. Only after the shoot he told us he was inspired by a neighbourhood nearby that was set to be destroyed. I went there and it was amazing. If we’d found that place earlier, we probably would never have shot it in a studio.

The set build took 4 days. As we didn’t have much time, our DOP Rik Zang lit the set while they were building. Since the studio was quite small we chose to mess with the perspective of the sets to create the illusion it was big enough to live in. The cul-de-sac served as our perfect dancefloor.

SS: The video is choreography heavy and the choreography is very powerful - what story did you want to tell with featuring the choreo so prominently and how did you collaborate with the choreographer on this?

RR: We worked with famous choreographer Marion Motin. The dancers were already booked before I started working on the screenplay, world class dancers each excelling in their own particular style. And then we had to match talented local kid dancers with them. Even then we had to look to Paris and beyond to find them. Once we had them on set, it all went so smoothly. All those dancers immediately got what it was we wanted to do.

The biggest challenge was to structure the screenplay to leave enough room for the dancing, while keeping the storytelling intact. So Marion focused on short pieces of choreography, each telling their own piece of the puzzle. Our editor Helena Overlaet Michiels did an amazing job finding the right balance between dance and story.

Each of the dance couples features a parent-child relationship at different stages, all witnessed by our Hero Boy with his inactive, Absent Father. Our boy was amazingly performed by Karl Ruben Noel, who we found not long before the shoot. I only saw him once during a casting online and I was blown away by his ability to convey his emotions through dance.

SS: Can you share anything from your initial discussions with Stromae about the video, and how did you continue to collaborate throughout making the project?

RR: The initial idea came from Coralie Barbier who was also one of the stylists on the project, together with Britt Ange. The story was there but we didn’t really have a shooting script. I spent the first three weeks going back and forth with Paul Van Haver [Stromae] to finish the script. However, even on set Stromae came up with a lot of fresh, additional ideas. We only had a budget for two shoot days, which is not a lot. We believed in the power of this story and wanted to get as much out of the production as possible so we made sure to decide everything upfront. Almost every shot was used in the edit.

My work with Stromae started when he asked me to direct his live Jimmy Fallon performance. I was only briefed about two weeks before the show and everything was already pretty prepped and Stromae had already developed the concept with choreographer Marion Motin. We had about 20-30 dancers all around him in the centre, and that was all the brief I had so in that sense it was both really free and also quite fixed. 

JULIEN SOULIER - dir. Jimmy Fallon live performance & L’enfer music video

The Jimmy Fallon slot was during Covid so it had to be pre-recorded but still a live performance. I decided I wanted to do everything in one take, so then the challenge was to find a studio that could accommodate a 360 degree shoot because Marion wanted to have the dancers all around Paul. My shots therefore needed to follow the dancers but still focused on Stromae. I knew if we did too many shots it would end up looking more like a music video and not a live performance so my main goal was to make sure the first two takes were great. Luckily Paul gave an amazing performance, so my first experience of working with him was really good overall. 

I then co-created his music video for L’enfer. Paul had received so many pitches for this one with different creative visions, but for a song that was so personal to him and he didn’t feel like they really represented it well. He said to me, this will be a difficult project because we don’t know exactly what we want with it, although we do know what we expect at the end. I said, you know what, let’s go for the ride! 

We spent about three weeks working on the concept and in all honesty, everything I came up with at the start wasn’t working. The most difficult thing is trying to create something simple and powerful – as creatives we tend to go a bit over the top. Paul then sent me an image of something small in a big space, and I thought, okay, maybe we can just focus on what’s happening inside his head. We put Paul at the centre and nothing around him. We just needed a simple space with a precise colour, start shooting close up of his eyes and then zoom out to reveal all the different ways he felt during this hard time in his life. 

We knew we didn’t want to do something overtly sad, we needed to give it energy because the song itself is so powerful. We wanted the audience to feel electrified, but that we’re also very much inside Paul’s mind. We stripped back all our previous ideas and came back to a very simple set up. The hardest thing was matching the camera speed with the lip sync. I prefer to do everything on set rather than rely on post production, so everything you see in L’enfer is 100% real, only the colour grade was done afterwards. The lip sync and the various speeds, the travelling – all of that is real. Paul had to actually lip sync slowly with the music set to a high speed to make it match up.

The ‘story’ is split into three parts to represent his different states of mind. From my perspective, I saw the three parts like this: the first is the kind of explosive moment when everything starts to go badly and feel bad. Everything’s moving fast and there’s this sense of losing control. The second part is that realisation that you have to deal with this depression. Things slow down here, everything becomes more difficult as he starts to battle with himself. Then the third part is when you decide to fight back.