“Dust”, interview with director Anke Blondé and screenwriter Angelo Tijssens

With “Dust”, Belgian director Anke Blondé and screenwriter Angelo Tijssens bring to the 76th Berlinale Competition a story that begins in corporate fraud and ends in something far more intimate.

Set in the spring of 1999, the film follows Luc and Geert, two wealthy entrepreneurs, as their network of shell companies is about to be exposed by the international press. An emergency board meeting is called. Evidence must be destroyed. By morning, the police will arrive. What unfolds is not a thriller about escape, but a slow, suspended descent into accountability.

Tijssens traces the project’s origins to a real-life Belgian fraud case. “Every country has a story like that,” he observes. Local businessmen celebrated as self-made visionaries until the system collapsed under the weight of deception. Yet what interested him was not the mechanics of the scam. “What happens when you take away everything they’ve built, not just the money, but the identity?”

For men who have come to see themselves as powerful and untouchable, the loss of status becomes existential. The fall is less financial than psychological.

Masculinity Under Pressure

For Blondé, whose previous work often centred on female protagonists, “Dust” represented a deliberate shift. “I was amused when I first read Angelo’s script,” she recalls. “There’s a lot of irony in it.” That irony coexists with a probing look at male identity.

The film dissects a form of masculinity shaped by social expectations: to provide, to succeed, to dominate. When work becomes identity, its collapse leaves a void. “Many men are suffering,” Blondé notes, “from the societal expectation of being successful.” Without the armour of power, Luc and Geert are forced to confront a fragile sense of self.

There is no conventional suspense. The scandal has already happened; the exposure is inevitable. Instead, the tension lies in proximity: the camera and edit remain close to their disintegrating mindsets. The narrative, unfolding over roughly 36 hours, loops and fractures time, mirroring their psychological confusion. Daylight never fully arrives. The film hovers in a perpetual dawn.

Landscape and the Fall

The Flemish landscape is not a mere backdrop. Rain, mud and empty roads shape the emotional terrain. Tijssens, who grew up in West Flanders, wrote the script with a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus on his desktop, a painting in which the mythic fall occupies only a small corner of the canvas, almost unnoticed.

That perspective informs “Dust”. The spectacular collapse of powerful men becomes, visually and narratively, unspectacular. The world continues. Ships sail. Fields remain muddy. “It takes away easy judgment,” Tijssens explains. Rather than constructing a morality tale, the film lingers in discomfort, asking viewers to sit with loss rather than cheer downfall.

Blondé describes the protagonists as “two cowboys” roaming their territory in iron horses, their reputations trailing behind them. Redemption, if it exists, is uncertain and interior.

Tech Optimism, Then and Now

Though set at the end of the 1990s, “Dust” resonates unmistakably with the present. The blind faith in tech entrepreneurs, the promise that innovation will bring connection and prosperity, feels familiar in an era shaped by AI and platform capitalism.

“Yes, there are parallels,” Tijssens acknowledges. The belief that technology will unite humanity has proven fragile. Today’s failures are less mechanical than moral. “Technology is failing us,” he says, pointing to a society saturated with connection yet starved of dialogue.

The film opens with the phrase: “Nothing is entirely true. And not even that.” While it gestures toward our so-called post-truth age, the quote dates back to the late 19th century. For Tijssens, that detail matters. Periods of disillusionment are cyclical. What ultimately restores balance, he argues, is not innovation but conversation, people speaking and listening to one another.

The Weight of Silence

In “Dust”, silence carries more weight than speech. On a narrative level, the protagonists avoid conversation because words would implicate others. Culturally, Blondé adds, silence reflects a tendency to bury emotional complexity “under the rug, or in the mud.”

There is bitter irony in the fact that these men built a speech-technology company yet cannot communicate, not with each other, not with their partners, not even with themselves. Words are dangerous because they expose vulnerability. Silence, however, traps them in isolation.

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