Fabrice Du Welz on Vinyan

Calvaire director Fabrice Du Welz's second film Vinyan follows a couple - Jeanne and Paul Bellmer (played by Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart) - who after losing their son in the 2005 Tsunami, remain in Thailand clinging to the fact that his body was never recovered. Jeanne is convinced that her is son is still alive, kidnapped by traffickers. Paul is skeptical, but cannot bring himself to shatter his wife's last hope. They travel to the jungles of Burma in search of the boy and embark on a quest that plunges them into an alien universe where nightmares, obsession and horrifying reality converge.

Peter Carlton, then Film4's Senior Commissioning Executive, was greatly involved in bringing the project to the screen, "I was approached when the idea was just a couple of sides of A4. There were various Tsunami projects in the offing. It was clearly important subject matter and Fabrice Du Welz's take struck me as a really Film4 way to approach it - not an obvious approach, but digging deeper into East-West dynamics and the painful psychological levels where death on this scale is almost impossible to accept. I knew Fabrice's previous film and immediately found the idea of him and this story irresistible."

Tell us about Vinyan

It's a ghost story, but not in the usual way. Usually in ghost stories, especially Asian ghost stories, dead people enter the world of the living. In my film, the couple penetrates the ghost world. It's not really a horror film; it's experimentation - somewhere between a ghost story and a psychological thriller. The couple slips down, slowly, into a strange, violent and poetical world.

How is the story linked to the real event of the 2005 Tsunami?

Vinyan starts from a very concrete place - that terrible disaster. It's a story about deliverance. Grief deliverance. The tsunami had a huge impact on the western world. Referencing this event gave me the opportunity to talk about the differences between two worlds - the West and the East. In particular I wanted to consider the difference in attitudes towards death. In the East, with many people following Buddhism, although I don't want to simplify - they believe in life and they believe in death.

I wanted to start the film with that terrible disaster, the post-apocalyptic environment, and have a Western couple in that world who will not accept their son is gone. I feel the tsunami affected the Western world because white people were involved. At the time the journalists' treatment of the aftermath shocked and surprised me.

Are there films or filmmakers that have influenced your career?

Three films have influenced me. There's ¿Quien Puede Matar A Un Niño?, a 1970s Spanish film in which the children turn on and kill the adults. Also David Cronenberg's The Brood and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now.

Next page • "Dead people walking through a dead kingdom"