Rabot (2017)

Directed by: Christina Vandekerckhove | 93 minutes | documentary

On our southern border is a country that you can drive to without a passport or paying outstanding traffic fines to a grumpy customs officer. The residential areas are larger, the highways wider, the office buildings grayer and the high-rise flats rotter. Poor and rich in Flanders, that is a lot further apart than with us and that is considered silent. The Fleming only seems to be a witness, whether he is doing well or not.

Historic Ghent, the richest city in the world in the late Middle Ages, is adorned on the edges with high-rise buildings that you don’t want to be found. One of these residential blocks will be demolished to make way for buildings that will put the city on the map. After all, city administrators – rich or poor, Dutch or Belgian – are the same everywhere. The citizen in the drain of society has to turn his check elsewhere, and that is a difficult delivery in Ghent.

Documentary maker Christina Vandekerckhove follows the residents of a residential tower in the Rabot district that has to be demolished, and viewed from the street that will not take long. There is also decay inside. Mumbling elderly people without teeth, stirring a pan, the word ‘scum’ on an elevator door, that works. Vandekerckhove likes to zoom in on it, supported by moody piano music. Old Ghent shines on the horizon. The sun sets, like every day.

The film only makes an impression with the duration, when you start to realize that those who have no future are no longer investing, and are also impoverished themselves – if that was not the case already. The hopelessness is cumulative and the same for everyone, for the Arab family with the big TV, the African mother who suppresses the death of a child, and the gypsy family singing accompanied by a Casio. It’s silent disillusionment; should not be more.