When Belgian director Jonas Geirnaert first read the script for Canneseries competition entry How To Kill Your Sister, he was sold within seconds by the premise of a roadtrip show that begins with a coffin on top of a car.
“It was the best pitch document I’ve read in 20 years,” Geirnaert told Deadline. “It’s so simple but a very strong hook into the series and characters. It was a no brainer.”
The show, which is one of a whopping half-dozen Belgian projects at Canneseries this week, touches on heavy themes around euthanasia, relationships and family, but with a comedic tint.
Created by Pedro Elias and Evelien Broekaert and starring Emma Rotsaert and Marjan De Schutter as leads, the show for Belgium’s Play4 and Germany’s ZDFneo kicks off with Anna, who is dying of cancer, bringing a coffin to Kat’s house and asking her to join a roadtrip, at the end of which she wants Kat to end her life. Via flashbacks, the audience is given a window into the sisters’ past relationship with their parents and how they came to be the people they are today.
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For Geirnaert, the roadtrip precinct was especially important. “If you were to have the same story in a static setting it wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “You’d get a totally different series. But with a roadtrip you are in the car with these characters and they are forced into this tiny bubble to talk to each other.”
The director was inspired by the timelessness of movies like Oscar-winner Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and wanted to imbue this sense of a technology-less society on How To Kill Your Sister. “It’s set in the present day but we choose not to show cellphones and computers and the locations look like they haven’t changed in 20 or 30 years,” he explained. “It gives a special timelessness to the whole thing.”
When scouting locations, Geirnaert was shocked to discover how difficult it was to find “old shabby gas stations” that would suit this timelessness. In the end, the team found an old pizza parlor which doubled up as a gas station, an important location in a show where the protagonists are constantly encountering new people on their journey.
While euthanasia is a thorny topic, Geirnaert stressed that the creative team behind How To Kill Your Sister are not “making any big statements” but wanted to spotlight “the way the sisters cope” and their relationship above all else.
Absurd and surrealist Belgians
The resulting series is one of a sextet of Belgian shows at Canneseries, including two in main competition, and Belgian content has been a big topic of discussion during the first couple of days of the fest.
Canneseries director Albin Lewi told us yesterday that Belgium is a nation that “has low budgets but knows they have to focus internationally and so finds very surprising pitches.”
Geirnaert concurred with Lewi – “If we had double the budget for [How To Kill Your Sister] maybe we would have made a worse series,” he said – and added that Belgians take an absurd and surrealist approach to drama that is appreciated worldwide.
He flagged competition rival Dead End from Malin-Sarah Gozin, who created the original Bad Sisters (titled Clan) before it was made world famous by Apple TV+ and Sharon Horgan. Dead End is about a man who can tell the origin or history of anything by tasting or eating it.
“Being a small country we sometimes go off the trodden path and have absurdity in our shows,” said Geirnaert. “Belgian shows always find an angle or way to tell a story that is different.”
“The market has just opened up for us,” he said of Belgian content more generally. “We have had a really good decade.”
Canneseries runs till Tuesday. The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 will premiere tonight and J.J. Abrams’ Duster is here over the weekend.
The post ‘How To Kill Your Sister’: Director Of Canneseries Competition Entry Talks Timelessness, Roadtrips & The “Absurdity” Of Belgian Content appeared first on Deadline.
