Hendrik Verthé

Baghdad Messi

The talented Hamoudi is an 11-year-old boy with a passion for soccer and an ultimate dream to one day reach the level of his idol Lionel Messi. The day Hamoudi is caught in a horrific suicide attempt, he wakes up severely injured in a hospital. As his parents struggle to keep the family safe, Hamoudi is determined to fight for his shattered dream.

Animals

Brahim is a young man, and secretly gay. At his mother’s birthday party, tensions around his unaccepted sexuality become unbearable. Brahim flees the oppressive family home into the night, where a terrible encounter awaits...

Yummy

A young couple travels to a shabby Eastern European hospital for plastic surgery. The young woman wants a breast reduction. Her mother comes along for yet another face-lift. Wandering through an abandoned ward the boyfriend stumbles upon a young woman, gagged and strapped to an operating table; she is the result of an experimental rejuvenation treatment. He frees her, but does not realize he just caused the outbreak of a virus that will change doctors, patients and his mother-in-law into bloodthirsty zombies.

Torpedo: U-235

World War II: Resistance fighters accept a suicide mission to deliver a stolen Nazi submarine carrying atomic uranium. Hunted by Hitler’s army, the crew must outwit the German Navy to bring the cargo safely to America.

We

During a scorching summer in a Belgian-Dutch border village, eight teenagers play games of discovery to break the listless monotony. They challenge each other and themselves and pretty soon, their sexual curiosity starts to blur the lines between right and wrong. As innocence is crushed in depraved games and sexual exploitation, the teenagers soon turn into ruthless predators.

Gangsta

Antwerp, Belgium. The lives of four small-time drug dealers spin out of control when they steal a shipment of cocaine, triggering a full out war between an Amsterdam drug lord and a ruthless Colombian cartel.

Black

Mavela, 15 years old, is a Black Bronx. She falls madly in love with Marwan, an extremely charismatic member of a rival gang, the 1080s. The young couple is forced to make a brutal choice between gang loyalty and the love they have for one another. An impossible dilemma.

The Circle

The Circle is a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100m underground. It is a 27km particle accelerator used by physicists to study the origin of everything. Results and interpretation of the collisions of particles will revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and how it began. The Circle leaves the scientific aspect of the experiment and makes a journey above the ground. We follow the 27km circle in an existential search for local people with an opinion about what's happening below.

Baghdad Messi

Iraq, 2009. Little Hamoudi (10) is totally obsessed with football. Just as the rest of the world, he and his friends are eagerly looking forward to the Champions League finale FC Barcelona-Manchester United. The long awaited clash between Messi and Ronaldo. But then Hamoudi's television breaks down...

Land of the Heroes

Iraq, 1988. A land devastated by war (Iraq-Iran conflict). Dilleer (10) and his sister Zienee want to watch cartoons on television, but that becomes more difficult than expected when bully Malo comes along.