| I’m a visual artist and filmmaker, and recently moved back to Belgium after a ten-year stay in Norway. For a few years I have lived and worked in Brussels. My work is broadcasted, screened, and exhibited worldwide on both visual art platforms and film festivals. I’ve earned awards and screenings at festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Cinevegas, the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, and the Locarno Film Festival among others. I work with found footage. I write and direct short and mid-length fiction films, and this summer I will shoot my first feature film, The Invader, a social thriller about an anti-heroic illegal African immigrant in Brussels and his struggle for economic and emotional survival in the new world. |  |
Nicolas Provost
I’m a visual artist and filmmaker, and recently moved back to Belgium after a ten-year stay in Norway. For a few years I have lived and worked in Brussels. My work is broadcasted, screened, and exhibited worldwide on both visual art platforms and film festivals. I’ve earned awards and screenings at festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Cinevegas, the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, and the Locarno Film Festival among others.
I work with found footage. I write and direct short and mid-length fiction films, and this summer I will shoot my first feature film, The Invader, a social thriller about an anti-heroic illegal African immigrant in Brussels and his struggle for economic and emotional survival in the new world. I don’t consider myself a political artist, and I will keep the political dimension of this subject in the background of the film, and push the action-driven story of the anti-hero forwards, the story of a man whose determination to find his place in the world will lead him to self-destruction.
Inspiration for my visual art comes from my love for cinema, and in particular the basic elements, “moving image and sound,” with which I try to work as a sculptor. My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. Cinema has existed now for more than 100 years, and we’ve all been raised with this universal way of storytelling. What interests me is to find these memories that we have in common, and sculpt them into new audiovisual concepts that hopefully move you, surprise you. I question the phenomenon of cinema by trying to grasp our collective film memory, and turn it into poetry. When I make a film I try to make it work as though it was a classic painting on the wall, but at the same time it should also work as a cinematic experience. I also try to make sure that the films are beautiful and accessible, and that there is a tension curve with a beginning, a middle, and an end—because I believe that every creative product is about storytelling, whether it is a picture, a song, a sound, or even an inaccessible work of art. I use storytelling as an important guide, using it to pin down elements and ideas that provoke both recognition and alienation, and succeed in catching our expectations into an unraveling game of mystery and abstraction, and hopefully it results in a moment of ecstasy that goes beyond the image.
Long Live the New Flesh is my latest film, in which I use fragments from horror films and transmogrify them into a new film. The challenge was to make the viewer experience the concept of horror in the horror film genre as something deeply beautiful by manipulating the violent images into colorful paintings and edit them together into an exciting story.
At the moment I am finishing the second part of a trilogy around the concept of creating fiction with footage that I filmed of real life. The first film, Plot Point, was entirely shot with a hidden camera around Time Square. The footage was then edited into a Hollywood thriller story. The second film is shot with the same approach in Las Vegas, and unwillingly features Hollywood stars. The third film is shot in Tokyo, where I have followed an actor that interacts with real life as he plays a serial killer character.
