The Invader

In the hypnotic opening scene of The Invader, refering to Michelangelo Antonioni and Gustave Courbet’s painting L’origine du monde, Belgian model Hannelore Knuts walks naked along a beach when she sees several African refugees struggling to survive as they are washed ashore.
What follows is an intense, consistent crossover between social drama, revenge film and Lynch-like trip, in which this earthly paradise turns into a hell for one of the refugees. In a ghostly Brussels, the man starts work illegally on a building site. ‘You nothing here, nothing at all’, his crooked boss tells him.
The Invader is Flemish video artist and short-film maker Nicolas Provost's feature debut. At the Ghent Film Festival it won the Jo Röpke Award for young Flemish Film Talent and the award for best director at Cinéma tous écrans in Geneva. The camerawork by Frank van den Eeden also deserves praise, as does the starring role by Issaka Sawadogo, who switches convincingly between victim and aggressor.